Buy Steve Chapman a Beer
The best weapons against drunk driving are social ones, not age limits.

By Ben Domenech, NRO
July 27, 2001 8:40 a.m.

n 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.