Right now I am loving and supporting
the Amethyst Initiative, which is enlisting the support of university presidents in a call to reexamine the legal drinking age in the U.S. (
U.S. News & World Report) Especially after confirming more or less to my satisfaction that no beverage industry money is involved. It's a project of
Choose Responsibility, a nonprofit founded by the former president of Middlebury College (you know those Middlebury kids...woo HOOOO! no wonder he's concerned).
I buy Choose Responsibility's arguments in favor of lowering the drinking age. For various reasons, some related to personal responsibility and some related to legal exposure, I spent an inordinate amount of time in college trying to keep people from killing themselves with alcohol. And I'm telling you,
1) A legal drinking environment is almost always safer than an illegal drinking environment, regardless of the age of the drinkers.
2) Our unusually high drinking age is unquestionably a factor in many college students' unhealthy relationship with alcohol, which includes binge drinking.
3) I'm much less worried about a college kid drinking a couple of beers and getting behind the wheel--not that it isn't cause for worry--than I am about a college kid drinking 20 shots of hard liquor and then falling asleep on his back and drowning in his own vomit. There is a good case to be made, as Choose Responsibility does, that the age 21 limit contributes to college-aged binge drinking in a big way, and that it's binge drinking that is the greatest threat to the health and well-being of teenagers and those around them.
Anyway, food--or drink--for thought.
Labels: alcohol, college