Lowering the Drinking Age

A collection of university presidents and chancellors are publicly calling for their states to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18. This has met with a tremendous backlash from groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and support from the interwebz (as evidenced by the comments that readers have posted on most of the news articles I’ve read). Unfortunately, those of us who actually like the idea of a change in the status quo don’t have a highly experienced and well-known special-interest group like MADD to churn out sound bites, so all the good quotes and publicity are against the change. I have to comment.

MADD is dodging their responsibilities and flirting with hypocrisy.

If you believe that people between the ages of 18 and 21 should be prohibited from purchasing and consuming alcoholic beverages, you need to have spent the last twenty years tirelessly campaigning against their being able to do other dangerous things or make other potentially life-changing or damaging decisions. To achieve continuity and avoid hypocrisy, you need to stand against the right of 18-year-olds to join the military to fight and die for their country, the right to purchase cigarettes (which more addictive than alcohol and actually shorten their users’ life expectancy) and the right to own and carry firearms. You need to crusade against 18-year-olds’ ability to enter legally binding contracts and financial obligations. And you’d damn well better argue against them being able to alter the course of our country by voting.

As a country, we the taxpayers and voters long ago decided that 18 was the age at which individuals have sufficient good judgment to make these kinds of life-changing decisions. There is no philosophically or morally viable reason that a right should be denied to an 18-year-old adult, but permitted to a 21-year-old adult, unless that right requires additional maturity to use effectively. I challenge anyone to argue that gun ownership, military service or voting require less maturity than responsible alcohol consumption.

And I do believe that within a few years of lowering the drinking age to 18, 18- to 20-year-old drinkers would be behaving responsibly in quantifiable ways.

During the years leading up to age 18, parents educate their children (most often by example) and prepare them to make the choices they’ll be faced with as adults – all of the choices I listed above. One huge reason for the preponderance of irresponsible drinking in college is that during the few years before age 21, parents are more distant voices in their children’s lives, and their children are far from their example. Also, as adults, college students are becoming more likely to make their own decisions, or to be influenced by their friends rather than by their parents. MADD calls the Amethyst Initiative an attempt by the University faculty to dodge responsibility. In reality, the responsibility to teach people to enjoy alcohol like an adult rests on their parents’ own shoulders.