Patrick Walsh of Princeton
Regarding the article “Drink fells students in initiations,” (The Packet, Feb. 10), I’m sure the hysterical-minded — of which there are a great many in our town — will view the recent news of a dozen Princeton University students imbibing themselves to the medical center as further proof of the need to vigorously prevent underage drinking.
Such a misdiagnosis of symptoms reminds me of the quack doctors of yesteryear who suggested bloodletting to treat anemia.
When will America ditch its wrongheaded, Puritanical approach to alcohol? The 21 drinking-age is not only a civil rights violation it simply doesn’t work. What is ubiquitous in a society cannot be taboo; trying to make it so is futile.
When we start treating 18-year-olds as the adults that they are, they’ll start acting the part. Let adults start drinking at 18 and we won’t have the idiocy we read about over that weekend.
Patrick Walsh
Princeton