21 Still Isn’t Working

I’m 19 years old.  I can buy a lottery ticket.  I can drive my car across the country.  I can vote and help determine the president.  I can become my younger brother’s legal guardian.  I can enlist in the army and risk getting shot to death on the front lines.  I can buy and smoke cigarettes that could turn my lungs black, shriveled, and cancer-ridden.  But I cannot enjoy a glass of wine with dinner or sip a beer as I watch the Superbowl.

In 1984, Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which raised the drinking age in the United States from 18 to 21. Nearly two decades later, the law still makes little sense. Not only is the law incongruous with government’s having deemed 18-year-olds mature enough to act as adults in almost every other aspect of their lives, but prohibiting college students from consuming alcohol in the open promotes a dangerous culture of binge drinking behind closed doors.

Though underage alcohol consumption has lessened since the early 1980s, about 90 percent of that drinking takes on the form of binging, or having enough drinks to raise blood alcohol concentration to 0.08.  That number drops to a little over 50 percent for adults over 21.  Clearly, something beyond the thrill of being young, wild, and free pushes college-age students to drink dangerously.

If young adults could drink publicly without the threat of punishment, they would cease to see alcohol as a forbidden fruit on which they must gorge themselves while they have the chance. After all, conventions like pre-gaming—drinking quickly and copiously before an outing where alcohol may not be available or permitted—only became a phenomenon after the drinking age was raised.  If, for example, students were used to having wine at dinner with their parents or meeting friends at bars to share only one or two beers, they would be less likely to indulge in more harmful modes of drinking.

What’s more, when students do binge drink and become ill, they are often reluctant to seek help for fear of being disciplined. This may not pose a huge problem at a school like Harvard, where an amnesty policy assures inebriated students and their friends that they will face no penalty for looking to College residential staff or HUPD for assistance with alcohol poisoning, but it certainly threatens students at schools who may be less forgiving.  Making drinking at the age of 18 legal would encourage students to get medical aid when necessary. In short, it would save lives.

Of course, one of the primary goals of the National Minimum Drinking Act was to reduce drunk-driving related deaths.  And on that count, it appears the law has succeeded: Deaths in crashes have decreased by approximately 16 percent.  Even if deaths caused by binge drinking numerically cancel out deaths caused by drunk driving, the law might still have achieved a net good.  After all, those who suffer from alcohol poisoning usually brought the illness on themselves.  In many drunk-driving accidents, on the other hand, some victims are completely innocent of any wrongdoing.  While a student who chokes on his vomit after drinking likely cracked open each and every can of beer that brought him to that point, a couple killed driving home from the movies probably had no control over the speeding vehicle that swerved into their lane.

The goal, then, must be to lower the drinking age while still keeping drunk-driving to a minimum.  One thing that can help achieve that goal is even more alcohol education. Increased efforts in the past decade to educate teenagers about the risks presented by alcohol have undoubtedly contributed, along with the higher drinking age, to the reduction in drunk driving.  If the drinking age is changed back to 18, a stepped-up effort to increase awareness about the hazards of alcohol should come with it.  In addition, the government could see to that people caught driving drunk—especially those under 21—faced more severe consequences, like the revocation of their drivers’ licenses for an extended period of time on the first offense.

When it comes down to it, the high drinking age in the United States treats citizens who are adults in every other sense like children and spurs those citizens to engage in irresponsible, detrimental behavior.  The government could solve these issues by lowering the age back to where it once was, while instituting a series of measures to crack down on drunk driving.

That way, we can have our beer and drink it, too.

Molly L. Roberts ’16, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Holworthy Hall. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays. Follow her on Twitter at @mollylroberts.