US drinking age - should it be lowered? I think so!

Vermont Considers Lowering Drinking Age to 18
By PAM BELLUCK

Published: April 13, 2005

MONTPELIER, Vt., April 7 - Last fall, Richard C. Marron, a Republican state representative, was reading a newspaper column by the recently retired president of Middlebury College, John M. McCardell Jr.

One of Mr. McCardell's targets was the drinking age, which in Vermont, and every other state, is 21.

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"The 21-year-old drinking age is bad social policy and terrible law," Mr. McCardell wrote, saying it had led to binge drinking by teenagers. "Our latter-day prohibitionists have driven drinking behind closed doors and underground."

Mr. Marron, a four-term legislator who is vice chairman of the appropriations committee, decided that the law needed changing, and he has introduced a bill to lower the drinking age to 18, setting off a debate about public safety, age discrimination and the rights of young people as well as whether it is possible to teach teenagers to drink responsibly.

"Now we have a legal age of 18 to do everything else, but you can't drink until you're 21," Mr. Marron said. "I'm not pushing it to the level of it being unconstitutional, but I do think it's a form of age discrimination. If we did something else, like said you couldn't use a public campsite until you're 21, we would have an equal-protection-of-laws issue."

Mr. Marron's bill is unlikely to pass, mainly because if it did, Vermont would lose $9.7 million in federal money for highway maintenance, grants available only if a state sets its drinking age at 21. And the state's public safety commissioner and health department, along with several legislators, argue that lowering the drinking age would simply worsen the problem of under-age drinking and drunken driving.

Still, 17 lawmakers have signed on as co-sponsors, and other legislators said they might be willing to consider such a bill if not for the loss of federal money. Even Gov. Jim Douglas, a Republican, might see some logic in the proposal if the federal highway money was not involved, said his spokesman, Jason Gibbs.

"Philosophically, it's difficult to reconcile the notion that you can enlist in the military, serve your country, go to war, but not go into your local pub and get a draft beer," Mr. Gibbs said.

While state health officials say that "a higher drinking age is safer," he added, the possibility that a lower drinking age could stem binge drinking is "certainly one that needs to be looked at very closely."

Mr. Marron, who says his ownership of a resort with a liquor license in Stowe, Vt., has no bearing on his support of the bill, said some teenagers drove to Canada, where the drinking age is 18.

States across the country raised the drinking age to 21 after the 1984 National Drinking Age Act tied that requirement to a percentage of federal highway money given to states.

In recent years, few legislative proposals have emerged to lower the drinking age, said Jonathan Adkins, a spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association, which, like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, strongly opposes such efforts. Vermont is simultaneously considering a bill to raise the cigarette-smoking age to 21, from 18.

Mr. Gibbs said the governor opposed the bill on smoking because 18 was the age of "pre-eminent personal responsibility."

The American Cancer Society has generally withheld support for such proposals, saying that there was not a lot of data on their effectiveness and that adoption might make cigarettes more of a forbidden fruit A survey of Vermont voters conducted by a state senator last month, before debate or hearings on the proposals, showed some support for lowering the drinking age (33 percent), but more for raising the smoking age (51 percent).

The forbidden-fruit argument is also made by advocates for lowering the drinking age.

"Before the age was increased, we had a very different environment," said Ronald D. Liebowitz, the current president of Middlebury College. "You had kids drinking beer and getting sick on beer, but you didn't have gross alcohol poisoning and binge drinking."

Mr. Liebowitz said many students "go off campus to private homes to drink and then, because this is a rural environment, they have to drive home."

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Alex Koroknay-Palicz, 23, the executive director of the National Youth Rights Association in Washington, has been campaigning for the bill on Vermont college campuses, saying it is a matter of civil rights and safety for teenagers.

"Instead of doing it in a controlled situation, going to a bar with a drink limit or something, they're doing it at keg parties in places that are harder to control," Mr. Koroknay-Palicz said.

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Statistics from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration show that the number of drunken drivers under age 21 involved in fatal crashes decreased by 61 percent from 1982 to 1998. The agency also estimates that 22,798 lives were saved from 1975 to 2003 by higher-drinking-age laws.

And in Vermont, Kerry Sleeper, the public safety commissioner, said all fatal crashes involving alcohol dropped to 25 in 2002, from 50 in 1986, the year the drinking age was raised.

Mr. Sleeper and other opponents of the new bill acknowledge that it is not clear if the decrease in crashes can be attributed to the higher drinking age or to stepped-up enforcement, education and measures like lowering the illegal blood alcohol level to 0.08. But they say the higher age has helped.

Barbara Cimaglio, Vermont's deputy commissioner for alcohol and drug abuse programs, said brain research showed that 18-year-olds were not as responsible as 21-year-olds. Because many 18-year-olds are still in high school, Ms. Cimaglio said, lowering the age would make alcohol more available to 15- , 16- and 17-year-olds.

Representative Loren T. Shaw, Republican of Derby, bases his opposition on personal experience. "I started drinking when I was 15," said Mr. Shaw, 63, who said he stopped at 25. "All I cared about was booze, stock cars and women. I lost a lot of friends due to drunken driving."

Many legislators probably share the view of Representative Thomas S. DePoy, Republican of Rutland.

"I don't really know if the age is relevant," Mr. DePoy said. "I think it's just going to boil down to the mere fact that this state needs the transportation funds."

Katie Zezima contributed reporting from Boston for this article.