WHO OF the following is drinking responsibly: A 21-year-old who downs a fourth-year fifth, or an 18-year-old who has a glass of wine with dinner?
Who can best guide you as you learn to drink moderately: Some guy standing over a keg at a party and filling cups as they’re shoved at him, or a trusted friend joining you at a quiet restaurant?
These are not difficult questions. They don’t require a lot of research. Drinking responsibly doesn’t mean watching the calendar; it means watching what you drink. Careful attention from a friend can help develop good habits; encouragement to drink all you can and then some is more likely to help develop bad ones.
Yet for 24 years, this country has maintained a minimum legal drinking age of 21. That law does not promote responsible drinking. Quite the contrary: By prohibiting responsible drinking for millions of Americans, it encourages them to drink dangerously. And it exposes them to unnecessary risks when they do drink by making people afraid to get help for underage drinkers who drink themselves sick. Now, more than 100 college and university presidents have signed on to the Amethyst Initiative, which calls for the reexamination of this law.
The University has long acknowledged that students do not, as a rule, wait for their 21st birthdays to have their first drinks. That acknowledgment is implicit in the posters appealing to social norms of responsible drinking. Every sign that identifies some particularly risky drinking behavior and points out how many people don’t do it, or that praises some responsible way of dealing with drinking, implicitly recognizes that its readers are going to drink.The September issue of the “Stall Seat Journal” says, “72 percent of U.Va. first years usually or always eat before drinking.” That implies that more than 72 percent of first-years (and first-years are typically under 21) drink. The poster also reassures students that Student Health and the University Medical Center emergency room don’t report underage drinkers to the police — a policy that should be adopted as widely as possible and advertised as widely as possible, because the fear of legal consequences can dissuade people from seeking medical help when underage drinkers suffer medical consequences.
This University has a special reason to condemn the drinking age laws. We are committed to the value of honor; we condemn lying, cheating and stealing. Evading the drinking age by means of false identification is a form of lying: One claims to be 21 when one is not. There are reasonable defenses to be made for such conduct, but it is dishonest. This makes dishonesty seem acceptable — and if we accept it as trivial, as most of us probably do, it undermines the community’s commitment to honor. And the problem is compounded if evading the drinking age by means other than fake ID, such as by getting drinks from older friends, is regarded as a form of cheating.
University President John T. Casteen III has declined, provisionally, to join the Amethyst Initiative. He said, in remarks posted online by the Department of Media Relations, that he wants to see more evidence that lowering the drinking age would not do more harm than good. If his standard is measurable net lives saved, I don’t know enough about the state of the evidence to declare this an unreasonable request: The drinking age almost certainly has contributed to some deaths, but it is also almost certain that it has prevented incidents that might have been lethal.
But what I can say is that the drinking age is unjust, that it violates liberty by prohibiting even drinking that does not harm others, that it encourages irresponsible behavior, that it provides an incentive for dishonesty, that by being unenforceable, it diminishes respect for the law, and that in general, it degrades the character of the people. By my lights, these reasons are sufficient to justify its repeal.
While I hope President Casteen will eventually be persuaded to join the Amethyst Initiative, the rest of the University does not have to wait for him to take the lead on this issue.
If students — both under and over 21 — want the drinking age repealed or lowered, there are a variety of avenues they can use to pursue that goal. For example, Student Council routinely engages in lobbying; this issue should be emphasized in its agenda. It’s difficult to think of any bad law whose effects are so focused on college students, or so dangerous.
But the biggest statement University students could make would be to adopt a referendum condemning the drinking age and taking concrete policy measures to mitigate its effects on University students.
Alexander R. Cohen’s column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.cohen@cavalierdaily.com.
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