Before I write this week’s column, I have to say a few things: Mr. Greene, I appreciated your letter last week. Secondly, I’ll only have 800 words, so I can’t hit every single part of every single issue, so I do my best. Finally, I apologize for the mistiming in regards to my column last week. I should have written on Veteran’s Day. For those veterans who may read this column, I apologize and thank you for your efforts and sacrifices.
This week I am contrasting and comparing statistics on the drinking age being 21 or 18. Most of the over-40 people I spoke with had the opinion that the drinking age should remain at the former, while the younger people, especially college students-no surprise there-decried this law as unfair. After all, as most said, we can die and kill for our country at 18; why is it that we can’t drink as well?
So I did my research. Unfortunately, the results are not going to please many people. While I did find some pro-lowering support, primarily I found age-21 support and statistics.
One man has done research in regards to lowering the age of legal drinking. He found that “a study of a large sample of young people between the ages of 16 and 19 in Massachusetts and New York, after Massachusetts raised its drinking age, revealed that the average self-reported daily alcohol consumption in Massachusetts did not decline in comparison with New York” (1). He also “found ‘a positive relationship between the purchase age and single-vehicle fatalities.’ Thus, single-vehicle fatalities were found to be more frequent in those states with high purchase ages.” (1) Finally, the researcher and a partner found that, in a study of 3,375 students in fifty-six colleges, “significantly more” (1). students were found to be drinking underage after all states enforced the 21-year-old drinking law in 1987(1). The hypothesis by these two individuals maintains that, at least in the short run, raising the drinking age was rather ineffective in cutting down on young drinking.
The latter was one of a very few resources I found supporting the typical college student’s view on college drinking. (Also, they had very little backing of their facts. Sound familiar? J) Anyway, I went to http://www.cspinet.org/booze/mlpafact.htm and found some very interesting results. I won’t quote every little fact or statistic they listed; there are far too many. What I will do is mention a few of the most important ones. For instance, there had been a “63 percent decline in alcohol-related crash fatalities among young drivers since 1982” at the time of this study, as well as “an Arizona Department of Public Safety report [finding] that fatal accidents increased over 25 percent while traffic fatalities increased more than 35 percent after the state MLPA was lowered from 21 to 19.” Finally, “in Australia, lowering the drinking age was associated with an increase of 20 percent to 25 percent in cases of male delinquency.”
When I went to http://www.tobacco21.org/lessons/ I found a graph showing results of polls of graduating seniors since 1977 in regards to drinking. It showed a decrease in daily drinking by nearly two-thirds up to the point of 1993, and a decrease of seniors having drunk “at least once in the last thirty days” by approximately one-third in the same time period. The drinking laws were having an effect, it would seem.
Countries such as Germany have lower drinking ages than the United States does. According to a German foreign exchange student who stayed at my house, the drinking age is 16! However, the legal driving age is 18. The reason for the latter, according to Robert, was for kids to know the potentially harmful consequences of drinking before they got behind the wheel. Do you think we should try this, anyone? Please respond en masse to let me know your thoughts.
The statistics say it all-it is safer to have the drinking age at 21 and not 18. According to http://www.nh-dwi.com/caip-206.htm, “although people between 16 and 24 years old comprise only 20 percent of the total licensed population, and 20 percent of the total vehicle miles traveled in this country by all licensed drivers, they cause 42 percent of all fatal alcohol related crashes.”
Despite these statistics, however, the government has only two choices to be fair and balanced in its laws regarding drinking and adulthood. The first is to make “adulthood” legally 21; the other is to make the drinking age 18. After all, as the argument goes, an 18-year old can kill for his or her country, pay taxes to the government, vote for those who will be in charge of our country, states, counties, etc., and sign his or her documents as a legal adult-but can’t drink. Seems like a double-standard to me.
1. http://www2.potsdam.edu/alcohol-info/YouthIssues/1046348726.html