The elders have spoken. It’s time to lower the drinking age. In recent months, a group of 130 university presidents and chancellors — including the presidents of Duke, Dartmouth, Hopkins and Middlebury — has called on the U.S. government to reopen the debate on the drinking age. We should listen to them. The issue of alcohol in America has always been somewhat of a conundrum. As Prohibition showed, the institution of drinking is so ingrained in our culture that even a heavily enforced national ban on alcohol failed to affect societal drinking habits. It only made drinking more dangerous as the sale of alcohol flourished in a violent black market. In the early 1980s, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a group of mothers who lost children in drunk driving accidents, successfully lobbied for the legislation to increase the drinking age from 18 to 21. A quarter century later, like the bootleggers of the Prohibition, young adults have found their way around the law. Nowhere is this more evident than on college campuses. Once teens are out of their parents’ control, they suddenly find themselves in a world where more than four out of five people drink, and drink a lot. According to a 2007 report by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, 83 percent of college students drank in 2005, and just less than half of those were binge drinkers, meaning that they had had five or more drinks in a row at least once in the previous two weeks. But this was nothing to new to them. Three quarters of those who drink in college started drinking before college. Even here at PA, the trend is shockingly apparent. According to last year’s State of the Academy survey, more than 70 percent of four-year Seniors in the class of 2008 drank without their parents present prior to Commencement. These numbers show that no matter what the law says, underage drinking is as much a part of American adolescence as listening to music that your parents despise. The efforts made to combat it over the past 25 years have been visibly unsuccessful. And while efforts to police underage drinking may have done a little bit to reduce it, these efforts only make teens try harder not to get caught, which sometimes makes their drinking behaviors more dangerous. In the spirit of binge drinking, the phenomenon that brought us such drinking games as Beirut, bei-rip, flip-cup, baseball, you-got-served and drinkball, underage drinkers become concerned not only with drinking a lot, but drinking it quickly. The less time you spend drinking, the less likely you are to get caught drinking. Another problem with policing underage drinking is that it turns otherwise safe havens for drunk teenagers into places to avoid at all costs. At a house party, when the cops roll up, instead of staying in the house where the worst thing that can happen to a drunk teenager is falling down on the floor, he or she will probably run to a car that will probably be driven by someone who wasn’t planning on driving that night. America’s teens aren’t just going to say, “Man that was close. We should quit drinking,” after a close call at a house party. They’ll probably just say, “Maybe we shouldn’t be so loud next time.” And what about MADD? What about drunk driving? Although the decrease in alcohol-related traffic fatalities in recent years is impressive, the higher drinking age likely claims only a small part of the responsibility for that decrease. Other changes have also been made to increase traffic safety and target drunk driving, such lowering the legal blood-alcohol content (BAC) limit and making law enforcement more efficient. Even seat belt use has increased by nearly 600 percent since 1983, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. If we want to continue to combat drunk driving, we should also make drunk driving penalties more stringent. It’s downright foolish that college students cannot legally drink. There’s no stopping them. If universities didn’t have to be too concerned about underage drinking because of state liability laws, they could concentrate more on curbing binge drinking. And instead of taking care of the kids falling down in fraternities, campus police have to pull them out of car wrecks. The statement of the Amethyst Initiative, to which 130 college presidents are signatories, sums up the situation: “twenty-one is not working.” Harrison Hart is a four-year Senior and a Commentary Editor from Baltimore, Md. hhart@andover.edu
