CAMPUS

The drinking age needs to be lowered

Late one night my roommate and I were walking back to our dorm on campus. We had been at a party and had walked within eyesight of our room when a campus police officer turned on his sirens. I ducked into nearby bushes, the officer got out of his car and demanded an ID from my roommate, who was 19. We had not been vandalizing cars, or stealing stop signs, or attacking people, we had been walking home, at night.

The national drinking age was mandated to be 21 two decades ago, in the interest of reducing drunken driving fatalities. Drinking fatalities uniformly decreased across all age groups since the mid 1980’s, indicating no direct link between the prohibition on 18-21 year old drinking and highway fatalities. Interestingly, there was a brief increase in the years following the change. But wait, you say, M.A.D.D. runs commercials all the time saying that the law is working. They neglect to consider the uniform decrease across age groups and refuse to consider other variables leading to a decrease in fatalities, including seatbelt mandates, airbag development, safer vehicles, and strict drunk driving laws. The founder of M.A.D.D., Candy Lightner, left the group in disgust, accusing the group of morphing into a neo-prohibitionist outfit.

Not only has the 21 year limit not met its objective, it has also denied full legal rights to adult citizens in this country.  18-20 year olds are eligible for jury duty, have the right to vote, serve in the military, can sign contracts and open bank accounts, and can adopt children. The only significant right denied is the right to drink alcohol. And very, very few of the citizens who chose to drink alcohol at 21 wait until that age. They break the law consistently. Millions of 18-20 year olds at college campuses across the country drink alcohol. Many do so recklessly and off-campus, a direct consequence of the current national alcohol policy. These young adults break this law because they know it is not fair and not reasonable. Many in this age group have been abroad, and in countries as varied as China, France, South Africa, Brazil, England, Australia, Mexico, Russia (to name a few) they are recognized as adults entrusted to chose to have a beer with dinner. In the United States, long considered a beacon of liberty and freedom, having a beer with dinner can result in arrest and months tangled in a legal mess. That happened to my roommate after a night of moderate drinking. The current law needs to be changed, a hysterical and ill-informed pressure group has done enough to harm our rights as citizens.