Some 120 university presidents and chancellors have signed on to a proposal to reduce the legal drinking age in the U.S. to 18 years old.

The college and university presidents claim the federal minimum drinking age of 21 has contributed to an epidemic of binge drinking, as well as other excessive, unhealthy drinking habits on their campuses.

According to a commentary by Radley Balko on FoxNews.com, “Prohibitions have always provoked over-indulgence.”

“Those of us who have attended college over the last 25 years can certainly attest to the fact that the law has done nothing to diminish freshman and sophomore access to alcohol. It has only pushed underage consumption underground....”

The reasoning for lowering the drinking age goes like this: “The U.S. has the highest minimum drinking age in the world (save for countries where it's forbidden entirely). In countries with a low or no national minimum drinking age, teens are introduced to alcohol gradually, moderately, and under the supervision of their parents.”

“U.S. teens, on the other hand, tend to first try alcohol in unsupervised environments — in cars, motels, or outdoor settings in high school, or in dorm rooms, fraternity parties, or house parties when they leave home to go to college. During alcohol prohibition, we saw how adults who imbibed under such conditions reacted — they drank way too much, way too fast. It shouldn't be surprising that teens react in much the same way.”

Balko doesn’t know his facts. Binge drinking is a problem in other countries. In Britain where youth can drink alcohol with their meals in pubs at 16 years old, 53,844 people under 25 were admitted to English hospitals in the last year due to alcohol-related trouble. In Canada where the drinking age is 18 or 19 depending on the province, the recent death of a 20-year-old man serves as a reminder to youth of the dangers of binge drinking.

Lowering the drinking age will just make alcohol that much more readily available to younger teens while binge drinking will continue to be a problem on university campuses. University presidents, who want the legal drinking age reduced, hope to shift the blame for alcohol abuse to students and away from their institutions. 

Alcohol consumption increased many fold after the repeal of prohibition and particularly as a result of World War II. Past history and the experience of other countries shows that lowering the drinking age won’t increase responsible drinking – it just increases the amount of drinking.
 

Dr. John Fisher teaches communications and researches in the area of mass media and political decision making.





 

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Show/Hide comments