Researchers and leaders in higher education debated the ramifications of lowering the United States' minimum legal drinking age to 18 during the fifth annual Dartmouth Symposium on Substance Use, held in Alumni Hall on Friday. The symposium, "Examination of the Minimum U.S. Legal Drinking Age," featured nine speakers who expressed divided views on whether the current drinking age should be maintained.
John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College and president of the non-profit organization Choose Responsibility, argued that the drinking age should be lowered. The current law, he said, does not prevent underage drinking, but rather gives young people the incentive to hide their drinking from adults.
McCardell presented a short homemade video clip depicting binge drinking at a typical underage house party, which elicited gasps of shock and surprise from the adult audience.
"We assume that one magically wakes up on the date of his or her 21st birthday capable of making mature decisions," McCardell said.
McCardell launched the Amethyst Initiative in July 2008. The initiative is a coalition of college chancellors and presidents, including Dartmouth President James Wright, who believe that the 21-year-old drinking age contributes to binge drinking at colleges and universities.
There was a 56-percent increase in binge drinking among 18 to 20 year olds between 1993 and 2001, McCardell said. He proposed several solutions to address the problem, including mandatory alcohol education, increased parental involvement and a "drinking license," similar to a driver learner's permit, for which teenagers could qualify at age 18.
"In the eyes of the law, when you're 18 you're an adult, with a single exception," McCardell said.
The United States' current drinking age was established by the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, which required states to raise their minimum legal age for the purchase of alcohol to 21. The federal government threatened to reduce highway funding for states that did not comply with the law. Prior to the implementation of the law, more than two-thirds of states had a drinking age of 18, according to Harvard economist and panelist Jeffrey Miron.
Changing the drinking age to 21 has not significantly reduced the number of traffic deaths, Miron said.
The number of traffic fatalities per miles traveled had been falling steadily for decades before the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, suggesting that the law alone had little effect, he said.
"Coercive federalism does not appear to have been effective in this case," Miron said.
In his presentation, McCardell said that traffic fatalities have decreased for all age groups, not only for 18 to 21 year olds, since 1984. He suggested that a confounding variable, like safer cars or mandatory seat belt use, may be responsible for this trend.
Some speakers argued that higher legal drinking ages appear to prevent the onset of drinking among adolescents. The United States, along with Iceland, reports the lowest percentage of adolescents who have consumed alcohol in the past year, according to data collected by the World Health Organization, David Jernigan, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said.
Adolescents are more vulnerable to alcohol and substance addiction because the inhibitory portions of their brains are not fully developed, Alan Green, chair of the psychiatry department at Dartmouth Medical School, said.
Audience members, most of whom were between the ages of 36 and 56, supported maintaining the current drinking age by a wide margin, according to a poll conducted at the beginning of the symposium.
The symposium was sponsored by the Dartmouth Center on Addiction Recovery and Education, the C. Everett Koop Institute and Dartmouth Health Services, among others.
