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Notes -
I don't think HBD is a good explanation here. A hangover from Puritan culture seems far more likely, what with the countries that White settlers came from being far more more liberal with their dispensation of alcohol today.
In fact, the US seems more anal about it than it has ever been since the Prohibition days, I doubt anyone would have gotten into trouble for serving drinks to teens in a private domicile more than a decade or two back. I'm under the impression that if teenage drinking was curtailed, it was mostly in the context of them throwing their own parties or trying to order drinks outside while underage.
You'd also expect HBD, if appropriate, to cause a general aversion to drinking for adults too, and the average American is no stranger to drink.
In fact, it's postulated that the Asian Flush is attributable to evolutionary pressures to reduce alcohol consumption, with how easy and abundant rice wine was. Yet they still make drinking a primary form of recreation in China, Korea and Japan, for all that they find it hard to handle their liquor.
And the Natives are an utterly minuscule sliver of the population, and I doubt they have been a primary concern of general temperance movements since the 1800s. I attribute it more to the general erosion of freedoms for American teens in the past few decades, as is true for younger children who were once expected to roam the neighborhood freely even when absolute crime rates were much higher.
I’ll go further; the electronic leash specifically makes underaged drinking harder the same way it does every other form of ‘bad’ behavior. If I cared about underaged drinking I would think this a good thing(I don’t).
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