Alcohol 101
College leaders right to start debate on drinking age
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Aug. 21, 2008, 10:07PM

How do you teach responsible drinking? The lack of a decent answer is killing hundreds of the nation's most promising young people.

Alarmed at persistent binge-drinking on their campuses, about 100 college presidents this week publicized a petition to Congress calling for national debate on lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18.

Their call for serious dialogue on the issue is exactly the right approach to a confounding problem, and from exactly the right source: experienced, disinterested scholars who spend their lives preparing the young for adulthood.

The presidents balked at actually calling for a lowered legal age, an astute decision: The stakes are high, and information on how to curb youth drinking is still in dispute. In their petition they argued that current law is not working and proposed considering a lowered drinking age as a remedy.

Making drinking illegal for most college students, the presidents said, "has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking."

Certainly extreme drinking patterns are thriving. Every year, college drinking plays a role in 1,700 student deaths, 599,000 injuries and 97,000 cases of sexual assault or date rape, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reports.

The presidents who signed the petition know first-hand that when a student dies, is injured or harms others through out-of-control drinking, more than victims and their families suffer. Classmates are traumatized, and institutions can be crippled by lawsuits and drained of the most promising minds if they are thought to have abdicated their job to protect the students they are charged with educating.

It's unclear whether changing the drinking age would do much to improve the situation. The presidents did not entirely bolster their case when they posited, "Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting ... serving on juries and enlisting in the military but ... are not mature enough to have a beer."

One might argue that just because some youths are mature enough to drink moderately, not all are. For that matter, it's debatable at what age one truly is "mature" enough to reasonably process the experience of fighting, being shot at or killing on the battlefield.

Yet, as Pomona College President David W. Oxtoby told the Los Angeles Times, when drinking among students is technically illegal but in fact widespread, colleges have little chance to counsel, give help to those who have drunk too much — or, most importantly, sponsor events such as student/faculty receptions where drinking moderately can be encouraged.

This question of how effective social modeling might be is one that academically informed debate would advance greatly.

As Mothers Against Drunk Driving vigorously asserts, it may be that keeping the drinking age at 21 reduces the number of alcohol-related deaths that otherwise might have taken place.

On the other hand, maybe removing drinking from Americans' long list of consumption taboos could teach young people to simply integrate it moderately into their lives.

That's the basic philosophy and outcome in Western European countries, although these cultures, too, grapple with individual cases of alcoholism and even some evidence of increased binge drinking.

Too, it's worth noting that this relaxed attitude toward social drinking coincides with harsh laws about drinking irresponsibly; in Norway, for example, driving with even a small amount of alcohol in one's blood can lead to harsh fines.

The college presidents may or may not be correct in leaning toward abolishing the 21-year-old drinking age. They've performed a service, though, in raising the national awareness that the young people in their care still are not drinking safely.

Now the scholars inside university walls need to marshal the data — sociological, historical and scientific — to make the debate on young adult drinking as clear-headed as possible.

i'm not saying i agree with the drinking age being 21, but i don't see how less college kids will drink if the legal age is 18 instead. at 18 you're still graduating from high school, moving out of the house(in most cases), going off to college and being away from home for the first time.

Sounds about right to me.

I just had a radical thought. We pretty much know by now that getting the death penalty has not proved to be a deterrent for committing 1st degree murder, but I imagine you make getting a DUI a capital offense -- you'll get A LOT less people driving even mildly buzzed.

You're spot on, edzeppe.

I am not in anyway advocating drunk driving. I have driven a total of 1.5 miles drunk in my life.


However, The problem with too stiff of laws regarding the simple act of driving drunk (which is risky and dangerous- not a guarantee of actually hurting someone) is how where you live pretty much dictates how much someone may actually "need" to drive drunk.

In the country you're driving down empty side roads, with very little risk to anyone except yourself and the other drunks in the car- no innocents there.
In major urban areas you have a multitude of options to get home. Cabs, Buses, Subways, walking (thats why i refuse to have a drunk driving discussion with someone who is born and raised in NY- they have never encountered the problem that people in non east coast suburbs face)
In the suburbs though, its a bigger issue. Most suburbs dont have bus systems, or cabs on every corner. There are no subways.. and most bars are by malls, or shopping centers- miles away from peoples homes. Should they drive home drunk for those reasons? No. But the circumstances are very different depending on where you live.

What hearing this whole argument does for me is more just remind me even further of how angry I am (& I'd already been thinking about this again somewhat lately) at the ridiculous hypocrisy that alcohol is legal, while all other drugs -- but more specifically for the purposes of my argument, marijuana -- are not. I mean it's truly laughable. At the end of the day, all of these things serve the same exact function: they're nothing more than mind altering substances that people use to, at the very least, "take the edge off". There's absolutely NO reason why alcohol should be legal while pot shouldn't. It's the very definition of being arbitrary. Oh wait, no it isn't, it's because there's no organized corporate structure and lobby for marijuana, far as I can tell that's the ONLY reason. And it's essentially the same thing with the likes of coke and heroin, but hey, I'm not greedy, I'll just make the case for pot right now. It's just a blatant ridiculous double standard that so chaps my ass.

But back to the central argument, they were discussing this on the Preston & Steve morning show the other day, and from what I recall, they came up with what seemed to be a reasonably valid argument on why NOT to lower it. On one hand, the whole idea of "you can die for our country at 18 but you can't drink" is a perfectly good stance. I understand it 100%. But to listen to the context in which they put things, when considering about how, even with the limit at 21, you as an of age person deciding to buy booze for kids you know that are under 21, well, they made the case that if you lower it to 18, obviously this puts a great deal of high school seniors within the safe zone, and that in high school (even as a senior) you can possibly be significantly more prone to be influenced by peer pressure to buy for those younger than you, and as such being in the high school environment now opens that up to possibly as low as 14 and 15 year olds getting the booze by their "older connection". Whereas with the 21 year old buying for those younger, it won't necessarily be the high school crowd he's catering to.

Just saying, I thought this was an interesting point they made. I'm honestly still not sure where I ultimately stand.

i'm not saying i agree with the drinking age being 21, but i don't see how less college kids will drink if the legal age is 18 instead. at 18 you're still graduating from high school, moving out of the house(in most cases), going off to college and being away from home for the first time.

Seems strange to me that people are thought of as being mature enough to vote at 18, but not mature enough to get a glass of wine at the restaurant.

What hearing this whole argument does for me is more just remind me even further of how angry I am (& I'd already been thinking about this again somewhat lately) at the ridiculous hypocrisy that alcohol is legal, while all other drugs -- but more specifically for the purposes of my argument, marijuana -- are not. I mean it's truly laughable. At the end of the day, all of these things serve the same exact function: they're nothing more than mind altering substances that people use to, at the very least, "take the edge off". There's absolutely NO reason why alcohol should be legal while pot shouldn't. It's the very definition of being arbitrary. Oh wait, no it isn't, it's because there's no organized corporate structure and lobby for marijuana, far as I can tell that's the ONLY reason. And it's essentially the same thing with the likes of coke and heroin, but hey, I'm not greedy, I'll just make the case for pot right now. It's just a blatant ridiculous double standard that so chaps my ass.

But back to the central argument, they were discussing this on the Preston & Steve morning show the other day, and from what I recall, they came up with what seemed to be a reasonably valid argument on why NOT to lower it. On one hand, the whole idea of "you can die for our country at 18 but you can't drink" is a perfectly good stance. I understand it 100%. But to listen to the context in which they put things, when considering about how, even with the limit at 21, you as an of age person deciding to buy booze for kids you know that are under 21, well, they made the case that if you lower it to 18, obviously this puts a great deal of high school seniors within the safe zone, and that in high school (even as a senior) you can possibly be significantly more prone to be influenced by peer pressure to buy for those younger than you, and as such being in the high school environment now opens that up to possibly as low as 14 and 15 year olds getting the booze by their "older connection". Whereas with the 21 year old buying for those younger, it won't necessarily be the high school crowd he's catering to.

Just saying, I thought this was an interesting point they made. I'm honestly still not sure where I ultimately stand.

if you legalize coke and heroin in the same way as alcohol, then it's pretty hypocritical to require prescriptions for less harmful drugs isn't it? or for any drugs...
so prescriptions become obsolete.

A fair point was made earlier about there being no immediate sort of test for pot (in regards to being under the influence while driving) as opposed to alcohol, yes it would seem that would need to be addressed, but I still say essentially, I can see absolutely no reason why alcohol and tobacco should be legal while marijuana at the very least shouldn't. Again, it's the definition of arbitrary.

Yes it should be addressed, followed by " i see absolutely no reason"


a bit contradictory, dont ya think?