Jim Gogek

Arguments in favor of lowering the drinking age are perfect for Internet and blogosphere — all opinion and myth, no facts. The truth is that research overwhelmingly supports leaving the drinking age at 21, and so do the top global researchers on alcohol. Robert Voas, who has been studying alcohol impacts for four decades, and who just won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Research Society on Alcoholism, stated it eloquently in an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor:

It’s startling that anybody – given the enormous bodies of research and data – would consider lowering the drinking age…

…This is extremely frustrating. While public health researchers must produce painstaking evidence that’s subjected to critical scholarly review, lower-drinking-age advocates seem to dash off remarks based on glib conjecture and self-selected facts.

One of the worst myths is the idea that there’s some “European Model” that teaches kids how to drink responsibly. The truth is that Europe has much worse youth drinking problems than the United States. In fact, every European country except for Turkey has worse youth binge drinking rates than the United States. Binge drinking is known to increase the risk for serious social problems such as fighting, assault, sexual assault, theft and burglary. So Europe, with its allowance of youth drinking, has created serious problems for itself.

There are plenty of other myths and misinformation:

Old enough to go to war, old enough to drink.

The military takes in youngsters particularly because they are not yet fully developed and can be molded into soldiers. The 21 law is predicated on the fact that drinking is more dangerous for youth because they’re still developing mentally and physically, and they lack experience and are more likely to take risks. Ask platoon leaders and unit commanders, and they’ll tell you that the last thing they want is young soldiers drinking.

The drinking-age law just increases the desire for the forbidden fruit.

…The opposite is true. Research shows that back when some states still had a minimum drinking age of 18, youths in those states who were under 21 drank more and continued to drink more as adults in their early 20s. In states where the drinking age was 21, teenagers drank less and continue to drink less through their early 20s.

I did it when I was a kid, and I’m OK.

Thank goodness, because many kids aren’t OK. An average of 11 American teens die each day from alcohol-related crashes. Underage drinking leads to increased teen pregnancy, violent crime, sexual assault, and huge costs to our communities. Among college students, it leads to 1,700 deaths, 500,000 injuries, 600,000 physical assaults, and 70,000 sexual assaults each year.

And on and on. Yeah, you can find a few researchers who claim otherwise. But they’re like the denialists who claim that global warming isn’t true. Do a Google Scholar search of youth, drinking, alcohol, etc. Look at the evidence in respected peer-reviewed journals. There’s no good argument for lowering the drinking age.