Drink, Freshman!

I read an interesting article on CNN.com this morning. It involves a group of over 100 college presidents who have become signatories of the Amethyst Initiative. The goal of the Amethyst Initiative is to spur public debate about changing the legal drinking age back to 18. Originally, I planned a little exposition piece here about why this is an issue. But let's cut to the chase: On any given college campus, the vast majority of students are going to drink. And of that vast majority, less than half can do so legally.

Lowering the drinking age back to 18 Raising the drinking age back to 21 solves a lot of problems:
-It removes the social taboo of drinking in college. Take away the forbidden-fruit status of booze, and suddenly getting tanked at every possible opportunity doesn't seem as attractive.
-It opens up venues where alcohol can be purchased and consumed legally, and in moderation. Where's the incentive to drink in somebody's basement when you could just as easily have a beer in a bar?
-It frees up police and college resources (money and manpower) committed to a never ending war on underage drinking.
-It presents educational alternatives to the "alcoholic abstinence" stance parents and educators are forced to adopt given the national drinking age.
-It ceases the blatant violation of civil liberties engendered by the fact that an 18 year old can vote, enter into a legally binding contract and serve in the armed forces, but they cannot purchase a beer.

If any of the above items sounds like a good reason to consider lowering the drinking age, then welcome to the club. But of course, every reasonable idea has its detractors. And in this case MADD is leading the charge. Head on over to their website and you will be inundated with quotes from "experts" citing all of the "scientific data" that the current drinking age saves lives. Click through enough of these "expert" testimonials and you eventually work your way to a single line graph which tells us that modifying the drinking age to 21 reduced alcohol related fatal crashes by 32% between 1983 and 1989 for individuals age 16-20. Now, seeing as this is the sole piece of quantitative evidence offered up by MADD, a couple of questions:

-Does this data account for deaths per mile driven, or is the data raw?
-Why are we counting 16 and 17 year olds? We're talking about lowering the drinking age to 18.
-How has the data looked since 1989? Fatalities still going down? Maybe that's because DUI penalties have gotten stiffer and enforcement has gotten more aggressive. Something that would continue to happen regardless of the drinking age. Fatalities up? How could that happen if people under 21 can't legally obtain booze?

I could continue asking probing questions all day, but that would only anger the MADD folks. Especially when they're awfully busy running a smear campaign against college presidents who work the front line of the underage drinking battle and are finally admitting that the system is broken. I'm not sure when MADD turned into Focus on the Family and became a bunch of propaganda smearing zealots, but letting reactionary hot heads determine the social and political landscape in this country has got to stop.