Former College President Says Minimum Drinking Age Doesn't Work
In a Sept. 16 commentary on the CNN website, former Middlebury College President John M. McCardell Jr. advocates abolishing the U.S. minimum drinking age of 21 and replacing it with a system that educates teenagers and young adults about the proper use of alcohol, and and then licenses them to drink.
McCardell is the founder and president of Choose Responsibility, a nonprofit organization that describes its purpose as "to stimulate informed and dispassionate public discussion about the presence of alcohol in American culture and to consider policies that will effectively empower young adults age 18 to 20 to make mature decisions about the place of alcohol in their own lives."
The following are excerpts from McCardell's CNN commentary: A study of binge drinking published in the Journal of the American Medical Association announced that "despite efforts at prevention, the prevalence of binge drinking among college students is continuing to rise, and so are the harms associated with it." ...
Yet, in the face of mounting evidence that those young adults age 18 to 20 toward whom the drinking age law has been directed are routinely -- indeed in life- and health-threatening ways -- violating it, there remains a belief in the land that a minimum drinking age of 21 has been a "success." ...
The principal problem of 2009 is not drunken driving. The principal problem of 2009 is clandestine binge drinking. ...
Alcohol is a reality in the lives of young adults. We can either try to change the reality -- which has been our principal focus since 1984, by imposing Prohibition on young adults 18 to 20 -- or we can create the safest possible environment for the reality.
A drinking age minimum of 21 has not changed the reality. It's time to try something different.