In Which I Compare The Drinking Age to Property Qualifications

OK, so this has nothing to do with Descartes’ Meditations. But while I was pondering the implications of the famous “I think, therefore I am,” I came upon this blurb at Inside Higher Ed, alerting me to this article on a study of drunk driving. As you know if you’ve chanced to talk with me on the subject at all, I feel strongly that the drinking age should be lowered or eliminated. But that doesn’t, of course, stop me from being saddened and bewildered by the thousands of tragedies we go through every year because people make the decision to drive intoxicated.

The study’s main finding is that college students become more likely to drive drunk or ride with drunk drivers as they get older, not less. Importantly, turning 21 seems to have a strong impact on students’ tendency to make those decisions. The first implication, then, is that we have been led “to the erroneous conclusion that existing college alcohol-safety programs are effective,” whereas “If college programs were successful, we should be able to at least prevent an increase in risky drinking and driving during the period the students are at the university.” Not sure I buy that entirely – who’s to say the exposure to positive messages doesn’t have a delayed effect in one’s mid-twenties? And for that matter, I imagine students seek more independent living situations around the time they turn 21 anyway. But if the researchers have found a strong enough effect, and it seems they have, the point is at least valid in part.

I do not think, however, as these researchers do, that this finding puts cold water on the anti-drinking-age position. I’ll let them talk first:

"There were noticeable increases in all three measures of alcohol-related traffic risk -- RWID, DWI and DAD -- when students reached the legal drinking age of 21," said Arria. "Our findings call into question the assertions of some advocates who claim that lowering the drinking age to 18 would be a useful strategy for reducing harm associated with alcohol consumption. The present findings are consistent with numerous prior studies showing that increased availability of alcohol is associated with a greater level of problems especially underage drinking-and-driving fatal crashes."

Both Voas and Arria said these findings support maintaining the minimum legal drinking age at 21. "In fact," said Arria, "lowering the drinking age to 18 would likely result in a surge of alcohol-related traffic problems given that younger students would have even less driving experience."

It is absolutely true that lowering the drinking age would not be “a useful strategy for reducing harm associated with alcohol consumption.” But a), that doesn’t mean it would increase harm, and b), that’s not the point. The researchers postulate that students who reach the drinking age with less driving experience will be more likely to drink and drive, and thus more likely to crash. Maybe, maybe, maybe. They certainly can’t argue that they’ve demonstrated that from their data. Moreover, driving experience is only one factor that goes into drinking behaviors. Cultural expectations and norms surrounding alcohol probably contribute more to drunk driving by increasing the likelihood of excessive drinking in the first place. If parents trained their children to drink in moderation, with meals, this problem might be solved or mitigated before a single person got behind the wheel of a single car.

And in any case, the point of lowering the drinking age is not to reduce harm caused by drunk driving, or even to reduce the harm caused by socially marginalizing the 18-to-21 population. It’s to give adults the right to make adult decisions. I imagine all sorts of harms are caused by 18-to-21-year-olds because they are gaining lots of life experience and responsibility at the same time. We probably vote for the wrong people, we definitely get into more trouble with the law, we screw things up at our jobs, we let food spoil and then get sick from eating it, etc. But everybody does those things. We only do those things a little bit more because we’re learning – in a dangerous world, like it or not. The path to responsibility is the freedom to make mistakes and suffer consequences.

We grant 25-year-olds a great many freedoms that they abuse. In fact, we grant 18-year-olds a similar number of freedoms – suffrage being only the most prominent. We give lots of rights to lots of people we know will abuse them, because that’s what rights are. We let men own guns, for example – even unemployed men under 30 living in urban areas. We let those same men drink. That’s downright criminal, if our goal is to reduce harm. Why shouldn’t your ability to drink and purchase dangerous weapons be conditionally based on your having a job? Better yet, since middle-class people are so much less dangerous than poor people, why don’t we let only employed citizens with a certain net worth buy liquor and guns? Yeah, and since they’re clearly the responsible ones, only they can vote or hold office!

Sounds like a plan to me.