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When Democrats took over our legislature, I had hopes that our General Assembly would focus on significant matters like higher education and transportation, rather than protecting children from displays of racy DVD covers or requiring libraries to filter Internet access.
But the first spate of proposed laws has not supported those hopes. One bill, introduced after two college students in Colorado died of alcohol overdoses last fall, would require the registration of beer kegs.
If you bought a keg, you'd have to show identification. The store would record your personal data, along with the keg's registration number and related information. If that keg were later found at a party where minors had been drinking, then presumably you'd be in trouble.
But if the idea is to reduce the number of deaths from alcohol overdose, keg registration will be counter-productive. That's because it's so difficult to kill yourself just by drinking too much beer.
People vary greatly in their tolerance to alcohol, but on average a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.40 percent is lethal (by state law, you're too drunk to drive if it exceeds 0.08 percent).
To reach that deadly level, a 150-pound person would have to drink 25 twelve-ounce servings of mass-market beer in four hours. That's about 2.3 gallons, nearly 10 times the capacity of the average human stomach, which is about one quart.
To be sure, all that beer doesn't stay in the stomach during the binge, but enough does so that by about the fifth beer during the first hour, you're going to have trouble getting it down, and consumption gets even more difficult after that. Thus, it's hard to die of alcohol poisoning with beer. (You can, of course, kill yourself or others by driving under the influence, but that's a different matter.)
By contrast, a quart (I'm showing my age here, since booze is sold by the liter in these decadent times) of 80-proof whiskey has about the same amount of alcohol as those 25 servings of beer, and consuming that quart over four hours does not come anywhere close to stretching the stomach's capacity.
From what I've read, distilled spirits, not beer, were the major factors in the two alcohol-poisoning cases in Colorado last fall, and that fits with the facts of alcohol and human physiology.
Thus registering kegs is not going to prevent such tragedies, and it might even encourage them. The law will discourage keg purchases, which means people are more likely to buy distilled spirits. And it's the spirits, not the kegs, that have been lethal.
It would make more sense to register the sales of Everclear, orange vodka, peppermint schnapps, Jagermeister and similar concoctions that hardly anyone touches after turning 21.
Another bad bill would require employers to give unpaid
time off to parents to attend their children's school
functions. The sponsor called it public policy that
actually helps families.
Sure. I enjoy spending time with my own kids, but that pleasure seldom extends to other people's children, especially when they come in herds. And it's even worse at an amateurish production in an over-crowded school facility with uncomfortable chairs where you're sitting behind eight or ten folks who stand to capture every precious moment with their video cameras.
Often I was glad to have the excuse that Daddy's got
to work
when one of these torture sessions was
scheduled, and I cannot believe that reasonable people
would vote to take that away.
Time off to picnic with your kids, or fly kites, explore ghost towns, ride bikes, visit museums, just hang out, or do something as a family -- that would help families, and thus might be worth the hassle of adding yet another law to the books.
But taking away an employed parent's right not to attend school functions? Not only is this cruel, but it will put sensible parents in terrible moods, and that cannot be good for families. It makes even less sense than registering beer kegs when it's the hard liquor that kills college students.
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