Posted on 07/18/2005 10:19:10 AM PDT by Last Dakotan
Two decades ago, few in the booze business believed it would happen here, in the beer capital of the world. Sobering Facts College students spend $5.5 billion a year on alcohol, more than they spend on textbooks, soft drinks, tea, milk, juice and coffee combined. Source: Harvard School of Public Health study 12th-graders who reported consuming alcohol in the last 30 days dropped to 48% in 2004 from 66% in 1985. Source: University of Michigan study
While other, more sober states caved in to the federal government's order to raise their drinking ages to 21 or lose a portion of highway funds, Wisconsin - insulated by the thick biceps of the Tavern League - would not be easily blackmailed.
It was 1985. Debate swirled. Would the economic loss from cutting 19- and 20-year-olds out of the legal drinking equation outweigh highway withholdings? Would bumping up the age cut teen traffic deaths and eliminate the "blood borders" - the so-called stretches of highway where teens from other states with higher drinking ages sometimes crashed and died driving home after a night of drinking in Wisconsin?
Twenty years after Wisconsin acquiesced, like every other state, the drinking age is still hotly debated.
Supporters say the law has saved thousands of lives and created a healthier, safer environment on college campuses and throughout society.
Opponents say it has forced teens to drink in secret, leading to reckless binge drinking and unsupervised, sometimes dangerous house parties. They say it's a civil rights violation and an insult to military members trained to kill but not trusted to consume alcohol.
Their complaints are getting attention.
Legislators in Vermont are considering a bill to lower the legal drinking age to 18. Wisconsin lawmakers are considering dropping the age to 19 for military members. Already some U.S. cruise lines have dropped the age to 18 for drinking beer and wine on excursions outside U.S. waters.
Each side comes to the debate with statistics to back up its argument.
Alcohol-related traffic deaths of drivers under 21 dropped by 17% immediately after states increased their minimum drinking age, says Alexander Wagenaar, a professor of epidemiology with the University of Florida who has studied alcohol issues for three decades.
"Raising the age to 21 is probably the single most effective prevention effort that we've done for teen drinking in the last 30 years," said Wagenaar, who estimates that as many as 20,000 lives have been saved in car crashes alone as a direct result of raising the drinking age.
But studies also show that more people ages 21 to 24 were killed after the bump in the drinking age, suggesting that the law simply delayed the deaths, according to John McCardell, president of Middlebury College in Vermont, who believes college campuses need to be more progressive in exposing students to responsible drinking.
"It would be hard to say with a straight face . . . that the law has had the effect of reducing drinking on campuses in an appreciable way," McCardell said. "I would argue it's had the opposite effect." Teenage crashes dropped
Statistics from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Safety back Wagenaar's findings, said Dennis Hughes, the DOT's chief of safety policy analysis.
The alcohol-related crash rate for 19-year-olds dropped from 22 per 1,000 licensed drivers in 1985 to 5 in 2003, the latest year for which data is available, according to DOT figures. And when Wisconsin raised its minimum drinking age from 18 to 19 in 1984, the alcohol-related crash rate for 18-year-olds fell from 21 per 1,000 licensed drivers to 12. By 2003, that rate had dipped to 5 alcohol-related crashes per 1,000 licensed drivers.
"The numbers for highway safety are irrefutable, and we've reaped those benefits for a long time," Hughes said. "A lot more kids are surviving their teens."
Kari Kinnard, too, sees benefits to the higher minimum drinking age. As president of MADD Wisconsin, Kinnard pays close attention to the issue. Kinnard says recent studies on the human brain show that it doesn't fully develop until age 21.
"Supporting evidence just keeps coming in that the right decision was made to move the drinking age," Kinnard said.
The higher drinking age has meant fewer injuries and deaths at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Susan Crowley, director of PACE (Policy, Alternatives, Community and Education), a 10-year, $1.2 million program aimed at curtailing underage drinking. The study is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
"Without a doubt, we've seen (the 21 minimum drinking age) improve the health and safety on campus," Crowley said.
More students are abstaining from drinking and are willing to admit they don't drink. Fewer students are being taken to detox, and fewer students report negative consequences as a result of their own or others' alcohol consumption, Crowley said, pointing to statistics gathered in the last five years.
Others, such as Richard Keeling, an expert on the effects of the 21 minimum legal drinking age, caution against crediting the drinking age for such progress.
PACE strategies such as cracking down on house parties and increasing fines for alcohol-related offenses are likely more responsible for changing behavior than a higher drinking age, Keeling said.
As a medical doctor, the former director of health services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and past editor of the Journal of American College Health, Keeling said the 21 minimum drinking age has had a "great many negative consequences." Teenagers are going to drink no matter what the legal age is, Keeling said.
"The pattern for underage students is more dangerous," said Keeling, who now runs a consulting firm in New York. "Afraid of being caught, they drink a lot in a short period of time. They do it less often but more intensely." Case for supervised drinking
Much of the problem stems from lack of supervised drinking experience, said McCardell, the Middlebury president. That's where colleges could help. They could and should play an active role in teaching young people to drink responsibly, McCardell said.
"You have to give them some exposure," McCardell said. "That doesn't mean sending everybody out to get drunk. But if you're serious about teaching somebody biology, you're going to include a laboratory. College campuses could be little laboratories of progressiveness."
Brendan O'Connell, a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says some type of supervised exposure to alcohol at a younger age would be hugely helpful to young adults. O'Connell tells stories of friends who drink themselves sick on their 21st birthdays. Bars offer free shots, and birthday revelers don't know when to stop, he said.
"It's almost like a holiday. It's something you've been waiting for," he said. "I've been to 21st birthday parties where I've had to drag my friends home. It's pretty bad."
U.S. Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis.) is one politician willing to consider alternatives to the 1984 act that coupled states' drinking ages with federal highway dollars. Petri has been working to persuade his colleagues that change is worth considering.
"If we're concerned about alcohol-related fatalities - and we should be - we should focus on alcohol-related fatalities," he said. "We need to leave greater flexibility to states to figure out the most effective way, rather than tell them we know all the answers."
That solution would be completely and utterly worthless, and it ignores reality.
The reality is, that kids do drink, and while it causes some trouble on it's own, it causes even more because it's illegal.
Kids that are kicking ass at school arn't going to be the ones with the problems, and the other ones will drink anyway.
I see. I boycott all companies with hyphenated names. Pick one name and be done with it.
I saw Abbie Hoffman (Steal This Book) speak at my college years ago and even though he was a liberal, he spoke an awful lot of sense on some topics. He said that if people from 18 to 21 didn't become informed and start voting, they were going to lose the right. He said that it was obvious that they didn't vote because if they did, they'd be able to drink.
Just as an aside, he also said that you should always try to get your news from multiple sources so that you get the true story.
Having differential ages made sense, but ran up against expanding federalism. I recall that Wisconsin had a different drinking age for its own residents for a few months, until some FIB of an Illinoisian challenged it in the courts under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Reagan was from California, which has always had a very puritanical cultural attitude about alcohol.
Feds have no rights in anyones business unless I need my boots polished and my butt wiped.
Slackers.....
"In many states, Texas included, a parent or legal guardian can legally supply alcohol to their own minor child, including at restaurants. (I believe this also works for spouses.)"
In other states that is considered child abuse and endangering the welfare of a minor.
No suprise Hoffman had some good ideas.
Classic Liberals are what we call "conservatives" today.
That was one of the ideas of federalism. Different states coud try different things.
That makes sense. It reminds me of something Zel Miller said (paraphrasing), "I didn't leave the Democratic party. They left me."
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