Can you think of a country in which 80 percent of its citizens have committed a misdemeanor by the time they are in the 12th grade? If you thought of the United States, you are right! Before graduating from high school, 80 percent of Americans have drunk alcohol and 62.3 percent have been inebriated according to teenhelp.com.
Setting the legal drinking age at 21, the highest in the world, has made criminals out of an overwhelming majority. So what's the solution? Stricter enforcement of the law until people finally give in? This is the failing method the government has resorted to for the past two decades, and it is time for a new approach. It is time we caught up with the rest of the world and revised our failing alcohol policies.
So why is the U.S. unique in its unusually high drinking age? Advocates of the current drinking age often argue that starting at a younger age makes one more likely to become an alcoholic later in life. There might be some scientific truth to this.
However, alcoholism is a far greater problem in the U.S. than in other countries with more lenient alcohol policies.
As anthropologist Dwight Heath has pointed out, Italy and Spain report very low rates of alcohol dependence: less than 1 percent in Italy and 2.8 percent in Spain. In the U.S. the rate is 7.8 percent. What explains this alarmingly higher rate of alcohol dependence in the U.S.?
One answer is that because American teenagers are not allowed to legally drink, they are forced to do it in secret. Without adult supervision, it is obvious that a teenager will drink in excess. We wouldn't give 16 year-olds a driver's license without first teaching them to drive safely. Yet this is our approach to teenage drinking.
In France, teenagers often enjoy a glass of wine at the dinner table. Their first meeting with alcohol isn't at a binge-promoting frat party but rather under the watchful guidance of their parents.
"Kids who drank with their parents were about half as likely to say they had drunk alcohol in the past month and one-third as likely to say they had had five or more consecutive drinks in the previous two weeks," said Dwight Heath, a professor of Anthropology at Brown University, in an interview.
In the U.S. a parent can be imprisoned for allowing his teenager to drink at a party - a party that the teenager will be going to anyway.
Because American teenagers typically first encounter alcohol without adult supervision, the frequency of teenage alcohol abuse is staggering. The Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth reports that 96 percent of the alcohol drunk by 15 to 20 year-olds is consumed when the drinker is having five or more drinks at a time.
According to the Century Council, an organization aimed at fighting underage drinking, in 2006 40 percent of college students reported "binge-drinking" within two weeks of taking the survey. If we do not lower the drinking age altogether, we should, at a minimum, make it legal for parents to casually introduce their teenagers to alcohol.
The other argument that defenders of the current drinking age make is that teenagers should not be allowed to begin drinking at the same time they obtain their driver's license. They fear that teenagers will take advantage of the new freedoms at the same time. Although not limited to teenagers, in 2007 31.7 percent of traffic fatalities involved alcohol, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Several European countries have solved this problem by having a lower drinking age than driving age (the usual drinking age is 16 and the usual driving age is 18). By the time European teenagers can drive they are habituated and responsible.
As a result, the auto-fatality rate per capita in England is half that of the United States, according to Professor M.R. Franks of Southern University. The other thing that makes safe drinking possible in Europe is better public transportation. Perhaps, instead of fighting inevitable underage drinking, we should make it easier for citizens to avoid driving altogether by providing other means of transportation.
The lesson to be learned is the same lesson that we learned during Prohibition, when a Constitutional Amendment outlawing the sale and transportation of alcohol was enacted. Prohibition did not achieve its goal of deterring alcohol consumption, and instead a black market for alcohol thrived. Prohibition soon became the only Constitutional Amendment to ever be repealed.
The lesson, as Reason Magazine's writer Radley Balko points out, is: "State and local governments are far better at passing laws that reflect the values, morals and habits of their communities."
