All Stirred Up
A former Vermont college prez is leading a national campaign to lower the drinking age

by Paula Routly (08/22/07).

You don’t need a PhD to advance a simple theory on college drinking. Students are still getting trashed, despite laws that forbid them from consuming alcohol before age 21. Worse, there’s reason to believe they’re drinking larger quantities in more dangerous situations. The evidence is staggering — literally — every weekend night on the streets between downtown Burlington and the University of Vermont. Residents along the retching routes won’t be surprised to discover that 44 percent of college students admit to binge drinking in the two weeks prior to being surveyed.

That last statistic is courtesy of Choose Responsibility, a new, Middlebury-based nonprofit that is challenging the conventional, older-is-better wisdom of organizations such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Choose Responsibility asserts that lowering the drinking age will lead to reduced alcohol abuse among young adults; it also proposes mandatory education and “licensing” for drinkers under 21, along the lines of driver’s ed.

“Prohibition doesn’t work,” asserts John McCardell, Jr., the founder of Choose Responsibility and former president of Middlebury College. His oft-quoted soundbite on the issue: “The 21-year-old drinking age is bad social policy and terrible law.”

With a crew of recent grads and student interns, McCardell has spent the last two years building a scholarly case against “Legal Age 21” — the 1984 law, signed by then-President Ronald Reagan, that forced states to raise their drinking ages to 21 or give up millions of federal highway dollars. Choose Responsibility is attacking the law’s basic assumption: that Legal Age 21 would result in fewer alcohol-related fatalities. In fact, after 1984, the number of drunk-driving deaths went down in every age category, not just among 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds.

What’s on the rise, McCardell points out, are casualties of a different sort: those that result when kids go “underground” to drink “in dark corners, off campus, in the worst-possible, most-risky, least-manageable situations.” He reasons, “Even if you accept the argument that Legal Age 21 has saved a thousand total lives a year — on the highway — that’s more than offset by the close to 1500 18-to-24-year-old lives lost to alcohol in other settings. Those lives aren’t less precious. Nobody wants to talk about that.”