On the Contrary

I am sure most of you have seen that 100 college presidents have banned together to start a dialogue about what the legal drinking age ought to be.  I find this discussion long overdue.  In my mind if you are legally an adult at 18, how is it that you are not fully entitled to all rights until you are 21?  Of course the argument is not that simple as those who want to keep the drinking age 21 cite statistics that show that when the law was changed to 21, driving deaths went down.

I would argue very vigorously that this is a bogus argument but let’s start with the rational since this is usually an irrational argument.  Kids drink and they do it poorly.  The educators are just facing reality that laws do little or nothing to prevent this and in fact may encourage binge drinking.  If you are an educator and the law says you can’t drink till your 21, how can you have a discussion with your students about responsible drinking when more  than half of them are not legally able to drink?  You would simply get trashed for encouraging underage drinking by talking to them about how to do it responsibly.  It is the same moron argument about birth control and the use of prophylactics.  The “just say no” idiots ignore that almost all of them say yes and think educating them to take precautions encourages sexual behavior when it is already occurring.  But educators are public officials and they have to be careful in a world full of ignorant people who could cost them their jobs.

My own experience tells me that the educators are raising a very valid issue.  When I went to college (University of Maryland) drinking on campus was banned.  So we all drove off campus and got bombed.  Universities and colleges are in a real bind here because if they allow legal drinking on campus, half or more of the population are not 21 and they will imbibe (as they do now).  Then they have an enforcement problem and are seen as encouraging underage drinking even though they have got most of them off the road.

My own fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, banned all drinking in the fraternity house in later years in a misguided attempt to handle binge drinking.  Once again, it was hit the road.  I find it most interesting that conservatives seem to take the law and order approach to things they don’t like.  Just as the war on drugs has just filled our prisons with non-violent drug offenders and the bill for this type of enforcement is just coming due, prohibition on drinking does nothing to stop the behavior.  I read an interesting interview with a young professor who remembered when students were invited to social gatherings where they could drink in a controlled and cordial adult environment.  His take was that it taught many young people about responsible drinking.  I couldn’t agree more.

There will always be people who abuse alcohol and then get in a vehicle.  But calling a person an adult at 18 and then telling them they are still not grown up enough to drink is counterproductive.  They simply break the law and learn to ignore laws they think are stupid.  The message we send in both our adult behavior and in our media is drinking is cool.  So why don’t we welcome them as adults and try to set an example for responsible drinking?  The earlier they learn this behavior (instead of a trip to the woods with illicit alcohol to get blasted), the earlier they will learn responsibility.

There may be a rise in deaths on the road if this is done.  There may not be.  It depends on how we teach our children responsibility.  But if your focus is on preventing deaths on the highway, I suggest you ban driving.  It would save a whole bunch more lives than trying to ban alcohol from kids who are drinking it anyway.  It would be nice if we as a society could just grow up ourselves and instead of dogma (restrictive laws) we just held people accountable when they abused social norms.  Why do social conservatives preach personal responsibility and then are so quick to enact laws that impact all of us?