Scholars debate U.S. drinking age

The day before Vermont lawmakers debated the 21-year-old minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) on Jan. 21, two prominent researchers argued that the current law has been a success in an on-campus lecture.

The lecture, titled “From Global to Local: Understanding the Success of the 21-Year-Old Minimum Legal Drinking Age” and co-sponsored by the Office of Health and Wellness Education and the Addison County Prevention Partnership, was held in McCardell Bicentennial Hall — a location that presenter Dr. John Searles of the Vermont Department of Health noted was “ironic.” President Emeritus John M. McCardell, Jr., for whom the building is named, founded Choose Responsibility, an organization that reached the opposite conclusion on the efficacy of the 21 drinking age in 2007.

The mission of Choose Responsibility, according to the nonprofit organization’s Web site, is “to stimulate informed and dispassionate public discussion about the presence of alcohol in American culture and to consider policies that will effectively empower young adults age 18 to 20 to make mature decisions about the place of alcohol in their own lives.”

The presenters conveyed their argument with a sea of studies and statistics, relayed to an audience nearly devoid of students. Much of the lecture was devoted to making comparisons between the United States and other countries regarding alcohol policy.

According to Searles, the U.S. is unique among western countries in having a drinking age of 21, a limit shared only by Fiji, Palau, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. However, the U.S. has the third lowest incidence of binge drinking, beat only by Hungary and Turkey.
Dr. David Jernigan of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health noted that people who start drinking before the age of 15 are five times more likely to become alcohol dependent than those who begin drinking at 21 and seven times more likely to be involved in an alcohol-related automobile accident.

Jyoti Daniere, director of Health and Wellness Education and co-sponsor of the event, wrote in an e-mail that the event was held in order to provide “our community with both international and state-wide statistics that support the argument that the minimum legal drinking age of 21 is saving lives.”

She added that “there is ample research showing that the more a student drinks, the lower his or her GPA ... a fact that may be of interest to all our hardworking students.”

Both presenters acknowledged that the 21 MLDA did not end underage drinking, and that the only demographics among which drinking did not decrease after the 1982 change in the MLDA were college students and females, a problem which Choose Responsibility seeks to rectify.

Although both the presenters and Choose Responsibility find faults with the current MLDA, they have differing views on how to prevent underage drinking.

Jernigan said that there is “no magic bullet,” and that “minimum drinking laws are only one strategy — they can’t be expected to do the whole job.” He offered alcohol taxes, lower blood alcohol content (BAC) levels, government monopolies of retail sales and legal restrictions to alcohol marketing as additional steps that could be taken to decrease underage drinking.

In an article published in Johns Hopkins Public Health in Summer 2009, Jernigan even agreed with the Amethyst Initiative’s — the organization of college presidents calling for an open debate about underage drinking — assertion that “Twenty-one is not working.”
“I would agree. Twenty-one isn’t working,” Jernigan said. “The reason it isn’t working is because the rest of the environment completely undercuts it.”

Choose Responsibility, on the other hand, privileges education as the best way to combat unhealthy underage drinking.
“In the 1970s, we did nothing to prepare young people to make responsible decisions about alcohol,” wrote McCardell in an e-mail. “If there is a lesson to be learned from the earlier experiment, it should be the need to educate.”

Choose Responsibility’s model for alcohol education is very similar to driver’s education — after taking the class, minors would be given a license entitling them to adult alcohol privileges. Jernigan found fault with this solution, calling it “a myth we wish were true,” and saying it “teaches people how to drink.”

Choose Responsibility also advocates for a waiver of the 10 percent penalty in federal highway appropriation for states — approximately $17.5 million in Vermont, according to the Vermont Department of Transportation — for those states that take part in extensive alcohol education and lower their drinking age.

The Vermont state legislature is considering a bill right now that would urge Congress to authorize these waivers, in order to facilitate the debate on alcohol policy, now discouraged by these fiscal penalties. The legislature is also considering a bill that would lower the drinking age back to 18 in Vermont.

During the lecture, Searles and Jernigan expressed deep opposition to both of these bills, a viewpoint that Jernigan shared at the hearings held in Montpelier the following day.

“I don’t think this is the right conversation to be having about the drinking age,” said Jernigan. “The minimum legal drinking age is not causing underage drinking; it is preventing it.”

Searles added, “We’ve already done this experiment. Why would we go through this again? I have no idea who would support this.”

McCardell is one of these supporters, and has shown his dedication to the cause both through his work with Choose Responsibility and the testimony he gave in Montpelier on Jan. 21.

In response to Jernigan and Searles’ comments, McCardell said, “I have never argued that the drinking age is ‘causing’ underage drinking. But the data simply do not support the assertion that the age is doing much in the way of prevention. The law does not say ‘drink occasionally’ or ‘in moderation;’ it says ‘don’t drink.’ How can anyone, in the face of the data, argue with a straight face that the law is working?”

McCardell is also positive that there will be movement on this issue, and he thinks the initiative that Vermont has shown proves that decreasing underage drinking is possible.

“Must we be for all time locked in 1984 on this issue?” said McCardell. “Mightn’t we learn better, even best, practices if we are allowed to try something different and measure the results?  I grow impatient with those who assert there is ‘no evidence’ that the plan I propose can work.”

As for Searles’ and Jernigan’s fear that a lower drinking age would eliminate the small steps forward the country has taken in decreasing underage drinking, McCardell said, “I do not believe it would be a disaster, that blood would flow in the streets, and that life and health would be put at risk.”