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the July 30 issue of The Weekly Standard, Steve Chapman's
"Keep the Drinking Age at 21" makes the case for a federally regulated,
nationally uniform drinking age. Chapman makes a well-intentioned,
but deeply flawed, argument. Here's its nub:
High
school students today are far less likely to drink or to drink and
drive. This is partly because of changing attitudes among kids.
But they've also gotten some crucial help from adults — particularly
a 1984 law effectively forcing every state to bar alcohol sales
to anyone under the age of 21.
Chapman quotes an oft-repeated statistic--that since 1982, the number
of fatalities from car crashes involving drunk teenage drivers has
dropped by 63 percent, and drinking and driving is no longer the
leading cause of death for teens. That's all true — but the
statistics actually go directly against Chapman's argument that
the standard drinking age of 21 is the cause of such progress.
The law Chapman refers to was a typical act of federal bribery —
if your state drinking age isn't 21, no federal highway dollars
for you! — but the states didn't fall in line, adopting the
across-the-board age of 21, until July of 1987, five years after
the decline began. According to many academic studies, the real
reason for the decline in teen drunk driving isn't due to the 1987
limits, but the efforts of groups like MADD and a vast increase
in state-level anti-drunk-driving initiatives.
Chapman's most misleading claim comes next:
One
group has conspicuously dissented from the emerging new consensus:
the people who would be most affected by the change. A recent poll
by the survey organization ICR found that 84 percent of teenagers
support keeping or raising the current drinking age. (italics
mine)
Does Chapman honestly believe that on any college campus, or in
any senior class of any high school, there's 84 percent opposition
to lowering the drinking age? That anyone actually wants to raise
it? What he fails to mention — and perhaps does not realize
— is that the ICR survey sample, according to its website,
was 514 teenagers, divided into two groups: younger teens (those
from ages 12-14), and older teens (those from ages 15 to 17). The
ICR survey didn't cover the people "most affected by the change"
at all, those aged 18-21. It's no surprise that 12-year-olds aren't
interested in buying a case of Bud for the Friday night slumber
party.
Even in the ICR sample, the only teens who really cared about the
drinking age were those who logically should — people whose
next birthday is their 18th. Again, from the ICR survey summary:
Younger
teens, those from ages 12 to 14, were twice as likely as older teens,
those from ages 15 to 17, to want to raise the drinking age. And
the older teens were twice as likely to want to lower it.
Chapman speeds ahead and attempts to debunk the most popular attack
on the 21-capped drinking age — the argument for a consistent
societal entrance into adulthood — by arguing that it is "foolish
consistency" to set the drinking age, or any mark of adulthood,
at 18 by default.
Setting
the drinking age at 21 can be criticized as a highly imperfect way
of keeping booze away from college-age kids, who have devised numerous
ways to get it. But it does hinder them at least a little.
Actually, not even a little. Perhaps Chapman should visit some college
campuses in his native Illinois — give me ten minutes and $20,
and I guarantee you I can find alcohol, even though I'm underage.
Frat parties, sorority parties, school dances, convenience stores,
or grocery stores with teenage clerks, older friends — all
are easy and quick avenues to cheap liquor. According to a 1999
survey by the Associated Press, about half of all high-school students
had consumed alcohol in the past month; and when those kids go to
college, it gets easier, not harder, to find alcohol.
That's why, ultimately, the best weapons against drunk driving are
social ones, not age limits. Most underage drinkers who try to buy
alcohol succeed (unlike the Bush daughters). Wisconsin attorney
general Jim Doyle says he favors lowering the legal drinking age
precisely because of his own experiences with his sons.
"I think this idea that somehow we're going to keep kids between
19 and 21 from drinking is a myth. We should recognize it's a myth.
We ought to put it up front, and be morally responsible about it,"
Doyle told the Telegraph Herald. "I would rather have them
drinking in a setting where somebody's checked an ID at an establishment
than an unsupervised situation where 200 kids will crowd into a
basement of a house, turn off all the lights and drink themselves
sick."
The argument for lowering the drinking age is supported by a large
number of conservatives — and not just at NRO. The Wall
Street Journal, The Economist, and many columnists and
politicians support this view. Sen. George Allen likes to quip that
if college kids could just get their political act together, the
Virginia drinking age would've been lowered a long time ago.
At least we know that, regardless of the result of this continued
debate, beer will always remain "The Cause of, and Solution to,
all of life's problems." Mr. Chapman, I'd buy you a beer, but we'll
have to wait another two years first.
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