Inside Higher Ed has a story today about a former Middlebury College president who is launching a non-profit organization to advocate a serious discussion about drinking age laws in the US. As he notes, real data on the topic are a little hard to come by:
What was striking about the research, McCardell said, was how little of it conclusively backs up claims about the positive impact of the 21-year-old drinking age. “This is by definition a very emotional issue, but what we need is an informed and dispassionate debate,” he said. He said that the major flaw in analyses to date has been false assumptions about causal relationships. If DWI accidents among teens have dropped, that must be because of the rise in the drinking age, proponents say.
But McCardell noted that a range of other factors could be at play, too — such as changing attitudes about seat belts, the availability of airbags, etc. At the same time, those who see a causal relationship in one set of statistics ignore others — showing continued drinking by college students (under 21) and substantial evidence of truly dangerous drinking by a subset of that population.
My initial reaction to this is “It’s about time…,” because I think the 21-year-old drinking age is one of the stupidest laws on the books. I doubt he’s going to get much traction with this, though– the puritanical streak in American politics is too strong, and anybody attempting to restore a litle sanity to the national alcohol policy will quickly be politically radioactive. It’s just too easy to paint any reduction in the law as advocating free beer for kindergarteners.
If you want to see how the subject makes even smart people turn stupid, look no further than this quote by Henry Weschler of Harvard:
Wechsler said that 19-year-olds just don’t drink responsibly so there is no reason for them to drink, period. “Nineteen-year-olds do not have two beers. When they drink, they drink a lot,” he said.
And yet, somehow, Europe and Canada have yet to collapse…
Anyway, I wish McCardell luck.