Those Drunk on Pabst vs. Those Drunk with Power
Recently the classic drinking-age debate was rekindled when dozens of College and University Presidents signed onto the Amethyst Initiative, which is at this point a simple statement, which reads:
It’s time to rethink the drinking age
In 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which imposed a penalty of 10% of a state's federal highway appropriation on any state setting its drinking age lower than 21.
Twenty-four years later, our experience as college and university presidents convinces us that...
Twenty-one is not working
A culture of dangerous, clandestine “binge-drinking”—often conducted off-campus—has developed.
Alcohol education that mandates abstinence as the only legal option has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students.
Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.
By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.
How many times must we relearn the lessons of prohibition?
We call upon our elected officials:
To support an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21 year-old drinking age.
To consider whether the 10% highway fund “incentive” encourages or inhibits that debate.
To invite new ideas about the best ways to prepare young adults to make responsible decisions about alcohol.
We pledge ourselves and our institutions to playing a vigorous, constructive role as these critical discussions unfold.
The Washington Post editorialized against the idea:
Health and safety experts have reacted with dismay, because raising the drinking age has saved many lives. In 2001, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewed 49 studies published in scientific journals and concluded that alcohol-related traffic crashes involving young people increased 10 percent when the drinking age was lowered in the 1970s and decreased 16 percent when the drinking age was raised. The retreat from a lower drinking age translates into some 900 lives saved each year among 16- to 20-year-olds.
[...]
The college presidents are right about binge drinking. Each year, some 1,700 college students die from causes related to alcohol use; there is also the toll of injuries and sexual assaults fueled by alcohol. But where is the logic of solving the underage drinking problem by lowering the age even more? Henry Wechsler, the Harvard expert whose studies of binge drinking popularized the phrase, put it best, comparing lowering the drinking age to "pouring gasoline to put the fire out."
WaPo recommended predictably heavy-handed solutions:
Work by experts such as Mr. Wechsler, as well as the experience of college officials committed to solutions, shows that strong steps to enforce the law and change the culture can produce results. Instead of talking about lowering the drinking age (and thereby shifting the problem to high schools), colleges should be working to develop better enforcement methods, expand education and counseling, and end pricing practices that make alcohol more accessible and attractive. Then, too, college officials can stop winking at fraternity bashes that, whether they are willing to admit it or not, add to the allure of going off to college.
On the one hand, the drinking age of 21 is ridiculously arbitrary and many industrialized nations do just fine with lower (or no) age limits. On the other hand, the statistics are correct: by just lowering the drinking age, more people will die.
So where might a left student organizer stand on this issue?
I'd argue that we should be calling this out for what it really is: a distraction.
A distraction from the root causes of the problem at hand.
A large part of the cause is due to how little control these students have over the rest of their lives at college. If you're ordered around and told what to do for most of the day, wouldn't you feel like going a little wild as soon as you were free?
College students are fresh out of some of the most restrictive years of their lives: high school. They're regimented for the entire day, 5 days a week, and then on top of that presented with tasks to do once they're home and ostensibly "out" of school.
That, combined with the litany of "18 and older" things they can't do until they're just about ready to graduate, means that when college arrives, they're away from their parents, and they're all of a sudden confronted with a few more slices of largely untrammeled freedom, a good number of them take it to the extreme.
If we look at it from this lens, then reducing the drinking age to 18 isn't going to reduce the tragedies: it will only push them 3 years sooner.
An obvious solution is to not make students' lives so devoid of agency many feel they must "live up" every sliver of freedom they can get. It sounds ironic at first blush, but the solution to students "abusing" their freedom is to give them more of it.
To continue Wechsler's fire analogy, we should be tackling those who laid down the dry timber to begin with: the people who set up and perpetuate these harmful, alienating, and just plain ridiculous social structures. But that's something one couldn't get a hundred College Presidents to sign onto.