In fact, I've thought many times about forming a counter group, Drunks Against Mad Mothers (DAMM) but never really had the guts. After all, who wants to go up against a bunch of angry/sad mommies? It'd be like throwing a piece of fresh-baked apple pie at your mom or something.
But now, I think MADD is a texbook example of an organization that achieves it's objectives but needs something new to do with its fervor. So now they've been pursuing a kind of neo-prohibition under the guise of preventing drunk driving. I don't believe the original founders have much to do with it anymore, and have actually even renounced the organization.
They also push spot checks for drinking and driving which I believe is misuse of tax dollars.
I am against drunk driving, but MADD go way past the line.
That way, drinking is something you are first exposed to at dinner with the family gasp
Italy is the same way - quite healthy attitudes towards alcohol. It's very rare to hear of anyone getting drunk just for the heck of it, and it's usually something people are embarrassed about, rather than proud of.
I went to UCSD, and groups of college students regularly made the trip to Tijuana, where the drinking age is 18. I read about some parents who wanted TJ to raise its drinking age to prevent this. Amazing. Yeah, Mexico should not be like France, Italy, Spain, Canada, England, Ireland, South Korea, or pretty much 95% of the civilized world. The US has decided drinking ages should be 2-3 years higher than everywhere else in the world, so dammit, anyone who borders us needs to change! Typical.
As for binge drinking... well, yeah, I did a ton of that as a US-based college student. I spent a year abroad in Ireland, and honestly, and we did a fair amount of binge drinking there too, but pub culture does encourage conversation and music over heavy drinking, so 18 year olds did at least have a path toward more responsible drinking.
The lowest incidence of binge drinking I've seen so far was in France, where I lived when I was 13 (though I looked older than my age). Cafe owners would typically go ahead and serve me a beer if I asked for one. Technically I think the drinking age there is 16. They also let me into bars provided I was there to watch a sporting event but bars were a little more serious (and they definitely wouldn't serve spirits to a kid). The shopkeepers would let kids buy wine if they knew it was for the parents (ie., the parents had sent the kids out to buy groceries). It really was a different world, much more relaxed about the rules.
The funny thing was, I was all ready to take advantage of the lenient rules, but the kids on the beach (this was in the south of France) were essentially uninterested in binge drinking. They were perplexed, and slightly amused with my interest. But once I discovered there were no takers, I lost interest myself (what am I going to do, go get tanked by myself?). So I had a beer or two as a novelty, and that was it.
The thing that irritates me so much about MADD is that they won't just let it be a state-by-state decision. I see absolutely no reason why voters in Utah should have the slightest say over the drinking age in Louisiana. Yes, "State's rights" have been used as a cover for severe civil rights violations, but if ever there was a situation where one state should butt out of another's business, this is it.