Under a banner called the Amethyst Initiative, 130 college presidents are asking the nation to consider lowering the legal drinking age.

"Twenty-one is not working," notes the initiative in its official statement. The group also states that binge drinking by young people continues, despite current laws. The initiative has inspired an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21 year-old drinking age.

College presidents have a right to be concerned. Consider these statistics for students between the ages of 18 and 24: Nearly 1,700 die each year from alcohol-related traffic accidents and other unintentional injuries. More than 696,000 are assaulted by students who have been drinking. And 31 percent of students in this age group could be diagnosed as alcohol abusers.

Yet there's no evidence that lowering the drinking age would solve any of these problems. Instead, it would simply give young people easier access to alcohol. In addition, lowering the drinking age would undercut the gains made since 1988, when 21 became the minimum legal drinking age in all 50 states.

Since then, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, more than 18,000 lives have been saved by decreases in alcohol-related traffic accidents. Those accidents are the leading cause of death in young people.

"The research clearly shows that raising the legal drinking age to 21 saves lives," says Marty Harding, a prevention specialist and director of training and consultation for Hazelden. "When faced with a proposal to undo decades of this progress, why would we do it?"

Recent successes in decreasing college alcohol abuse indicate that the drinking age is not the core issue. Rather, it's the culture of heavy drinking that prevails at many schools.

William Cope Moyers, executive director of Hazelden's Center for Public Advocacy, a binge drinker in college and a recovering alcoholic, recalls that his life was shaped by the drinking culture on his campus.

"What happened to me was caused by the simple fact that alcohol was readily available in an environment where the checks and balances of home life suddenly had vanished," Moyers notes in a recent blog entry. "Drinking was part of the culture on campus, in the fraternity house and at mealtime. That it was legal only helped to foster that culture, especially among newly minted 18-year-old college freshmen like me.

"Twenty-one is not working, according to the college presidents' statement," Moyers adds. "But from my own experiences a long time ago, 18 never worked either."

The drinking culture on any campus is fueled by heavy marketing of cheap alcohol and easier access to the drug--two-for-one drink specials, discounts on beer pitchers, social events sponsored by the alcohol industry, and related tactics. When policymakers target such practices, students drink less.

The Task Force on College Drinking proposes several research-based strategies for changing the culture of heavy drinking:

• Increase the enforcement of current drinking age laws--in particular, through compliance checks on retail alcohol outlets.
• Increase the enforcement of other laws to reduce alcohol-impaired driving, including the current law that sets the blood alcohol limit for adult drivers to .08 percent.
• Use liquor licensing laws to restrict the number of stores that sell alcohol within one mile of a college campus.
• Increase excise taxes on alcoholic beverages, which increases the price of drinking. (A recent study found that excise taxes on alcohol in Alaska resulted in reductions in alcohol-related deaths; also, excise taxes on tobacco products have been effective at decreasing tobacco use among young people.)
• Set clear policies for making and serving alcoholic drinks--for example, standardizing the size of drinks, cutting off sales to intoxicated customers, checking age identification, and eliminating "last call" announcements.

These are among the options supported by another initiative named Support 21 Coalition, which calls for keeping the current legal drinking age. Members of this coalition include Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the American Medical Association, and nine other organizations. MADD (www.madd.org) offers several arguments to support the 21 age law, including the fact that a person's brain continues to develop in to his or her early 20s, and it is particularly vulnerable to damage from alcohol abuse during adolescence.

Any national debate about solutions to college drinking problems is welcome. Let that debate focus on creating new norms for alcohol use among young people--and ways to make the current laws work.

Published December 12, 2008