February 16, 2007
Reconsidering the Drinking Age
In Inside Higher Ed:
[Former Middlebury College president John M.] McCardell is about to try. With backing from the Robertson Foundation, he has created a nonprofit group, Choose Responsibility, that will seek to promote a national discussion of alternatives to the 21-year-old drinking age. The group is preparing a Web site with studies that challenge conventional wisdom about the advantages of the law, while explaining its flaws. The group will also push an idea — floated without success in the 1990s by Roderic Park, then chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder — to allow 18-20-year-olds who complete an alcohol education program to obtain “drinking licenses.” And McCardell and others plan to start speaking out, writing more op-eds, and trying to redefine the issue.
The current law, McCardell said in an interview Thursday, is a failure that forces college freshmen to hide their drinking — while colleges must simultaneously pretend that they have fixed students’ drinking problems and that students aren’t drinking. McCardell also argued that the law, by making it impossible for a 19-year-old to enjoy two beers over pizza in a restaurant, leads those 19-year-olds to consume instead in closed dorm rooms and fraternity basements where 2 beers are more likely to turn into 10, and no responsible person may be around to offer help or to stop someone from drinking too much.
Any college president who thinks his or her campus has drinking under control is “delusional,” McCardell said, although he acknowledged the political pressures that prevent most sitting presidents from providing an honest assessment of what’s going on on their campuses. But he said that the dangers to students and institutions are great enough that it’s time for someone to start speaking out. While he was president at Middlebury, one of his students died, a 21-year-old who was driving after drinking way too much.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 10:45 AM | Permalink
Comments
Very interesting idea and I think a step in the right direction. It does however stop short of addressing the issue of those under 18 who also drink without supervision and frequently way too much. Indeed, it's been suggested that binge drinking begins in high-school. I'd be in favor of having a system where young adults around the age of 14 could, under the controll of their parents or a designate, be served. It's a good time to learn one's limits and responses and certainly better than waiting until they can drive!
Drinking is not gonna go away any time soon and our attitudes towards it prohibits our taking an unvarnished look at how we can effectively form structures that simultaneously recognize it and manages its instinctual components.
PS: Anyone serving in the military should should be able to drink, regardless of age, responsibly and held to the strictest application of the UCMJ.
Posted by: doug | Feb 16, 2007 2:47:53 PM
The argument seems to be that since teens already drink, then let them drink legally and all will be ok. A serious problem with under 21s drinking is that science has shown that their risk drives are far in advance of their responsibility controls and thus they are much more likely to do ot ofcntrol things in many areas at that age.
As far as drinking while in service, I see no reason why the laws ought to be against teen drinking as civilians and ok if military. I know the usual cliche: if they are old enough to die then they are old enough to drink. I dislike the two-tier system as inequitable.
Of course colleges would love to change drinking age. It gets them off the hook for what they should be responsible about.
Disclosure: I have served in the military, twice. I have been at a number of colleges as a student. I have had as much booze ir not more than most guys, and I have a son at 18 in college now (and yes, he tells me he drinks beer there).
Whatever happens, though, I hope that the law will be uniform throught the nation rather than on a state-by -state basis.
cheers
Posted by: fred lapides | Feb 16, 2007 6:59:19 PM
"The argument seems to be that since teens already drink, then let them drink legally and all will be ok."
Not at all. Re-read. The argument is that post-18 adults do drink, and the 21 legal drinking age forces them to drink in uncontrolled situations; it would be better to have them be legally allowed to drink in the usual situations -- bars, restaurants, in the company of adult relatives -- which are more legally and socially controlled. A slightly more complex argument, to be sure, but stating it too simply leads to misrepresentation.
"Scientific" arguments about the drinking age seem to fly in the face of the empirical evidence of drinking in European countries. Leaving out the UK, which seems to have a serious binge drinking problem stemming from other sources than underage drinking, the western European societies show their younger adults how to drink responsibly, and they learn.
The proposal is not going to be an easy one to put into action, and the tendency will be to judge it too quickly. If the drinking age is lowered to 18, and three 19-year-olds die in alcohol-related circumstances in the following year, that does not mean that the proposal is a failure. We're talking about a proposal that seeks to change the whole society's attitudes and norms about drinking. That's going to take time, it's going to take patience, and -- unfortunately -- it will be fought every step of the way by people and groups who believe that the best way to deal with dangerous drinking by a small percentage of people is to make drinking next to impossible for everyone. But the results sought by this proposal -- more mindful drinking, a drastic lowering of risky drinking in all age groups, and an intelligent approach to giving young people a model for responsibility -- are surely worth the effort, and deserve as much chance as this draconian prohibition has been given.
Posted by: Lew Bryson | Feb 21, 2007 9:39:44 AM
Post a comment