Lowering the Drinking Age Is a Non-Starter

The News & Advance
Published: September 13, 2008

Should the national drinking age be lowered from 21 to 18? It’s a debate that emerges every generation or so across America. The most recent debate was brought on by an increase in binge drinking on college campuses.

Would lowering the drinking age to 18 make the student consumption of alcohol less secretive and lead to more responsible drinking on campuses? Or would it increase the chance that more students would end up drinking and driving with the disastrous results that await on the nation’s highways?

The presidents of five Virginia colleges are supporting the Amethyst Initiative, which seeks to reopen the debate on the national drinking age. It has been signed by about 100 college presidents around the nation. The initiative simply asks for a thoughtful national discussion of the effect, for better or worse, of lowering the legal drinking age to 18.

The colleges supporting the initiative in Virginia are Hollins and Washington and Lee universities and Randolph-Macon, Hampden-Sydney and Sweet Briar colleges. None of the presidents are ready to sign on to one side of the debate or the other. But, as Walter Bortz, president of Hampden-Sydney said last month, “Certainly we should talk about it at a minimum.”

While legitimate arguments exist on both sides of this controversial issue, the argument for highway safety tilts the debate toward keeping the minimum drinking age at 21.

The founder of the Amethyst Initiative, John McCardell, brought his campaign to Virginia Commonwealth University last fall where he told students and staff that the 1984 federal legislation that raised the drinking age to 21 for all states is “bad social policy and terrible law” that has led to an epidemic of binge drinking on college campuses.

McCardell is president emeritus of Middlebury College in Vermont. He says the law forces young people to drink to excess in secret. That law, by the way, imposes a penalty of 10 percent of federal highway appropriations on any state with a drinking age lower than 21.

Sweet Briar President Elizabeth Muhlenfeld signed the initiative, but sees both sides of the issue. She feels obligated to enforce the law against underage drinking among students on her campus. At the same time, she knows that a majority of students drink, oftentimes excessively, even though most don’t turn 21 until their junior or senior year.

“It’s happening,” she said recently. “You know it’s happening — and how can you best combat the worst effects of that? All of us really struggle with how to deal with the cultural phenomenon (of drinking).”

Mothers Against Drunk Driving has countered the initiative with statistics from the U.S. Department of Transportation showing that a lower drinking age will mean more highway fatalities. One study shows that the rate of underage drunken driving has decreased more than 50 percent since 1984 when states adopted the minimum legal drinking age of 21.

Chris Konschak, executive director of MADD in Virginia, said that raising the drinking age “saved over 1,000 lives a year in that age range of 18 to 21.”

Muhlenfeld readily acknowledges that the higher drinking age has saved some lives. But, she adds, “by contributing to this society of binge drinking, (it has) destroyed some lives.”

A part-time Randolph College student summed up the debate for lowering the drinking age succinctly when she said, “Maybe if it wasn’t seen as so forbidden, people would use it in more moderation.”

The initiative has succeeded in launching a national debate on the legal drinking age, which is healthy for students and administrators on the nation’s college campuses.

At the end of the day, however, the debate’s participants should listen to Christopher J. Murphy, chairman of the Governors Highway Safety Association and a critic of the initiative. He called the legal drinking age of 21 a “life-saving law” and said, “Underage drinking remains a serious problem that needs to be addressed, but lowering the drinking age would be a gigantic step backward for highway safety.”

He’s probably right. Let the debate continue.