Roseyland

So I was having lunch at my desk today and reading CNN.com. This is what I do most days, eat at my desk and read CNN. I’m a wild and crazy guy. Anyways, I read this article about the Amethyst Initiative. The Amethyst Initiative is a group of chancellors and presidents from United States universities and colleges that have signed a statement asking for debate on the 21 year-old drinking age. The Amethyst Initiative believes that the 21 year-old drinking age is not working and that it is creating a culture of binge drinking on college campuses.

All I can say is: Amen. This has been a pet issue of mine since I was a freshman in college (13 years ago, yeah, I’m old). A little background: I went to a small liberal arts college in small town in Nebraska. Doane College in Crete, Nebraska to be exact. Doane had about 1,000 students and most students lived on campus all 4 years. I loved it, everyone knew everyone, and there was this great sense of community. It was the best 4 years of my life. While I was at Doane, there was a fairly liberal drinking policy. Students who were 21 or older could have alcohol in their rooms and we could have parties on campus. Technically you were supposed to be 21 to drink, but as you would expect, this was frequently violated.

I had my first beer at Doane in the Spring of 1996 on the 4th floor of Smith Hall at the end of my fraternities Hell Week. It was okay. I wasn’t a big drinker then, and I’m not now. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a cold beer at a baseball game or visiting a winery every now and then, but I’ve never been drawn to alcohol they way some people are. Even though I wasn’t a big drinker, I always thought Doane’s alcohol policy was exactly as it should be. With most students living on campus throughout their 4 years of college, Doane had a great sense of community. The alcohol policy was a big part of that. It is hard to ask the average 21 or 22 year-old college student to live on campus if he or she can’t drink on campus. Doane’s alcohol policy also limited the temptation for students to go off campus to drink, which I am sure prevented a significant amount drunk driving.

There was a lot of underage drinking at Doane, but I never really saw it as an issue. If you put a group of 18-22 year-olds together, the 18-20 year olds are going to drink just as much as the 21-22 year olds. I’m struggling with how to say this, but if something is going to happen, right or wrong, it is best to let it happen out in the open. When you push groups and activities underground, things go bad. When I think of my time at Doane, the first thing I think of is the sense of community. In that community, there were heavy drinkers (I lived with a few ), moderate drinkers, and people who barely or never drank. We were all one community though, and within that community there was accountability and people to fall back on when you made a mistake. If someone got too drunk and out of control, there was always a sober person available to deal with it. If you got too drunk, made an ass of yourself, and didn’t remember it the next day, someone would remind you and then remind you again later.

If Doane did not have a liberal alcohol policy, I think the community that I loved so much would have been split into pieces. Students who choose to drink would do it secretly on campus, or worse, off campus. Not only that, they would have done so surrounded by nothing but other drunk people, which would only encourage more drinking, which would lead to all kinds of crazy. On the other hand, the students who didn’t choose to drink would spend every weekend night watching rented movies in the dorm lobby, and today they would have really crappy stories to tell about their college days.

Since college, I have always felt that the drinking age should be 19. 18 is okay too, but I like 19 because almost everyone in college is 19 or over, and few high school students are over 18. I also think it should be an unspoken rule that 18 year-olds on college campuses can drink. Whatever the drinking age is, it is going to be arbitrary. It’s not like there is a magic age at which you are suddenly responsible enough to drink, and if there is, it is probably closer to 35 than 21. I say pick the drinking age that is the most natural for our society, and I think that age is 19 (maybe 18).

This is probably where I should end this blog post, but I read a few more articles on the Amethyst Initiative, and some of them sent me off into an internal rant that prevented me from getting any real work done this afternoon. I found this blog post by Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune to be particularly irritating. You should read the whole thing, but here is an excerpt:

College-age people who favor the change might ask themselves: If the drinking age is lowered, whose funeral will I be attending as a result?

Seriously? Are you kidding me? This is a completely ridiculous thing to say. A lot of the criticism of the Amethyst Initiative seems to be based on the idea that a higher drinking age reduces drunk driving deaths. This is an old argument that gets applied to everything from alcohol, to cigarettes, to trans-fats and high fructose corn syrup. Ever hear of a little thing called personal responsibility? No? Hmm… Look it up. I do not doubt that that a higher drinking age lowers drunk driving deaths, but an even higher drinking age would lower them even more. Prohibiting alcohol all together would lower deaths even further. I wonder if that has ever been tried? Hmm… A rational person would say that we need to balance personal freedoms with the cost of those freedoms to society. I highly doubt that a 21 year-old drinking age strikes that balance any better than an 18 or 19 year-old drinking age.

The current 21 year-old drinking age is about as effective at preventing drunk driving as abstinence only sex ed is at preventing teen pregnancy and STDs. That means it’s not very effective. Rather than trying to prevent underage drinking, why don’t we put those efforts towards encouraging people to drink responsibly and holding them accountable when they do not. One good step in this direction is to lower the drinking age and allow college communities to exist in open and safe environments where young people can find their way into this crazy crazy world.