Chapter III Verse II - Drinking Age

How old do you need to be to drink in The Bahamas? 'Old enough to reach the bar' is an answer I have heard and used more than once. One of the things I appreciate about my Bahamian people is the average citizen’s respect for liquor. We have liquor at most of our gatherings, if not for our Christian friends then for the others. Our nation’s relationship with the spirits has it’s downsides but I would like to take a happy perspective.

I have never had a Bahamian teenager beg me to buy them liquor because they were not old enough. Oh yeah, I have had a young’un beg me for a beer at a party or ask me for a sip of rum, but I have never seen the sort of conspiring and plotting that goes on in some cities as under-aged children search for accessible alcohol.

So many young Americans (here and in their native land) drink their way to oblivion. Many of us have stood outside Waterloo or the Zoo watching tourist after tourist come staggering out, collapsing, vomiting and generally unstable. With near suicidal vigor they guzzle one after another until all grip on reality is lost and a violent stomach emptying is assured. This is repeated until they return to the land of 21-and-over only. So why the difference?

Both Bahamian children and the children of our stricter neighbors to the north see the same thing: Grown-ups having a good time with alcohol. Children copy adults. It’s how they learn to survive. The difference comes because most Bahamian adults are willing to give a sip. I don’t find this when I talk to my foreign friends. They often have a lot of distance between them and the adults around them. So sad.

Should we give a young person alcohol? I can’t answer that for anyone. I will say that when children experiment with their guardians they learn to trust, to listen and to learn from them. If you don’t tell them what rum is, show them what it tastes like and tell them the truth, who will they turn to? That’s right, their friends. The same dummies you tell them to ignore. It is usually the bad ones too, since they are the ones with the liquor.

Still, when I was growing up it would have been no great feat to get a bottle of liquor or wine. Even if you did steal a sip or two from the cupboard to share among little plastic cups it was a one-day thing. This was often followed by days of terror that someone would notice how much less there was in the bottle. And it just did not taste good enough to repeat the process.

At a party the worst alcoholic pressure is usually having enough money to buy drinks for the girls you want to talk to. Beyond that it’s take it or leave it. It’s just liquor - no mystery, not secret adult pleasure, no hidden powers.
This is not to say that we don’t have our share of drunken driving, date-rapes and violent alcoholics. Ask one of our country’s heroic social workers to tell you some of the effects of alcohol on the Bahamian family. It makes the other drugs look like small-time punks. But as a nation I am proud of the average person’s understanding of the benefits and as well as the detrimental effects of the liquor. We have some ways to go but for once I don’t feel like we are near the back of the class.

- Dsus Imbibes