Pros and cons of reducing the drinking age

By BILL SCHACKNER
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, July 12, 2007

Sarah Rafson and her college friends picked an off-campus bar on her 19th birthday -- and did what in America requires a fake ID or a bartender willing to look the other way.

Legal drinking in Canada starts at 18 or 19, depending on the province. That's why many U.S. college students, including Rafson, a University of Toronto junior from Pittsburgh, automatically become legal drinking adults when they head north of the border to study, only to become minors again when they return home.

"It feels like walking backward in time."

Sure, Rafson says, there are drunken college parties in this city. But she swears she sees fewer instances of her peers slamming down drink after drink than she does in the United States. Her own birthday celebration in November, the day she sipped her first legal drop of alcohol, stopped at a couple of drinks, and she says she's been a light drinker since.

"It's legal," she said. "It's no big deal."

Conventional wisdom in the United States says making people wait to imbibe legally keeps them safer from alcohol abuse. But John McCardell, 58, president emeritus of Middlebury College in Vermont, has caused a stir of late, claiming that an epidemic of underage and binge drinking is proof the current approach doesn't work. McCardell says it's time the United States brings back the 18-year-old drinking age.

Specifically, he proposes a system under which "drinking licenses" would permit consumption at an earlier age after mandatory education about alcohol and its risks. He said the 21-year-old drinking age, the standard across America for almost two decades, hasn't stopped young people from drinking themselves into the hospital or the grave.

"All you're doing is driving it off campus or underground. You're not ending it," McCardell said. "You're sending it to much less safe environments."

There are plenty of people who say what he's proposing is nothing short of insanity.

Those lining up to object include academic researchers, government officials and advocacy groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, all of whom say the preponderance of scientific evidence shows that raising the drinking age reduces problems.

Federal highway crash data indicates the 21-year-old drinking age has saved nearly 25,000 lives over the past three decades, said Ralph Hingson, a division director with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

He also said the law has helped curb alcohol consumption among high school students.

Hingson said he shares McCardell's concern about alcohol's toll. But the solution is not to start young people drinking sooner.

Just look at Europe, he says, where lower minimum ages are common, yet adolescent alcohol abuse is generally worse than in the United States.

"There is no evidence that lowering the age here would help, and I would be concerned that it would make things worse," he said.

McCardell, though, said he's not without research that supports his position.

A study published in 2002 by the journal Addiction found that while alcohol use was more pervasive among Canadian students ages 15 to 24, heavy drinking was significantly less prevalent than among their U.S. counterparts.

"It's hard to look at the Canadian example and say things would be much worse here if we lowered the drinking age," McCardell said.

In the United States, there is no national drinking age per se, though all 50 states set theirs at 21. About half had lower limits but reconsidered after the Reagan administration in 1984 said any state unwilling to adopt 21 as its drinking age would lose 10 percent of its federal highway funds.

The experience has been different in Canada.

Ontario, the province that includes Toronto, raised its drinking age in 1979 from 18 to 19, and it's stayed there since, meaning the bars are open to thousands who are a year out of high school.

Both sides of the minimum age debate agree on this: The latest data on student drinking is cause for alarm.

In March, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reported that alcohol misuse in college had worsened, and nearly one in four full-time students nationwide met the medical threshold for substance abuse or dependence.

The percentage of students on campus who abuse alcohol is no greater than in 1993, but the frequency of binge drinking has increased. Binge drinking is generally defined as five or more drinks per sitting for a male, four for a female.

Each year, more than 1,700 alcohol-related deaths occur among those 18 to 24 years old, including motor vehicle crashes and other unintended injuries. Drunkenness is seen as a major contributor to sexual assault and other campus crime as well as academic problems.

(Bill Schackner can be reached at bschackner(at)post-gazette.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com)