Drinks

      But Bryan swears that at 19, he's mature enough to handle alcohol. After all, he's ranked high at one of the nation's top universities, and even has the chance to graduate early in order to start law school at an Ivy League school.
      "Everyone at college should be able to drink," Bryan said. "The fact that older kids get to do it just separates students by a false maturity divide. It's such a farce. We all take the same hard classes together, we're all friends, and there's no real leap between 18 and 21, so what's the difference?"
      Bryan is in the majority of students the Herald interviewed who believe that the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) should be lowered to 18, especially with the rising fear that any day now, the federal government could be taking a second look at those draft cards that guys like Bryan casually filled out on their 18th birthday.
      Proponents of the federal law that set the MLDA at 21 across the country celebrated its 20th anniversary this summer, and say it has saved 20,000 lives.
      Although two decades have passed since the law was enacted, the debate still rages on why men and women are considered mature enough at 18 to fulfill other major responsibilities, especially military service, but aren't mature enough to handle alcohol.
      For many who support the MLDA's remaining at 21, arguments like Bryan's are fallacious. They point out that while formal adulthood begins at 18, the drinking age is not the sole exception. For example, a person must be 25 to rent a car or to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, 30 to serve in the Senate and 35 to run for president. Furthermore, studies have shown that the earlier a person begins drinking, the more likely he or she is to develop alcohol dependence or abuse, suffer alcohol-related problems and drink more frequently and heavily as an adult than those who do not drink until 21. And what many underage drinkers don't realize is that drinking harms a brain that is still developing, a process that isn't complete until the early 20s.
      But opponents aren't giving up, calling the arguments for the law flawed themselves. How does renting a car compare to the more important legalities that define adulthood - marriage, voting and sex, to name a few? John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College in Vermont, has been vehemently opposed to the MLDA of 21 for years. "Clearly, the government believes that individuals are capable of experiencing all of the privileges and responsibilities of adulthood at 18 with this single exception, and the case of making this exception has not been compellingly made," McCardell said. "Let's raise the age for everything to 21, bring the drinking age back to 18, or justify the inconsistency, which I don't think this argument justifies."
      The argument McCardell refers to is whether the government can still justify tying drinking to highway funding after more than two decades. In 1982, President Reagan established a Presidential Commission on Drunk Driving after examining evidence that linked younger drinking ages to increased alcohol-related highway deaths. The commission suggested federal legislation raising the MLDA from 18 to 21.
      A year later, 27 states had not followed suit, and Reagan feared that many underage drinkers in MLDA-21 states were driving to neighboring states with lower MLDAs to buy and consume alcohol, creating deadly "blood borders" where alcohol-related accidents were abundant on cross-state highways. On July 17, 1984, Reagan signed the Uniform Drinking Age Act, which mandated that states that kept their MLDAs at 18 would not receive federal highway funding. Montana was the last state to bend to the law in 1998.
      In the 20 years since the act was passed, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) reports that the law has been an overwhelming success. One month after the act was passed, alcohol-involved highway accidents began to drop, and since then, alcohol-related youth fatalities have decreased by 63 percent. "Twenty years, 20,000 young lives saved, 20,000 families kept whole," said Wendy J. Hamilton, president of MADD, at its MLDA-21 Act anniversary event in July. Research shows that the law has also decreased reported drinking among high school seniors and college students, and MADD is now looking for the government to enact stricter enforcement of the law, since the organization's research shows that young adults are more likely to drink and drive.
      But many experts, such as Ruth C. Engs of Indiana University, cite flaws in MADD's argument. Engs attributes the decrease in alcohol-related accidents to other factors that did not appear until the same time the act was passed, like more effective drunk-driving education and free taxi services from bars. And McCardell is befuddled as to why necessary infrastructure improvements are tied to social policy.
       "This has nothing to do with drunk driving," McCardell said. "If there were a chapter of presidents against drunk driving, I'd be a founding member. What's magical about 21, and how does 21 solve the problem? The abridgment rests on the shoulders of the minority who do not make responsible choices [about driving drunk]. But most people will make responsible decisions, and they are more likely to make them if they are treated like adults."
      That's a sore issue for many students. Sara, a student at Cornell University whose social life revolves around weekly binge drinking, says that many students are vexed by the way lawmakers seemingly think students are prone to making irresponsible decisions. "We are taught not to drink and drive since elementary school," Sara said. "If you don't know by 18 that it's wrong, you're going to screw it up anyway. That's nothing that a law can change. If you're going to be an idiot at 18, you're going to be an idiot at 21. But they should know we're not all idiots."
      Those opposed to lowering the drinking age say that it has nothing to do with how anybody views college students; rather, the reasons lie in the facts. Full-time college students drink more heavily on average than their non-college peers, since drinking culture is deeply ingrained in college life and alcohol advertisers heavily target the college market. Proponents of leaving the legal drinking age where it is say that lowering it so all college students can drink will only abet the drinking culture.
      McCardell and Engs refute this point, saying that the culture itself needs to be changed and that that can only be done if colleges are given the power to teach students responsible drinking. "It's like saying on your 21st birthday, you're expected to paint an oil portrait, but you can't touch oil until you're 21. Isn't that absurd?" McCardell asked. He favors providing instruction in the university setting for responsible drinking rather than his having to serve as a policeman for a law he opposes and says is based on "specious arguments."
      Engs agrees, saying prohibition is not working now, as in the past, so reforming college drinking culture within the law is doomed to the same failure. "The simplest and most dramatic action we could take to create more responsible drinking culture among college students would be to lower the MLDA to 18 or 19," she concluded in her research. Engs reports that the best way to teach responsible drinking would be to let young adults drink in controlled environments such as restaurants, pubs and university functions. In those situations, mature behavior would be expected, so responsible drinking would be taught by role modeling.
      Even students agree that they need to be taught to drink more responsibly. Adam, a student at Dartmouth College who is actively involved in Greek life, said he never wants to drink again like he did his freshman year. Although he still drinks and is under 21, he has no opinion on changing the drinking age, since "it's just so easy to get alcohol anyway."
      Adam said he has learned to control his drinking on his own, but admits he still binges some. "Kids need to learn how to drink, which is something nobody ever taught me," he said. "They need to respect alcohol so their first experience isn't, 'Hey man, let's get messed up.'"
      Take a look around any college campus, however, and it's easy to see that bars and pubs where many students flock aren't in the business of promoting safe drinking, although they do monitor drinking. They're in the business of, well, business. Many bars promote weekly drink deals to attract college bar crowds: two-for-one "Two-for-Tuesdays," penny beers on "Wasted Wednesdays," dollar shots on "Freaky Fridays." They're there to sell, and so are restaurants, which is why MLDA-21 advocates brand Engs' and McCardell's idea as flawed.
      But Engs still maintains that the problem isn't with bars and alcohol advertisers, but with the way society reinforces underground drinking and dangerous taboos. "When [students] get the opportunity to drink," she says, "they do so in an irresponsible manner, because drinking by these youth is seen as an enticing forbidden fruit."
      For many college students, Engs' assumption couldn't be more true. Jason, a graduate of Chaminade High School and a student at a Northeastern Christian college, said he got wasted his first night at college and many nights after that. Every weekend was about drinking, and by his sophomore year he had received two warnings about his drinking. By his junior year, as he neared his 20th birthday, Jason started to slow down. "I just realized I didn't need to not know my name to have fun," he said.
      Despite the fact that he admits to having matured into a more responsible drinker over time, Jason still maintains that the drinking age should be lowered. He said that his desire to drink as much as he could when he was 18 was a direct result of the law. He thought of drinking as a way to challenge society and its rules without really doing anything wrong. "Oh my God, I'm bad," he recalled his thinking.
How young is too young to drink?

20 years after adoption of controversial minimum age, debate continues


Laura, Sam, and Dana all admit to tasting the forbidden fruit perhaps a bit too much at the outset of college. All say that they were motivated by the thought of being parent-free at college, enabling them to go "buck wild." Laura said she was just "getting the rebellion out of my system," and thinks that students should be allowed to drink earlier so they don't "mess up a career with drinking."
      Sam said that if the MLDA were lowered, drinking wouldn't be considered as much a taboo and an act of rebellion, so it would be phased out more quickly. And Dana said that if responsible drinking were taught and the age were lowered, she could finally go out and have a nice wine with dinner, which is how she now favors drinking.
      But Dana actually opposes lowering the MLDA, saying she may be mature beyond her years, but others are not. "If they lower the drinking age, the age people would start drinking would be a lot younger," she said. "Kids in high school would buy beer for their younger siblings."
      Dana aligns herself with the MLAD-21 supporters who say that lowering the MLDA would weigh down the branches of Engs' "forbidden fruit" and turn it into "low-hanging fruit." Research shows that 15- to 17-year-olds are in awe of the actions of 18-year-olds more than of those older than 18. So, by lowering the age to 18, MLDA-21 supporters say, younger students will have more opportunities to obtain alcohol and be more prone to the heavy drinking that their slightly older peers would be doing.
      "If you lower the drinking age to 18, what you're really doing it is lowering the drinking age to 16," said Joseph Califano Jr., president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. "It is important for society to set some standards, especially when we know that alcohol is so implicated in the main causes of teen deaths and rapes. ... And the standard is 21."