Some support campaign to lower drinking age
Daniel Bloom, Clarion Staff Writer
Issue date: 10/22/08 Section: News
Recently, a movement has taken root across the U.S. that argues if a man or woman is old enough to fight a gruesome war, they're old enough to have a drink. Organizations such as Choose Responsibility and the National Youth Rights Association are at the forefront of the debate.
"If there was gunfire coming from a window, I shot into that window and made sure nothing was coming back out at me. One time, there was an RPG shooter shooting at me. I had to shoot the position-caller before I could shoot the actual shooter. I was 20," said Rocky, who fought in the Iraq war, and was trudging through the scorching sand and shooting m16's at enemy combatants in the Iraqi desert at 20 years old.
Choose Responsibility, under the direction of John M. McCardell Jr., previously the president of Middlebury College in Virginia, has already received signatures from 123 different college presidents asking legislators to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18 and to instate alcohol licensing programs for men and women within that age group.
Why are so many educators proponents of the movement? They believe that the goal of the drinking age legislation, enacted state-by-state throughout the 80's and early 90's, was to prevent irresponsible
drinking.
"It does not reduce drinking. It has simply put young adults at greater risk," says McCardell. This, they contend, is because rather than reduce drinking, it has driven alcohol consumption into under-supervised environments.
The federal government says there may be something to that argument. In a National Survey on Drug Use and Health conducted in 2005, 85 percent of 20-year-old Americans reported that they had used alcohol, two-fifths of which claimed to have binged.
Opponents of the movement, Mother's Against Drunk Driving (MADD) being the most prominent, herald the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study that found that 22,798 lives have been saved because of the higher drinking age.
Proponents challenge the study's findings, pointing to questionable corollary evidence supporting the figure.
A Gallup poll released in August found that 77 percent of Americans oppose lowering the drinking age.
"If there was gunfire coming from a window, I shot into that window and made sure nothing was coming back out at me. One time, there was an RPG shooter shooting at me. I had to shoot the position-caller before I could shoot the actual shooter. I was 20," said Rocky, who fought in the Iraq war, and was trudging through the scorching sand and shooting m16's at enemy combatants in the Iraqi desert at 20 years old.
Choose Responsibility, under the direction of John M. McCardell Jr., previously the president of Middlebury College in Virginia, has already received signatures from 123 different college presidents asking legislators to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18 and to instate alcohol licensing programs for men and women within that age group.
Why are so many educators proponents of the movement? They believe that the goal of the drinking age legislation, enacted state-by-state throughout the 80's and early 90's, was to prevent irresponsible
drinking.
"It does not reduce drinking. It has simply put young adults at greater risk," says McCardell. This, they contend, is because rather than reduce drinking, it has driven alcohol consumption into under-supervised environments.
The federal government says there may be something to that argument. In a National Survey on Drug Use and Health conducted in 2005, 85 percent of 20-year-old Americans reported that they had used alcohol, two-fifths of which claimed to have binged.
Opponents of the movement, Mother's Against Drunk Driving (MADD) being the most prominent, herald the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study that found that 22,798 lives have been saved because of the higher drinking age.
Proponents challenge the study's findings, pointing to questionable corollary evidence supporting the figure.
A Gallup poll released in August found that 77 percent of Americans oppose lowering the drinking age.
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