Dour Hour

North Dakota excels at a lot of things; my native state's high school students get better SAT scores than any other state; the school system's performance is also a good as Minnesota's vaunted system, and at about 2/3 of the budget per student.

But the state doesn't excel at a few other things - like having much to do on a weekend night for a bunch of 20-somethings. I don't know that they kept statistics on this sort of thing back when I was in college, but I think most of us suspected that our state led the nation in binge-drinking among college students, then as now. If you didn't have a significant other, and didn't care for weekend-long Dungeons and Dragons (TM) marathons, there wasn't much to do but drink.

It's a serious problem; college students in the midwest cause immense harm to themselves and their communities with their booze-fueled antics - or at least, I know my classmates and I did.

I'm not familiar with the "Power Hour", where one's classmates supposedly take a 20 year old to a bar precisely at midnight when he or she turns 21, and line up 21 shots or other drinks before closing time. But legislators in several states are proposing laws that would push the "official" 21st birthday back to 8AM.

The traditional power hour most new 21-year-olds celebrate could soon come to an end.

A new bill introduced in the Minnesota House last week would prohibit 21-year-olds from drinking at midnight on their birthdays. Individuals would have to wait until 8 a.m. instead.

The chief author of the bill, Rep. Morrie Lanning, R-Moorhead, said the purpose is to prevent deaths because of excessive drinking of alcohol by young adults.

For starters, I'm not sure that "most" 21 year olds do the power hour; my "power hour" involved dashing from a party over to a nearby bar to grab a beer at midnight (and then noticing to my alarm that the clocks at the party were way fast, and it was still 11:55 when I got my beer).

But while I may or may not know birthday customs, I do know a thing or two about bars. I spent four miserable years spinning records a one redneck bowling bar or meat market dive or another.

In Minnesota, under existing dramshop laws, bars are not allowed to keep pouring drinks down people's throats. In theory (and by law), bartenders and servers are supposed to keep an eye on how many drinks their customers are getting; customers aren't supposed to stockpile drinks at their tables, or have more than about a drink or two per customer at a table at a given time. While not every cocktail waitress or bartender is infinitely conscientious, the fact is that a bartender or waitress job usually covers more than an eight hour window. On the other hand, all of these bills would, essentially, prevent a kid from legally ordering a drink for precisely that - eight hours.

So the birthday parties move to the homes, dorms and apartments, where the rituals are even more stupid, and where nobody is legally obliged to say "whoah". Or the party moves to sometime after 8AM the next day, where the kid drinks the same 21 shots (from the same bar that is currently dumb enough to bring 21 shots to the same person in one or two hours).

This situation is already covered by existing laws. It's not covered perfectly - but then, either is the "phenomenon" of the Power Hour.

Posted by Mitch at March 14, 2005 05:27 AM | TrackBack