College presidents: Drinking age not working

Over 100 of our nation's college and university presidents have signed a statement urging policymakers to debate and consider changing the drinking age from 21 years old. The group is known as the Amethyst Initiative and they write in part:

How many times must we relearn the lessons of prohibition?

We call upon our elected officials:

• To support an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21 year-old drinking age.
• To consider whether the 10% highway fund “incentive” encourages or inhibits that debate.
• To invite new ideas about the best ways to prepare young adults to make responsible decisions about alcohol.

Sounds about right to me.

I don't have any easy answers, but I think it's hard to argue that the status quo is working well. Certainly, changing the drinking age in the 80s had a positive impact on the driving death rate, but we live in a different world today. The college presidents don't have any specific policy proposals, only that a real debate on the question occur.

Drinking and driving still occurs way too often, but we have a generation of young people who have been taught how important it is not to drive while intoxicated. It is no longer socially acceptable. What young people haven't been taught in large part is how to drink responsibly. This is despite beer advertisements' small print suggestion to "Drink Responsibly." Perhaps we have different needs than inthe 80s when the nationwide 21 year old rule went into effect.

Fostering an environment where large numbers of under 21 year olds are forced to drink behind closed doors, often with equally inexperienced drinkers surrounding them, doesn't seem to be a helpful situation to say the least.

I rarely drank as a pre-21 year old myself, but I've always thought the drinking age was absurd. I was told, "wait until you become a parent and your attitude on these things will change." Well, I am now a parent. My girls are still young and perhaps at least a decade from their first drinking experiences, but I don't think any differently yet. The abstinence message doesn't work. So what are we going to do from a public health perspective to deal with that reality?

One of my favorite ideas is to lower the drinking age for bars and restaurants, but not liquor stores. At the age of 19, allow young people to have a beer with their older friends or family members at a restaurant. Give them time to learn their own limits in an environment that usually doesn't encourage excess binge drinking. (And it's expensive to binge drink at a restaurant too!) Have them begin to drink around older, more experienced drinkers who are also probably not binge drinking. Binge drinking usually occurs at parties behind closed doors, but it's true that sometimes licensed bars overserve with disasterous consequences. But we have options to deal with irresponsible businesses that overserve young patrons.

When I was 20 years old I grew a beard. I suddenly was no longer carded. So I had a beer or two when I went out with friends to Eithiopian and Mexican restaurants. I learned to associate beer drinking in a social drinking setting. I learned to associate beer drinking with food in general and spicy lentils or cheesy burritoes in particular. What if we made this a more common early drinking experience? Would more young people learn more healthy drinking habits?

Clearly we're not going to allow 16 year olds in bars anytime soon and many teens' first alcohol experiences will still be in binge setting behind closed doors. Making/allowing/encouraging this kind of setting from their teen years until they are 21 has to have some consequences. If someone starts experiencing alcohol this way at the age of 16 it will be five years of binging before they are allowed to have a drink in another (more healthy) context. Five years is a longtime opportunity to develop and solidify some problematic habits.

The problem is that we truly don't know the outcomes of lowering the drinking age, positive or negative. We can only hypothosize. It was just a couple decades ago that we had a 18 year drinking age, but that was a different world. It is probably going to take one or two states to throw themselves into uncertain territory and change their law and everyone will study it. It's too bad that there are real barriers to even trying something out, chiefly the threat of losing 10% of federal highway funds and the influential Mothers Against Drunk Driving. MADD is already up in arms, directing people to target these bravy college presidents for calling for a debate on the issue.

It's a shame. And who suffers? The children suffer. Why should you have to wait until you're in your twenties to enjoy a Tanqueray and tonic with some fried calamari on a shaded patio after work on a breezy August day? OK, that's probably not at the top of the list for most 19 year olds, but shouldn't they have more options than cheap beer and vodka in a friend's dirty and overcrowded studio apartment surrounded by peers who are drinking to excess? Would that lead to safer choices for those bothe under and over 21 years old?

My bold answer to these hypothetical questions: Probably.