>Allowing children to smoke and drink from age 12 would be a social disaster, it's not even an argument - obviously - the 'prohibition' works - and in that case, there's nary any negative externality.

The negative externality is the huge amount of young adults damaging their bodies with excessive alcohol consumption in college because they never learned to drink healthily. The US with its late legal age for alcohol has a far bigger problem with youth alcohol abuse than European countries where youth are introduced to alcohol earlier.

"Learned to drink healthily".

Given that alcohol is carcinogenic, there is no such thing as "drinking healthily".

That point aside, alcoholism rates in the Eastern EU are much higher than the US. And Russia/Belarus leads the world. I don't think younger drinking age correlates very well with reduced rates of alcoholism.

Not really though. Drinking age is 18 in Sweden and they have hugely worse rate of hazardous drinking than US, same for Finland, and a bit UK where there are slightly fewer restrictions.

The legal age for alcohol is 18 in France.

This idea of 'US binging' doesn't really hold that much water, though one could very well argue that 21 is just 'too old' - the fact is, these are as much cultural issues as anything else.

Same with Japan, they are 'polite drunk', it's not even quite the same thing.

Take the argument and apply it to smoking or cocaine, fentanyl and you see that it doesn't really work out.

It really depends.

US could have lower drinking age, possibly 'permitted with parents at 16' - but - a much more responsible culture overall as well. It's hard.