Notes from the Desk: A license to drink

For the past month or so, the opinions pages of The Campus have played host to a dialogue regarding the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) of 21. The latest such piece to appear in our pages was written by Dr. John Searles, in response to Nick Alexander’s ’10 op-ed on the subject. As someone with a few opinions on the subject myself and an editor of these pages, I feel that now would be an appropriate time to add my two cents.

Most of the debate over MLDA thus far has been frustratingly black and white: either we give people the right to drink the day they turn 18 or the day they turn 21. At either age, it’s unreasonable for us to expect a new drinker to learn how to use this potentially dangerous and harmful drug overnight. Consider a similar example:

When I was 16, I got my driver’s license. And it wasn’t because the state of Vermont decided that, on the day I turned 16, I was suddenly ready to operate a vehicle on my own. It was because, over a span of two years, I took a driver’s ed course in my high school, logged 40 daytime and night-time practice hours with my parents and passed multiple examinations, both written and practical, that indicated to the state that I was ready to graduate from a learner’s permit to an operator’s license. My path was regimented, regulated and graduated to allow for maximum learning opportunities.

We need to treat alcohol consumption as we treat learning to drive: as a calculated, graduated learning process. Here’s what I propose:
When you turn 17, you can enroll in an alcohol education class, and upon completion of this course, you will receive your junior drinker’s license. With this license, you can legally consume alcohol in your home, but you can’t purchase it yourself and are held to a maximum BAC of 0.00 behind the wheel. The purpose of this is to allow parents to teach their kids, before they leave for college, what it looks and feels like to drink alcohol in moderate and responsible quantities. It would not open the floodgates to underage binge drinking because you wouldn’t have 17-year-olds buying handles of vodka for 14-year-olds — just the former enjoying beer or wine with their families over dinner.

When you turn 18, you graduate to the next license. On this level, you can drink outside of your home but can’t be in public with a BAC over .1. There is still no tolerance on the roads, and you still can’t purchase alcohol from a store. At 19, the BAC limit goes away — by this age, you should know your limit and crossing it should be a conscious decision. At 20, you earn the right to buy alcohol. At 21, we have a generation of people who have been gradually taught how to consume alcohol safely and responsibly.

I can’t point to any peer-reviewed studies that tell me this method would work. Unfortunately, there are limits to what science can tell us — I’d be surprised to find an Institutional Review Board in America that would approve a study involving giving alcohol to underage kids. It’s just not a feasible option and not a valid argument against MLDA-18.

I do agree with Dr. Searles in his assertion that our nation is captivated with the concept of alcohol. Interestingly, it has two faces, and which face you see depends on your age — it’s either the devil’s nectar and a punishable offense, or the essential component of any good social gathering. It’s truly an insane contrast, and my point is that the line we use to distinguish between these faces is arbitrary. By lowering the MLDA, of course “hazardous drinking” will not “somehow, by some unspecified mechanism, turn into responsible drinking,” but the reverse is also true — three extra years of alcohol abstinence does not turn someone into a responsible drinker. It’s a learning process, and we need to treat it that way.

Which is why I was upset to read Dr. Searles’ assertion that “education on this issue is ineffective.” I hope this isn’t a call to abandon attempts to educate our kids about drinking, simply because it has been “ineffective” thus far. I’m insulted by the notion that my peers and I are somehow inadequate learners — after all the work we’ve done in the name of academia, we deserve more credit than that. We’re all capable learners and have utilized this capability to its fullest on our path to and through Middlebury. This suggests to me that it’s not the learners who are the problem, but the material and the methods. You can’t teach me the logic behind MLDA-21 because there isn’t any. When I turned 18, I gained the right to vote, fight in a war, own a gun and skydive, and asking me to “learn” that I’m not mature enough to drink yet is asking me to abandon logic and fall in step. Sorry, I can’t get behind that.

I could, however, get behind a logical system of education through experience — something a bit more fitting for the reality we live in.