Op-Ed: A reality check for the Office of Health and Wellness

Last week, the Director of the Office of Health and Wellness Jyoti Daniere co-sponsored an abysmally one-sided and thankfully ill-attended “debate” on the 21-year-old legal drinking age.

The event largely consisted of two “scholars” (Dr. David Jernigan and Dr. John Searles) harping upon Daniere’s own laughably misguided view that “21 is saving lives.” Fortunately, it was not long before these “scholars” found themselves drowning in their own sea of contradictions.

Throughout their presentation, Jernigan and Searles insisted upon their frail argument that legal age 21 is “preventing” underage drinking, and yet simultaneously conceded that, in their own words,

“Twenty-one isn’t working. The reason it isn’t working is because the rest of the environment completely undercuts it.” In so doing, Jernigan and Searles inadvertently revealed the most important point in this debate: legal age 21 has no basis in its “environment,” otherwise known as reality. Much like its predecessor, Prohibition, legal age 21 blatantly and inexcusably runs counter to the basic facts of human social interaction.

It is no secret that legal age 21 is almost entirely ineffective. As college students without Ph.Ds ­— or to put it differently, as unpretentious citizens who have actually lived under this law and experienced its deleterious effects ­— all of us can testify to its failures. Ask anyone with a social life what they remember most about freshman year, and chances are they will begin recounting the time they hurled on a Public Safety officer or drunkenly urinated on the walls of their dorm — all of this occurs in a legal context that would prefer to pretend that underage drinking no longer exists, otherwise known as the woefully inadequate status quo.

The law, as it stands, would have many of us graduate and enter the workplace without even having sipped a beer, leaving us totally ill-equipped to engage with alcohol on a responsible, experienced basis. Given this legal absurdity, it is little wonder that students are taking matters into their own hands with fake IDs and a well-developed culture of ‘pre-gaming.’

It is not hard to see through the ‘facts’ put forth by Jernigan and Searles. The entire basis of their argument rests upon the contention that though

“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 … the U.S. has the third lowest incidence of binge drinking, beat only by Hungary and Turkey.” When applied to the scholars’ own logic, this statistic quickly falls flat on its face, and questions abound.

By what magical feat did Hungary and Turkey manage to oust the U.S. from the top position, given that both nations have a legal drinking age of 18? Clearly, the issue is not as simple as Jernigan and Searles would have us believe.

Hailing from the birthplace of John McCardell’s Choose Responsibility (CR), Midd-kids are not so easily fooled. We are aware that under legal age 21, ‘pre-gamers’ are forced to consume as much as they can, as fast as they can, out of the public eye and in the shadows of their dormitories, unmonitored and unchecked by bartenders and their more experienced peers. According to the American Medical Association, under legal age 21 the 18-20 year old bracket has seen a 56 percent increase in binge drinking between 1993 and 2001 alone. As stated by McCardell,

“How can anyone, in the face of the data, argue with a straight face that the law is working?”

To this, proponents of the status quo often respond that legal age 21 has reduced deaths from drunk driving. However, more than1,000 lives of 18-24 year-olds are now lost annually to alcohol off the highways, a figure that is constantly increasing.

Why not actually reduce alcohol-related deaths, rather than just redistributing them? Why not consider CR’s solution, which both combats drunk driving through alcohol licensing and undermines binge drinking through alcohol education for 18 year-olds? Why not tailor the law to reflect reality?

Perhaps it is time for the Office of Health and Wellness to do what it does best: listen to its students. Let those who are dying do the talking. We can take it from here.