Presidents’ View on Drunkeness

I discovered recently that over 120 university presidents in the US have endorsed a campaign to lower the legal drinking age from 21 to 18.

They say that the law is disregarded as irrelevant anyway, and thus is establishing a habit of breaking the law, and that it contributes to binge drinking.

At first I wasn’t so sure.

Yes, 18 year-olds can vote and fight for their country, and it's completely reasonable to treat them like adults in their drinking choices, too. But I’m hesitant to advocate changing a law just because it is regularly broken.

But after reading testimonies of some of the signing presidents, I’ve been convinced. Coming from a province where the legal age is 18, what I didn’t realize (or had forgotten from high school days) is that when it’s illegal for you to drink in public, you “top up” in private before heading out for the evening. Yup, binging, alcohol poisoning, blackouts are all more likely in that scenario, and for schools with 70% or more students under 21, it's a serious situation.

Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, President of Sweet Briar College really hits home with her comment on why she signed the petition:

“It is the lucky college president who has not had to telephone parents to report that their child has been the victim of date rape exacerbated by alcohol abuse, or killed in an automobile accident coming back from an alcohol fueled all-night party. SAMHSA, a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services, states that nearly one in five teenagers (16 percent) "has experienced 'black out' spells where they could not remember what happened the previous evening." This is not good clean fun. It is a national shame that demands our attention."

And if it’s 16% of teenagers, you know it’s higher for college students.

The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 penalizes 10% of a state’s federal highway appropriation if that state sets its drinking age lower than 21. The result has been that the dialogue around legal drinking age is stifled.

In their efforts to educate their students and model responsible drinking, colleges are hamstrung because their only options are to talk about abstinence (which is completely ridiculous) or urge responsible behaviour (which acknowledges the students are going to break the law).

These presidents don’t know the answer to this very complex problem, but they’re trying to encourage their elected representatives to create the legal space to at least be able to discuss it.