Push to Lower Drinking Age Faces Tough Climb Up Capitol Hill
DRINKING
The Keene Sentinel
Joe Vines
Boston University Washington News Service
December 8, 2008
WASHINGTON – The push to repeal the federal statute that strips 10 percent of federal highway aid from any state that has a legal drinking age lower than 21 seems to have fallen on deaf ears on Capitol Hill.
Choose Responsibility, a national organization based in Washington that promotes lowering the drinking age to 18, is seeking to have the issue debated in Congress next year, when the federal highway bill is scheduled to come up for reauthorization.
The group’s Web site argues that the age 21 restriction on drinking “has failed utterly at its goal of protecting young people from the dangers of excessive alcohol use.”
“Removing the 10 percent penalty will allow the states to debate this openly and put all options on the table,” said Michael Giuliani, executive director of Choose Responsibility. “Allowing the states to set their own policy, which is where the Constitution says alcohol regulation should be, is what our hope is.”
Giuliani said organization leaders have talked with members of Congress about sponsoring an amendment to the highway bill that would repeal the law, but declined to name those to whom the organization has spoken. So far no member of Congress has publicly favored amending the highway bill to do away with the penalty for states that lower the drinking age.
The issue has been widely discussed on the campus of Keene State College this semester, after college president Helen F. Giles-Gee was asked to sign the Amethyst Initiative, a national petition circulated among heads of colleges and universities calling for a national debate of the effectiveness of the current legal drinking age. Choose Responsibility provides staff support and is sponsoring the Amethyst Initiative.
Giles-Gee did not sign the initiative but supports a discussion of the issue, said Andrew Robinson, vice president of student affairs at Keene State.
“It called for a debate, but at some point [the initiative] said ‘21 is not working.’ So what the president decided is let’s have that debate without signing an initiative that would appear as though we were supporting lowering the drinking age,” Robinson said.
“The statement does not recommend the drinking age be 18 or 25,” Giuliani said. “It’s calling attention to the problem that is going on in America of excessive alcohol consumption and calling for an open and unimpeded debate about that topic.”
One Keene State freshman favors raising the driving age as a solution instead of lowering the drinking age. Tim, who declined to give his last name because of the sensitivity of the subject on campus, said, “You don’t hear of too many 26-year-olds who are really, really drunk, but you do hear of these really drunk high school students.”
Currently, a person must be at least 16 years old and complete a driver education course before obtaining a license, according to the New Hampshire Department of Safety’s Web site.
To date, the Amethyst Initiative petition has 134 signatories, including Southern New Hampshire University President Paul LeBlanc, who did not return repeated calls for comment for this story.
According to Choose Responsibility’s Web site, the current legal drinking age of 21 is not working and instead has resulted in the unintended consequence of creating a clandestine college culture of binge drinking that is often conducted off campus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines binge drinking as excessive alcohol use in a relatively short period—typically, five or more drinks for men, four or more for women in about two hours. Binge drinkers, the center says, usually are not considered to be alcohol-dependent.
The center reports that 90 percent of the alcohol consumed by those under 21 in the United States is during binge drinking. And binge drinking is most prevalent among people ages 18 to 20.
Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, said in a press release issued by Mothers Against Drunk Driving that he “won’t consider any effort to repeal or weaken [the law] in any way.”
Oberstar’s opposition is a significant blow to advocates of repealing the statute since as the committee chairman he can simply refuse to entertain any amendment offered to change the law. However, Jim Berard, the committee’s communications director, said the issue could come up next year, though he couldn’t name any potential backers of changing the law.
Niel Wright, communications director for Rep. Thomas Petri, R-Wis., a 15-term lawmaker who sits on both the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Education and Labor Committee, said while the congressman believes that the drinking age should be left up to the states, he does not foresee offering legislation to change the law in the next Congress.
The statute was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 as an amendment to the Federal Aid Highway Act. In 1986, South Dakota brought suit in federal court contending that the law violated the 10th amendment, which reserves to the states powers not delegated to the federal government, and the 21st amendment, which repealed alcohol prohibition, In a 7-2 decision, the court decided that the law didn’t constitute prohibition. And because the statute did not ban the sale of alcohol to persons under the age of 21, it did not violate the 21st amendment.
Choose Responsibility advocates a national licensing program in which high school graduates, upon completion of a detailed curriculum, obtain a license that, according to the organization’s Web site, entitles “him or her to all the privileges and responsibilities of adult alcohol purchase, possession and consumption.”
However, the license would come with certain restrictions. “If you put restrictions and penalties on people who would receive this license – that if they violate the law in any way then that license is gone – they’re going to be less likely to do something if you give them comprehensive education,” Giuliani said.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), a national organization founded to prevent drunk driving and underage drinking, contends the current law is working and saves lives.
“[T]here is no reason to go shooting in the dark for a solution and repealing a law that we know already saves lives with absolutely no evidence that it would be a benefit,” said Kelley Tway, media relations manager at the organization’s national office.
Tway also said that medical studies have shown that the brain of an 18-year-old is not fully developed and use of alcohol can stunt development in the final stages of growth “The 21 law saves lives, no matter how you slice it,” Tway said.
“If you all of the sudden lower [the law] down to age 18 without having an educational background with it, the problem may not necessarily get better, it may just transition to a different age-group of students,” said Dan Saucier, student body president at Keene State.
Saucier, a senior majoring in education and American studies from Rochester, N.H., said opinions among the student body on the issue are mixed, but he expressed concern that if the drinking age were lowered from 21 to 18, the problem would be taken out of the hands of college presidents and put into the hands of high school principals, a sentiment Giuliani takes issue with.
“Alcohol is a reality in public high schools now. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors, 60 percent of high school sophomores and 40 percent of eighth graders have consumed alcohol,” Giuliani said. “Since the age has been raised to 21, the age of first consumption of alcohol has dropped. It’s younger now than it has ever been.”
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