The News Article and Some Comments by Readers
Bid to Reconsider Drinking Age Taps Unlikely Supporters
College Presidents
Say Current Laws Lead to More Abuse
By JOHN HECHINGER
August 21, 2008
A new campaign highlighting campus
alcohol abuse won heavyweight support this week as top college presidents
signed a statement urging consideration of lowering the drinking age, but the
effort is already encountering a powerful backlash.
More than 100 college presidents,
including leaders at Dartmouth, Duke and Middlebury, have joined the month-old
Amethyst Initiative, which argues that "the 21-year-old drinking age is
not working" and "has created a culture of dangerous binge
drinking."
John McCardell, a history professor and former president of Middlebury College in Vermont, is leading the effort. His group, Choose Responsibility, a nonprofit unaffiliated with the college, has received financial backing from money manger Julian Robertson. Mr. McCardell says he receives no money from the alcohol industry.
He argues current laws drive drinking underground, causing more problems than they solve. "The law is out of step with reality," he says. "The law is so obviously unjust and discriminatory. It ought to at least be the subject of debate."
But he and the college presidents are taking on powerful constituencies, including some of their colleagues, the top government traffic-safety agency, the insurance industry and public-health authorities, all of which say the higher drinking age saves lives. Even representatives of the alcohol industry say they support current laws.
Laura Dean-Mooney, president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, says she is alarmed by the initiative. The mother of a 17-year-old high-school senior, she says she wouldn't want her child to go to a school whose presidents had signed the statement, saying it sent the message, "It's OK to drink underage."
The debate dates to 1984, when Congress imposed a penalty of 10% of a state's federal highway funds on any state that set its drinking age lower than 21. With billions of dollars at stake, states complied.
There is broad consensus that the higher drinking age has reduced driving fatalities. Since the law's passage, the number of 16- to 20-year-old drunken drivers killed annually has fallen by half, to about 800, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates the law saves about 900 lives a year, equal to about 17,000 people since all states adopted the law in 1988.
"I'm aware of no legitimate debate" about the fact that lowering the drinking age saves lives, says Henry Wechsler, the retired director of the College Alcohol Study at the Harvard School of Public Health. He says college presidents are mounting this campaign largely because enforcing rules on alcohol is a nuisance.
Harvard researchers found that as many as 44% of students reported binge drinking, defined as consuming four or five drinks in an evening, at least once in the previous two weeks.
One supporter of the initiative to revisit the drinking age, William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, says the current laws make it difficult to counsel underage students on how to drink responsibly. "It frustrates me to no end," says Mr. Durden, who helped draft the Amethyst statement. "We're not for drinking. We want to break the cycle."
Elizabeth Pogust, a 21-year-old senior at Middlebury, says she felt pressured to drink as a freshman. Classmates would quaff alcohol in their rooms before roaming the campus on weekends, she recalls. As they got older, she says, she and her peers learned their lessons. "I've noticed a definite change in my attitude once it was no longer forbidden," she says.
Moonie Shin, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says colleges should crack down, not seek to ease rules on drinking. "I feel that college presidents are looking for the easy way out and not dealing with the situation," says Ms. Shin.
In the early 1990s, the University of Rhode Island, the state's flagship college, had such notoriety for drinking that wags said that its initials, URI, stood for "You are high." The campus made Princeton Review's list of top party schools.
Robert L. Carothers, who became president of the university in 1991, eliminated all drinking at university functions, even among faculty. The university stepped up enforcement, helping spur the shutdown of half of the school's 18 fraternities.
The Rhode Island school secured $8 million in grants to study ways to stop drinking. The school worked with local authorities to ban businesses that ran "pub crawls" that ferried students from one bar to another. It supported a local ordinance that places a big orange sticker on off-campus houses that have been visited by police because of unruly parties. After three violations, landlords are required to terminate leases. The school also pushed for a law that requires beer kegs to be registered, so those who sold to underage students could be tracked and punished.
The University of Rhode Island is no longer on the list of party schools. "To the degree it gives impetus to the idea that colleges and undergraduates should ignore the law and the science, it's a destructive thing to do," Dr. Carothers says of the effort to reconsider the drinking age.
Write to John Hechinger at john.hechinger@wsj.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121928142497058879.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Article has this diagram:
Comments of Readers (elsewhere):
We should not be surprised that college
presidents are asking for a lowering of the drinking age. Drinking on campus
has become a part of the culture of most colleges.
Instead of forcing students to party off campus and take inordinate risks to
get their hands on illicit substances, we should promote the responsible use of
alcohol in safe and open situations.
Prohibition showed in the early 20th century that outlawing alcohol did not produce
a significant decrease in consumption. But it did generate enormous profits for
those willing to produce and serve illegal booze. Lowering the drinking age to
19 would allow legal access to most college students, freeing up police and
campus resources for other, more important safety questions.
This does not mean that we need to relax our laws for alcohol-related offenses
such as DUI. We must give young adults the ability to make mistakes in safe
environments, such as a college campus.
We should lower the federal minimum age to 19, removing the "illicit"
motivation for heavy drinking. This would eliminate the problem that many
critics cite: the legality surrounding alcohol and high schools, because there
are much fewer 19-year-olds than 18-year-olds attending high school. This
compromise would allow both sides to get part of what they want, keeping
alcohol out of high-schoolers' hands while allowing
for a safe and controlled drinking experience for those at college.
Douglas Cummings
For many years I thought it was totally unfair to draft 18-year-olds yet
prohibit them from buying alcohol. My view changed when I read that the younger
a person is when drinking begins, the more quickly he can go from social
drinker to full-blown alcoholic.
As the mother of one young adult who made a conscious decision not to drink
till he turned 21, I am thankful for that law. On many long-distance drives
with friends, he was the designated driver. I can't help but wonder if things
could have been tragically different had the legal age been 18.
Also, as a college student in the 1970s, I can attest
to the fact that binge drinking was alive and well. The legality of the issue
was irrelevant.
I find it hard to believe that lowering the drinking age from 21 would not result
in even greater binge drinking.
I would like to offer a theory as to why there might be increased binge
drinking in this country. It seems a reasonable conclusion that as young people
spend more and more time plugged into electronic devices, their social skills
might suffer. What better way to overcome social anxiety than to down a few
drinks?
Vicki Usher
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See also this YouTube video on lowering the drinking age:
Note: You can search YouTube videos for Related videos.
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