In 1980, Candy Lightner founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving, after her 13-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver. In 1985, she walked out of the organization. Explaining her decision in a story in The Washington Times, she said that MADD "has become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned ... I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving." Now, the substance of Lightner's critique of her own organization can be seen in play here at Dartmouth.
President James Wright is, thus far, the only Ivy League president to join the Amethyst Initiative. Former Middlebury president John McCardell founded the Initiative, which seeks to lower the drinking age to 18 ("College presidents urge debate over drinking age," Sept. 17). In an op-ed in The New York Times, McCardell writes, "It is astonishing that college students have thus far acquiesced in so egregious an abridgment of the age of majority. Unfortunately, this acquiescence has taken the form of binge drinking. Campuses have become, depending on the enthusiasm of local law enforcement, either arms of the law or havens from the law."
The Amethyst Initiative gains its name from the Greek word for "un-intoxicated." Judging by that fact, you can surmise that proponents of the Amethyst Initiative aren't out to make drunkenness an easier state for students to attain. Basically, they seem to have learned the lessons of Prohibition: Banning a commodity that is desired in all quarters breeds messy results, making millions of normally law-abiding citizens into criminals.
To most of us, this would seem like common sense. But MADD's agenda runs counter to it: They have launched a massive e-mail campaign to derail the Amethyst Initiative. Two university presidents in Georgia have already left the program due to pressure by the group, and Wright said he has received 1,400 e-mails from MADD supporters urging him to drop the initiative. It seems like MADD would prefer to quash the debate before those who support lowering the drinking age can be given a fair and honest hearing for their views.
I am not a fan of Dartmouth's drinking culture. This does not get in the way of my support for the Amethyst Initiative, but rather it is the reason that I support it. Imagine a world where drinking is not confined to weekly nihilistic binges in humid, unfinished fraternity basements, a world where it is used to complement and facilitate conversation and not as an end in itself. This world actually exists in some places, as I have recently come to realize. In England, pub culture is focused on conversation and sociability. The social scene at Dartmouth is focused more strongly on mindless drunkenness and vaguely remembered hookups. While these may seem awesome for a while, I believe that they eventually wear one out.
Since MADD is theoretically concerned with prosecuting drunk driving, it would make a great deal more sense to suggest a compromise rather than immediately start a campaign to stop the Amethyst Initiative. For example, they could make a deal that if the drinking age is lowered, drunk-driving penalties need to become more severe. European countries have long had similar regulations and the number of DUIs and amount of alcohol abuse in many of those countries is proportionally smaller than in the United States.
Yet, it does seem somewhat reasonable to doubt if we can really change. Would Dartmouth's drinking culture change as the law changes, or are our habits so ingrained that anything more than oblivious drinking binges is a hopeless pipe dream? As Dostoevsky wrote, "[Man]...would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element."
However much I may harbor reservations, I still think that people can be made to adjust their drinking habits to the law. President Wright observed that drinking ought not to be an "end" in itself, and I believe that the better half of human nature can be led to realize this: Neither drinking, nor drug use, nor anything can ever be an end in and of itself. Only humanity can occupy that station.
