Let's Chuck the Drinking Age

What happens when presidents from more than 100 of the nation's best-known colleges call on lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18? Well, a brigade of hyperbolic mommies start screaming at them, that's what.

In the Amethyst Initiative, college presidents have offered a rational, if counterintuitive, plan. Let's stop treating young adults like wards of the state. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, naturally, replied: No debate allowed.

There is plenty of empirical evidence suggesting that the 21-year-old drinking age is counterproductive. To begin with, this drinking age bars parents from educating their children about alcohol and, like all prohibitions, it fosters criminality.

"Kids are going to drink whether it's legal or illegal," explains Johns Hopkins President William R. Brody. "We'd at least be able to have a more open dialogue with students about drinking, as opposed to this sham where people don't want to talk about it because it's a violation of the law."

Sham indeed. It begins with the demonization of alcohol. (Mothers Against Drunk Driving once compared alcohol to heroin.) Imbibing is satisfying and a highly pleasurable way to spend a couple of hours. It is completely harmless for the majority of adults. Let's not pretend otherwise.

And by outlawing even the moderate use of alcohol among young adults, society creates a forbidden fruit. It drives students off-campus and underground. It creates an incentive to drink as much as possible in the shortest amount of time possible.

According to the presidents, the drinking age has "created an environment of excess consumption and goal-oriented drinking. While fewer individuals aged 18-20 are drinking, those who choose to drink are doing so at dangerous and alarming rates."

Perhaps if young adults were allowed to experience the effects of alcohol in a controlled environment, they would be less inclined to binge later.

(Binge drinking, incidentally, is the consumption of five or more drinks in a row by men and four or more drinks in a row by women. Let he among us without sin …)

The present drinking age, it also can be noted, treats 18-20-year-old adults as if they were criminals, pre-emptively outlawing them from partaking in a legal product that other adults — even adults convicted of drunken driving or serious felonies — can enjoy legally.

Every state has the authority to set its own drinking age. They won't. After Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act in 1984, the government blackmailed states by threatening to take away 10 percent of federal highway funding.

There is no politician who has the audacity to take on MADD, anyway. No one wants to be accused of willfully hurting children.

Yet even if MADD were right, the safety of the "children" never should be the sole basis for public policy. Call them naive or idealistic, but there are still people in this country who believe the word "freedom" matters, as well.

If I may indulge, let's extrapolate on a cliché: It's regularly pointed out that young adults can volunteer to serve in Iraq but are prohibited from buying a beer.

But young adults are also free to produce children (many children). A young adult will plan the entire course of his life by the age of 21. A young adult can serve on a jury and determine the fate a fellow citizen. If a young adult chooses, he can act in pornographic films, gamble nightly, smoke several packs of cigarettes or, in some places, even engage in the truly depraved act of becoming a politician.

Yet this same young adult is breaking the law when ordering an appletini?

It makes little sense. And when a large number of college presidents ask: "How many times must we relearn the lessons of prohibition?"

The answer is: We never learned the lesson the first time.

David Harsanyi is a columnist at The Denver Post and the author of "Nanny State." Visit his Web site at www.DavidHarsanyi.com. To find out more about David Harsanyi and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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