Photo illustration by Jessica Giordano
When I was a freshman, my friends and I started planning our weekends as soon as we recovered from our hangovers and scrambled to get our forgotten homework done on Sundays.
In order to have our alcohol secured for next weekend, we would have to find an upperclassmen or a friend with a fake ID willing to take the risk of buying us drinks. We tested our limits, we drank too much, and luckily we all came out of freshman year alive.
This is not the case for the over 5,000 people under the age of 21 who die each year from alcohol-related incidents. According to advocates of Legal Age 21, the raise in drinking age in 1984 has directly reduced the number of drunk-driving fatalities. Therefore they argue the law should not be overturned.
But nearly anyone on Fairfield’s campus can tell you that the legal age is not stopping students from drinking — in fact, it’s causing a dangerously large number of students to drink too much when they do decide to drink, as opportunities to consume are few and far between.
Binge drinking is not a phenomenon limited to Fairfield. John McCardell, president of Middlebury College and founder and president of the organization Choose Responsibility, has seen the effects of binge drinking firsthand and has been engaging in debate over the 21-year-old drinking age with everyone from Stephen Colbert to an audience in the BCC last Wednesday.
His aims are to inform citizens about the history of Legal Age 21, to analyze its current implications, and to create an open-minded debate amongst parents, educators and lawmakers about alternative policies.
Loading ...The points McCardell made Wednesday night in support of these aims are clear and logical. Perhaps the most cited argument for lowering the drinking age is that of responsibility: at age 18, citizens are bestowed with all of the very weighted privileges of adulthood — enlisting in the military, serving on juries, the right to vote — with the exception of the right to consume alcohol.
There should be consistency with the logic behind offering such responsibility and privilege. Furthermore, there should be education at home, school, and state levels rather than offering “minors” little more than denial and scare tactics. And finally, states should be allowed to lower the drinking age without the fear of losing 10 percent of their highway funding.
Oh, you didn’t know that 21 is not the federally mandated drinking age? Neither did I. Many citizens don’t realize that individual states have the right to lower the drinking age. However, those that choose to will lose highway funding that often amounts to millions of dollars.
Whether or not the drinking age should be lowered, this is still bad politics. How can a state independently set its own drinking age with the federal government holding millions of dollars over its head?
One cannot argue with statistics, however: since 1984, when the drinking age was raised to 21, drunk-driving related deaths have decreased significantly. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who would argue that this is a bad thing. Yet as a college student, I cannot help but agree with McCardell when he said, “It’s not 1984 anymore. The problem of 2010 … is binge drinking.” If the drinking age were raised to 45, we would see an even greater decrease in drunk driving fatalities.
That does not mean it would be the most logical choice for society. One must also consider the argument that science presents: McCardell cited recent studies that suggest that the human brain is not fully developed until the age of 25. Clearly, binge drinking at a young age can impede upon brain development.
Yet the issue goes back to education. Students on this campus have seen time and time again that strict prohibition and the lack of education often practiced by parents and educators creates an air of mystery around alcohol consumption, enticing students to unleash their curiosity once in college, with detrimental effects.
If young adults had the opportunity to talk about and test these limits in a safe and controlled setting, or in public areas as opposed to basements and backyards with no supervision, the mystery would be eliminated. Maybe we’d be drinking at a younger age, but I can bet you we’d be drinking less and we’d be doing it in a safer way.
According to an article in The Mirror on Jan. 27, after the raid at Bravo went down last semester, instead of asking underage students, “How could you use a fake ID to drink off campus?” Dean of Students Tom Pellegrino asked the right question: “Why?”
Why were so many students driven off campus to drink at a bar known to turn their heads at fake IDs?
The question of why binge drinking is so prevalent on college campuses led University President Jeffrey von Arx to be among the college presidents to sign the Amethyst Initiative, which “supports informed and unimpeded debate on the 21-year-old drinking age.”
It is hard to say which side of this debate is right and which is wrong. I, along with other students across the nation, can only speak from my own experiences with drinking, both on and off college campuses. As I see it, this is not just a college issue; it is an issue affecting youth across America.
But kudos to von Arx, McCardell and others who are willing to examine a law that clearly isn’t working. Whether the drinking age is lowered or not, a change in society’s mindset about drinking and education is needed, before more young adults pay the toll.
For more information, see www.amethystinitiative.org.
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You think a lower drinking age will work? I challenge you to look at places like the UK and see what is happening there. The lowered drinking age has done nothing to reduce binge drinking and in fact they are looking at the problem as one of their major public health issues. If we did lower the age I fear for the younger kids who are not even more exposed to alcohol and will want it as much as the 18 and older kids now. Look at the brain science as well. There is a time for drinking and when kids can show they are mature enough to be responsible then I could be supportive.
Please note this important fact: less than 4% of college presidents signed the Amethyst Initiative. What do the leaders that did not sign know that YOU don’t? You said it….you are lucky to be alive!
They pose the question as whether lawmakers should “allow” people under 21 to drink alcohol, instead of asking whether the supporters of this blatantly unjust law ever had any right in the first place to hire gun-toting goons in bulletproof vests as weapons of unprovoked violence, to intimidate Mr. and Mrs. Twenty into giving up their inherent natural right to drink the beverage of their choice.
Supporters of the blatantly unjust law, including the hate-mongering MADD bigots, point to a decline in crash fatalities, but the government sets the level of carnage by setting the DWI penalties and the enforcement levels.
If you drink, you drink. If you die, you die. Your choice. It’s not like the politicians you voted against had any right to restrict that choice. Everybody knows why most voters and politicians would rather impose the drinking age on somebody else than impose tougher drunk driving laws on themselves. To see the results, check out http://udadd.com/memorial.html
From now on, would the hate-mongering MADD bigots and all other supporters of underage drinking laws kindly offer your arguments by number:
State Legislators’ Message To Underage Drinkers:
1.) To prevent blood borders, the drinking age in every State has to be 21, because that’s the only integer that is equal to itself.
2.) Drinking alcohol during pregnancy harms the baby, so we impose Prohibition on men under 21 and not on pregnant women 21 and older.
3.) A tipsy rape victim will be arrested for internal possession if she calls the police, who are there to protect and serve.
4.) We jail parents who are home supervising your drinking sessions in order to prevent you from holding such sessions.
5.) A new scientific study published in the New England Journal of Medicine conclusively establishes that the politicians you voted against have a right to impose this law on you.
6.) Statistical analysis of historical crash data proves that the United States of America ought not to be a free country, with liberty and justice for all, where the citizen decides what to drink, where parents govern their child who still lives in their house, where the punishment for drunk driving is meted out to the drunk drivers.
7.) Freeways are more important than freedom, — especially when it’s your freedom, not ours — so we sold your freedom to get more highway construction money from Congress, (like a mother selling her daughter for cocaine money,) and we still expect you to respect this law.
8.) The drinking age saves lives. Of course, we could save a lot more lives, maybe yours, by doing what it takes to eliminate drunk driving, but we’d have to give up driving drunk ourselves, and that’s not fair because we can drive better drunk than teenagers can sober.
9.) A combination of driving inexperience and alcohol make you a greater danger on the road, whether you drive or not, and that gives us the right to punish you when you drink alcohol, whether you drive or not.
10.) Don’t drive drunk? We can list some other crimes you never commit, as an excuse to deny liberty to you: murder, rape, assault…
11.) Everybody who drinks under age is immature and irresponsible because they’re doing something that is illegal, as well it should be, because they’re so immature and irresponsible.
12.) Liquor corporations have the nerve to advertise their products to you, and we have more respect for their First Amendment right to free speech than we have for your God-given right to drink the beverage of your choice.
13.) We can’t stop older drunks from freely exercising their right to practice alcoholism, because they hold too much political power, but some of them started as teenagers and never had a chance to quit since then, so we punish you instead.
14.) You shouldn’t destroy your brain while it is only 95 percent developed. You should wait until it is completely developed and then destroy it, like we did.
15.) Even though this law is imposed on you by morons who cannot see the obvious flaws in these absurd arguments, it is embellished with a fancy seal, and a Governor years ago scribbled his autograph on it, so you have a sacred duty to obey it.
Translated by Tom Alciere
Webmaster, Underage Drinkers Against Drunk Driving
Most states in the nation adopted a minimum drinking age of 21 soon after federal passage of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, which required states to maintain a minimum drinking age of 21. Under the Federal Aid Highway Act, States were required to enforce the minimum drinking age of 18 in order to avoid a 10% reduction in federal highway funds. The original intention of the law was to reduce the incidents of alcohol-related accidents among people under 21. But since passage of this legislation, and the raising of the drinking age in many states, the percentage of people who drink between the ages of 18 to 20 has skyrocketed. Many say the prohibitions have actually encouraged secretive binge drinking, more dangerous behavior, and less educational programming targeting this age group. Respected law enforcement officials and university presidents have recently called for changes in the federal law to permit states to lower the drinking age.
At age 18, people are legal adults. As much as their parents may think otherwise, they are no longer children. They have the right to vote and help choose the President of the United States. They can go to war to defend our country, and they can legally purchase guns and cigarettes. It is absolutely absurd that they cannot have a beer or glass of wine without fear of possible arrest and prosecution.
It’s time for the nation to repeal these Prohibition-era laws and adopt a more intelligent, progressive, and educational approach to drinking among younger adults. These laws simply don’t work, they aren’t enforceable any longer, and if anything they are counterproductive. Literally millions of responsible young adults are already consuming alcohol and that’s not going to change. What we need to do is stop wasting the taxpayers money chasing, charging and prosecuting responsible young adults who want to have a beer, and start putting the money where it ought to be, in promoting smart education about responsible drinking, and in pursuing far more serious criminals, including those at all ages who drive under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
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Eric Paine
President & Founder
Drink At 18
http://drinkat18.com