The U.S. has the highest drinking age in the world, and every few years a chorus starts up about how we should lower it. Interestingly enough, the latest chorus is composed of college administrators. More than 100 U.S. colleges have signed a statement asking the nation to consider lowering the drinking age to 18. The statement compares the current drinking age to Prohibition, noting, “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.”
College administrators fear that the current drinking age leads to surreptitious and binge drinking. Students drink heavily before they go out, because they know they won’t have access to alcohol in public, leading to some cases of alcohol poisoning and drunk driving.
“We have a crisis on our hands. We need some new ideas and new thinking,” William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the Maryland state university system, told the Baltimore Sun.
In the past, states have tried to get creative with bills that would allow 18- to 20-year-olds to purchase alcohol in restaurants but not liquor shops, or to drink after they complete an alcohol education program.
National surveys, however, indicate that most people support keeping the drinking age at 21. A recent study showed that drinking-related traffic deaths among youth had declined by 11 percent since the 1980s, when the nationally recommended drinking age of 21 went into effect. Opponents, however, claim such fatalities were already in decline before most states switched to 21.
Yeah, I always got the idea that the drinking age had a lot more to do with drinking-and-driving than with the actual drinking.
The logic goes something like this:
– Young people get in more accidents than adults
– Drunks get in more accidents than the sober
– Drunk teenagers will kill the most people on the road.
Personally, I think we should lower the drinking age, but, that does seem to be the logic.
I always understood that the reason we have the highest drinking age is that there are many more teenagers driving here. It is either cost prohibitive (insurance, petrol etc) in other countries or the driving age is higher.
In Ontario the legal drinking age is 19. I think this is an acceptable age. We still have problems with drinking and driving. But we also have problems with speeding, and reckless driving. If a young person is going to be irresponsible, I don’t think a little something like legal drinking age is going to change that.
19 means that you might be more likely to keep it out of the high schools. It is routinely ignored at 21. My having a law that is always ignored, it encourages our youth to ignore all laws.
I don’t have a source for this(I think it was on NPR), but recently I heard that the statistics have not indicated that a later drinking age has reduced drinking and driving fatalities, that being said, it really doesn’t matter what the drinking age is, I was able to go to bars and order drinks under 21 with no problem, and I’m sure today’s kids are the same…and the ones who can’t/don’t go to bars are getting their older friends to buy it for them.
Does anyone seriously think it’s a good idea for high school seniors to be able to legally purchase booze?
I was a college freshman when my state, Minnesota, complied with the federal government’s demands (more like blackmail, withholding federal highway repair funds, indeed) when it changed the drinking age from 19 to 21. I was grandfathered in, having turned 19 before the law changed. In the intervening years, I never saw the change in age produce any noticeable difference in the drinking habits of incoming freshmen. And if what my nieces and nephews have told me about college life today is true, it’s far more “alcohol-centric” than in my time, when it was legal for us to drink. Binge drinking is a weekend sport for these kids–and “dry” campuses don’t change that. Just as it was in my day, there’s always a willing host somewhere. I thought this was a ridiculous law then and my views haven’t changed in the past 20+ years. Other countries don’t have drinking ages–at least not drinking ages the allow its citizens to be able to vote and serve in the military before allowing them to order a beer–and they don’t have our problems with drunk driving. Maybe it’s time we took at closer look at what works in these countries and apply it to our own situation. Every time I hear about someone who’s on their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th even 6th DUI/DWI arrest, I want to scream. People are hit by drunk drivers and die because we are too lenient on people who drive drunk and our legal blood alcohol limits are too high. Get serious about punishing offenders and we might make a dent in our drunk driving problem.