Thoughts on the drinking age

At one point in college, I served on a joint student/faculty/administration counsel on student alcohol consumption (something my friends at the time thought was highly amusing), and one of the members was Barrett Seaman, a college trustee. Since that time, Seaman has written a book on college binge-drinking ("Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess") and has started a group called Choose Responsibility that has been lobbying to overturn the Federal mandatory 21 year old drinking age.

Seaman's argument, which makes a lot of sense to me, is that the the mandatory drinking age creates a college culture where drinking is pushed underground, leading to dangerous excess (a greater tendency to poison yourself drinking shots of vodka in your dorm room instead of waiting in line to get a beer at a party or a bar). It also socially separates adults from teenagers at a critical moment in teenagers lives. They lose the chance to see adults responsibly consuming alcohol, and also removes a way for students and professors to bond outside of class. A number of times my fraternity tried to invite professors to our more, er, "upscale" events, but they never showed up because of the risk of being around a lot of underage drinking. That brings up the third problem- because underage drinking is so pervasive in college, it creates a situation where large numbers of otherwise law-abiding folks are forging government documents, endangering the welfare of minors, etc - which is risky for the people involved, and also breeds a general contempt for the law.

Seaman also notes that the main selling point of the current drinking age is a sham:

The other side almost invariably trots out the same statistics supporting their claim that MLDA 21 has reduced drunk-driving fatalities by some 13 percent, allegedly saving nearly 1,000 lives a year on the nation's roads. I know I can knock that one right out of the park with the simple observation — backed by peer-reviewed studies — that Canada, during roughly the same period, had an even greater reduction in drunk driving deaths without changing any of its provinces' 18- or 19-year-old drinking age limits.

This is an interesting area where, much like marijuana legalization, you'll find that a lot of policymakers tacitly agree there should be change, but right now the politics are so toxic it's almost impossible to do. Any governor who opted to buck the Federal highway money (the Federal Government basically bribes the states to go with a 21 year drinking age by making a condition to get a portion of the state's federal highway dollars) and drop the drinking age back to 18 would inevitably have the DWI deaths of every 18-21 year old hung around his neck at the next election- even if the overall rate of DWIs for that category stayed the same.

In any event, Barret's piece in the Hamilton College alumni mag (available here) is a good read on this topic.