Iwould like to congratulate Lea Kelley '97 on her column proposing to lower the drinking age to 18.While she concentrated mainly on aspects of Dartmouth life that could be altered for the better by changing the drinking age to 18, it is important to expand on a couple of general ideas regarding this change that would affect high school and college campuses all over the country.
It is a fact that drinking will happen wherever people our age are left without parental influence, and oftentimes it happens while the underage drinker is still with his parents -- it is just done a bit more clandestinely. The reason so many high school and college-age people seem to flock to alcohol like lemmings upon their first tastes of freedom is due to the image of alcohol that is spoon-fed and force-fed to them since birth: alcohol is reserved for mature, adult people.
Consequently, alcohol becomes a sign of maturity, which then translates -- in the mind of the underage person -- into the perception that alcohol is a tool through which maturity can be achieved.And at age 14 or 15, no one wants to wait six or seven years to be considered mature -- the longer one has to wait for the right to do something, the stronger becomes the desire to do it behind the back of whatever authority figure is denying that right.
Let's switch back to Dartmouth for a second, just to bring the point a little closer to "home." Under the current drinking laws and the school's alcohol policy (as it is stated and supposed to be enforced, not how it is enforced all the time), an 18-year-old student should not be able to be served at any house on-campus, off-campus or anywhere else inside the confines of the borders of the United States.
What does he do?He does something everyone of us here at Dartmouth has seen or experienced.He finds a "friend" (even though it may just be an acquaintance) who is of age to buy him and a couple of his friends some beer or other alcohol.Since this underage drinker is fairly certain that he will not get served at any party which he plans to attend, he and his friends will sit in his dorm room, door locked, shades pulled down, music on but not loud enough to attract a noise complaint from campus po', drinking enough to achieve a buzz that won't wear off in the next couple of hours.
Now I ask you, what is more dangerous, the four or five beers he may have in the course of an entire night at a house party, or the two cases of beer or bottle of vodka shared between four people in the course of an hour and a half before going out to social functions?
This is what the 21 age and alcohol policies like that of Dartmouth create, because, let's face it, the police and campus po' are never going to get rid of 18-year-olds drinking, short of total prohibition of alcohol for everyone or some sort of tyrannical, police-state enforcement policy this country would never tolerate.
If those same decision makers who choose the drinking age tell me I can pay taxes as an adult, can be drafted into war as an adult and can be held accountable for myself in a court of law as an adult -- in effect, all of the responsibilities of adulthood -- I see nothing at all wrong with being able to take a drink as an adult.
By age 18 a good majority of people have already had some sort of experience with alcohol.The problem with that is more often than not this experimentation is both unsupervised and uneducated. As my hypothetical situation demonstrates,this can be a dangerous combination and one that could be prevented. By lowering the drinking age to 18, the powers that be would also lower the risks that people of that age take with alcohol -- most notably, preventing vast numbers of clandestine drinking binges -- and hopefully would increase the amount of education about alcohol given to young people growing up.
By keeping the age at 21, those decision makers are spreading the idea that alcohol is the last step to adulthood. The puritanical bent of the 21 drinking age serves only to prevent people from learning how to drink responsibly, which would include an early exposure to alcohol in a controlled, educating environment.By the time anyone turns 18, he should not have his first experience with alcoholin a dark, locked dorm room with other first-timers.
One need only take a glance across the ocean at our European counterparts.Why is it that alcoholism is more prevalent in our society than in theirs?Their drinking laws are less strict, their drinking ages much lower and per capita rates of alcoholism and casualties due to alcohol consumption do not even approach the levels of the United States.It's time to rethink this issue.It's time to get out of the dark, locked room.
