Lifestyle: College Drinking Debate: 18 Or 21?

College presidents from about 100 of the nation’s best-known universities, including Duke, Dartmouth and Ohio State, are calling on lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18, saying current laws encourage dangerous binge drinking on campus. The movement called the Amethyst Initiative began quietly recruiting presidents more than a year ago to provoke national debate about the drinking age. “This is a law that is routinely evaded,” said John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College in Vermont who started the organization. 1

Binge drinking occurs because students are allowed to remain in permissive situations that began at home and extended to the campus. Parents either intentionally looked the other way (starting with dropping their kids at the mall at 12, 13,14 just to get them out of earshot for awhile) or were so clueless to what their kids were doing that the kids realized they could get away with anything, anytime, anywhere. Lowering the drinking age underlines the fact that adults are easily malleable and no authority prevails. 2

The main problem during the Nam era was any lack of uniformity. Every town had is own ideas, creating mayhem on the highways with people traveling from one locality to another , then driving home afterward. Wisconsin and Illinois were a classic example of this when only ladies could drink at 18 in Illinois. All their boyfriends had to go to Wisconsin. The only reason 21 seems good is that it’s UNIFORM. Just as it is now, the drinking age should be MANDATORY across the nation for both men and women. 3

Mothers Against Drunk Driving says lowering the drinking age would lead to more fatal car crashes. It accuses the presidents of misrepresenting science and, in the words of MADD CEO Chuck Hurley, “waving the white flag.” 4

Each state has the authority to set its own drinking age, but in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which says that states with a drinking age lower than 21 will lose 10 percent of their federal highway money. After that law passed, all 50 states raised their drinking age to 21. 5