Alcohol

THIS WEEK the Massachusetts legislature will consider legislation which would raise the legal drinking age in the Commonwealth.

Raising the drinking age above 18--something the Legislature tried to do last year--is an idea whose time has passed. Eighteen-year-olds are considered old enough to vote and fight abroad. It is incongruous to us that while, on the one hand, they are expected to be on military call, they are not able to walk into a bar and have a drink.

But we recognize that a bill to raise the legal drinking age will inevitably pass--its success is too important to new Gov. Edward J. King, who campaigned on a platform of law-and-order politics. If the drinking age must go up, then it should be raised only to age 19. At age 18, high school students are too young to be able to buy liquor, either for themselves or for even younger classmates.

Raising the legal drinking age any higher seems pointless and may in fact aggravate the problems which the new legislation is attempting to address. All five neighboring states now have an 18-year-old drinking age, and teenagers would be able to get liquor elsewhere, simply by driving over the border. Drinking would move into back alleys and front seats. In addition, the proposed law would exceed its stated intent of removing alcohol from the school yards by discriminating against the thousands of students attending Massachusetts colleges.

The conclusions King draws from the statistics he has presented as a rationale for raising the age--that the number of drivers under 21 involved in fatal highway accidents since 1972 has skyrocketed nearly 100 per cent--are questionable at best and are likely too partisan to represent accurately the true incidence of teenage drunk drivers. State Sen. John Owen presented figures in a hearing last Tuesday that showed that drunk driving had increased more in the 21-25 age group than in the 18-21 bracket.

Most legislators feel a responsibility to keep alcohol out of schools and out of the hands of teenage drivers. But a drinking age of 21 seems simply too restrictive a measure. It would be far more reasonable and less hypocritical to raise the drinking age only one year to age 19.