Forever 21?
The legal drinking age may have started as a way to reduce drunk driving, but it has caused deadly side effects.
By Kathleen Reeves
April 14, 2009
(Photo courtesy istockphoto.com)Last month, Stephen Colbert mused about the notion of lowering the drinking age. “If we have freshmen in college drinking, that alcohol will mess up the Ritalin and the Adderall they’re taking to study for their finals,” Colbert said. He was responding to his guest Dr. John McCardell, founder of the nonprofit Choose Responsibility, which advocates for a lower drinking age.
College isn’t what it used to be, and many people are taking a long, hard look at the role drinking plays in college today. Some, like McCardell, believe that setting the legal drinking age at 21, has created a new problem: deadly incidents of binge drinking.
In 1997, police called to a fraternity house at Louisiana State University found a roomful of unconscious students. It was the fraternity’s initiation night. One of the pledges, 20-year-old Benjamin Wynne, died later due to alcohol poisoning. In September of 2004, a freshman at the University of Colorado named Gordie Bailey drank 15 to 20 shots as part of a fraternity initiation. Members of the fraternity—many of whom were underage—put him on a couch, and every so often someone took his pulse. It was nine hours before someone called 911, and by then, Bailey was dead. Earlier in the same month, a 19-year-old named Samantha Spady died at Colorado State University, also in a frat house. These are just a few instances of the 1,000 alcohol-related deaths that happen every year, off the road.
For many of us, we’ve always thought of 21 as the age when one can legally buy alcohol in bars and liquor stores, but it wasn’t always that way. The drinking age was raised to 21 from 18 in 1984 largely through the work of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Constitutionally, determining the legal drinking age is up to the states, but MADD lobbied to pass the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, a law that stipulated any state that set the age below 21 would lose 10 percent of its federal highway funding. After the act went into effect, drunk driving fatalities did initially go down for people under 21. But a 2001 study (PDF) found that when drunk driving fatalities go down in one age group, they go up in an adjacent group. So as fewer 18- to 20-year-olds die on the roads, there’s an increase in deaths among 21- to 24-year-olds.
McCardell calls the legal drinking age of 21, or “legal 21” a “good example of the law of unintended consequences.” In banning under-21 consumption in public places, he says, it has been successful in driving alcohol consumption into private places where it has been deadly. “To measure the law’s success by highway fatalities is to take a limited view,” he says, as 60 percent of lives lost to alcohol by those under 21 occur off the roads.
Advocates have begun to rally around something called the Amethyst Initiative. The Initiative took shape last July and was McCardell’s brainchild. As a former president of Middlebury College, McCardell spoke to other college presidents and discovered that many of them doubted the efficacy of the drinking age. To date, 135 college and university presidents have signed the initiative.
The debate centers on the question of whether the legal drinking age of 21 has curbed or exacerbated the problem of binge drinking on college campuses. Some students are drinking themselves to death. There’s undoubtedly a growing problem with binge-drinking on college campuses. Between 1993 and 2001, binge drinking actually increased by 56 percent among 18- to 20-year-olds. As a result, alcohol-related deaths that don’t involve a car are more and more frequent. A 2005 study found that between 1998 and 2001, off-road drinking deaths among 18- to 24-year-olds increased (PDF) disproportionately to their population increase. Alcohol-related emergency room visits, property damage, and sexual assault are on the rise as well. College policies have done little to curb this kind of excessive drinking.
While critics of the Amethyst Initiative dismiss it as a cynical effort by colleges to reduce their liability from lawsuits brought by families of alcohol victims, the argument to lower the drinking age is two-fold, according to Choose Responsibility. First, if administrators didn’t have to reprimand every student under 21 drinking, they could spend more time addressing students who drink way too much. Campus police departments could focus their limited resources on problem drinkers rather than 18 to 20-year-olds drinking responsibly. Dr. Lee Peters, the Vice President of Student Affairs at the University of Hartford, a school that is a signatory* of the Amethyst Initiative, points out that of his university’s 332 conduct cases involving alcohol last semester, 300 were merely possession. These students weren’t drunk and weren’t fighting or damaging property. “What could my staff do if they didn’t have to deal with minors in possession?” he says.
Second, Choose Responsibility argues that if drinking were acceptable, college students would likely begin drinking more moderately. This is the more complicated, controversial assumption. Alcohol is particularly dangerous for the under-21 crowd because it’s illegal and thus drunk in dangerous ways. Choose Responsibility is concerned by the culture of “underground drinking in unsupervised environments,” as the organization’s executive director, Michael Giuliani, puts it. Before attending events at which they won’t be able to drink, students drink great quantities, often quickly. Or they stay in their rooms, drinking all night. Or they fail to get help for a friend who drank too much because they fear they’ll be punished. This fear of punishment is how college students put themselves at risk.
To counteract these behaviors, Choose Responsibility is calling for a separate campaign to address the culture of binge drinking, much as activists and lawmakers addressed drunk driving in the ‘80s. “It’s not just about lowering the age,” says Giuliani. “It’s about creating a cultural shift around this kind of excessive, reckless drinking in clandestine locations.” He believes that the massive public relations effort toward stigmatizing drunk driving in the ‘80s can be a model for solving the country’s binge drinking problem. Lowering the drinking age, he says, is only “a piece of the puzzle.”
Another piece of the puzzle, according to Choose Responsibility, is rethinking alcohol education. Giuliani says that youth need “a more reality-based education of cause and effect, not just, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it.’” It is a parallel debate to the one over sex education: now it is between “abstinence-based education programs” and “harm reduction strategies that address the complex psychological expectancies that lead to excessive drinking amongst young people.” Choose Responsibility thinks that with a radical shift in the way we teach adolescents about alcohol, we can begin to counter binge drinking.
Another consideration is the purported link between the age that a person begins drinking and his or her chance of becoming an alcoholic, which puts that person at risk for becoming depressed or suicidal. But the cause and effect isn’t clear here; many young people who suffer from depression might be drawn to alcoholism and drug abuse. Alcoholism is a problem—a human problem, a cultural problem, whatever you want to call it—that has no relationship to the legal drinking age.
Giuliani has seen a surge of interest in the issue both on and off campuses since the announcement of the Amethyst Initiative. But Peters is less impressed. “I was shocked, as a child of the ’60s, that there wasn’t a groundswell of students on this campus forming an alliance,” he says. Ironically, the law’s impotence may account for students’ apathy in changing it. “It’s not like they can’t drink,” Peters says of underage students, “so it’s not a big issue for them.” McCardell urges students to volunteer with Choose Responsibility, or to write letters to Congress. Though a few states have introduced bills to lower the age, these bills are dead on arrival—no state is willing to lose 10 percent of its federal highway funding. In effect, changing the federal law is the only feasible route to lowering the drinking age.
Maybe some don’t believe that we can teach our children to drink responsibly because alcohol is such a complex beast in our culture. Some doubt that we can tame it with legislation. We’re afraid to change anything, to even go near it. Perhaps this is why, in talking about binge drinking in the past, we’ve rarely mentioned the roadblocks of the law. Instead, we’ve simply made examples of irresponsible behavior. Will this behavior respond to a change in the law? “It won’t completely stop happening any more than drunk driving will stop happening,” McCardell says. “If all we do is stop one fatality from happening by bringing alcohol consumption out into the open, then I think this is worthwhile.”
Kathleen Reeves graduated from Yale and worked as a field organizer in Iowa for the Obama campaign. She is a freelance writer living in Connecticut.
*This text has been edited from the original.
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