Is the wait worth it? Considering the Drinking Age

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.

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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.