Metro Pulse/Commentary/Lower the Drinking Age

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Young people will drink anyway, so...

by Glenn H. Reynolds

As you drive, or walk, down the Cumberland Avenue strip near U.T., it's obviously not doing terribly well. There are some new businesses here and there—a Panera Bread, a Chili's—but they're outnumbered by the blank fronts and "for lease" signs indicating establishments that have gone out of business. The Strip isn't a ghost town, exactly, but it's something of a ghost of its former self. Hard to believe that a street so close to tens of thousands of students can be so empty.

And yet, it is. I suspect that one reason for this is the 21-year-old drinking age. When I was in college, the drinking age was 18. That, coupled with draconian enforcement (the Knoxville Police seem to care more about underage beer sales than about burglary) has certainly cut down on the number of 18-21 year olds drinking—in bars.

This wasn't Tennessee's choice. The legislature of Tennessee had decided that people who were old enough to marry, to vote, and to fight for their country were old enough to have a beer. Not all states felt this way, but that was considered part of federalism—until Liddy Dole, as Secretary of Transportation, "spearheaded" efforts to force states to adopt a uniform drinking age of 21. In response to Dole's "spearheading," Congress enacted a statute withholding federal highway funds from states that failed to raise their drinking age to 21.

Ironically, Dole was part of the Reagan Administration, which was supposed to be committed to "new federalism," and to returning regulatory power to the states. But just as people on the Left talk about free speech, but pass "speech codes" that ban things they don't want to hear, people on the Right talk about states' rights, but feel perfectly comfortable with federal regulation that advances their pet causes.

Hypocrisy aside—there's plenty of that to go around in politics, after all—the drinking-age increase has at least saved lives, right? Just look at all those out-of-business drinking establishments.

Actually, that's not so clear. There's less drinking in bars, but that may not be a good thing. When the drinking age was 18, students tended to drink in bars, and they tended to drink beer. Raising the drinking age to 21 in effect, created a new Prohibition for this age group. The result was that students who would have been drinking in bars wound up drinking in dorm rooms, apartments and fraternity houses. And since much of that drinking was illicit, easy-to-conceal liquor and pure grain alcohol were more popular than bulky, hard-to-hide beer. (This substitution of stronger intoxicants for weaker ones is a standard effect of Prohibition).

So instead of drinking weak alcoholic drinks in bars, where bartenders have a legal duty to stop serving them when they're intoxicated, 18- to 21-year-old students now drink strong alcoholic drinks in private, where there may be no one sober to provide some supervision, or call a cab. This seems likely to cause more problems: more risk of alcohol poisoning or serious intoxication, more risk of dangerous drunken behavior, perhaps even more risk of drunk driving—and there are some people who say that it does just that. As Jacob Sullum writes in Reason:

"The question is not whether teenagers will drink. They always have, and they always will. Three-quarters of Americans are drinking by their senior year in high school.

The question is how teenagers will drink, whether they will do it excessively and recklessly or in a manner that minimizes the risk to themselves and others."

Drinking, like most things, is a learned behavior. And it can be learned well, or badly. Learning to drink PGA punch in a dorm room is learning badly. As an Alabama professor writes:

"[When I was in college] we also had parties with the faculty. Near the end of each semester, nine out of ten teachers would invite their various classes over to their homes (one class at a time) for cheese, crackers, fruit, and of course wine and beer and sometimes (in the spring) mint juleps made with fresh-cut garden-grown mint. The tenth of ten was generally considered a jerk. In short, we learned how to drink like adults from adults. Of course, even then there were alcoholics and binge drinkers among the students and sometimes the faculty, but the general level of civilization in drinking habits was relatively high. Many years later, as a university instructor, I found that relations with students were necessarily much more distant than they should have been. Colleagues occasionally served wine or beer to undergraduates in parties at their homes, but this was far less frequent, since it is now a crime. Just about the only legal choices today are beerless back-yard cookouts and cookies-and-milk parties. It does indeed tend to puerilize the students."

"Puerilized" (he teaches Latin), but not necessarily safer. Temperance groups—who pretend to be against drunk driving, or "binge drinking," but who really oppose alcohol use in general—may prefer the current situation, but it's hard to see why the rest of us should.

So I have a challenge for both the Democrats and the Republicans running for office this year: Return the drinking age to 18. Republicans are supposed to be for smaller government, and states' rights, both of which should favor getting the federal government out of the drinking-age business. Democrats are supposed to be the "party of youth," and they're supposed to be for individual freedom. So they should be on board, too. Well?

Glenn Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee, and writes for InstaPundit.com, MSNBC.com, and TechCentralStation.com.