From Stephen Wallace
National chairman and chief executive officer of SADD Inc. (Students Against Destructive Decisions)

Behind the fusillade of faulty arguments proffered by the Amethyst Initiative in support of lowering the minimum legal drinking age to 18 lurks an inconvenient truth: Doing so would only exacerbate the current epidemic of underage drinking, further jeopardizing young lives at a critical juncture in their physical, social and emotional development.

What we know is that alcohol is already used by young people more frequently and more heavily than all other drugs combined and that the average age for teens to start drinking is 13. Bad news considering that the earlier one starts to drink, the more likely it is he or she will experience alcohol problems later in life.

Add to those sobering statistics the fact that close to 1.5 million college students are killed, injured or assaulted each year as the result of alcohol and you can see why a rallying cry to maintain the current law can be heard across the land.

Most think it’s a bad idea
Lined up against the small band of college presidents publicly endorsing the Amethyst debate is a broad swath of citizens, experts, and public servants. According to an ABC News poll, 78 percent of Americans do not believe that lowering the minimum legal drinking age is such a good idea. Neither do the American Medical Association, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, National Institutes of Health, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, and the U.S. Congress, to name but a few.

Amethyst acolytes argue, however, that a lower minimum legal drinking age will permit parents to teach their teens to drink responsibly before they head off to college – when their professors can pick up where Mom and Dad left off, perhaps offering students a glass of red wine over a meal of pasta, as suggested by one college president.

Uh huh.

First of all, the experiment of promoting responsible drinking at home has been an unmitigated failure. According to SADD’s Teens Today research, more than half of teens who say their parents allow them to drink at home report that they also drink with their friends, compared with just 14 percent of kids whose parents do not allow them to drink.

Further, it seems unlikely — if not folly — to believe that binge-drinking college students are going to suddenly reverse course and engage in more civilized drinking simply because they can do it “out in the open.”

And even if they did, this argument bypasses important scientific evidence of the deleterious effects of alcohol on rapidly maturing adolescent and young adult brains.

Success in Wisconsin
No doubt, dealing with the problem of underage and binge drinking is a complicated, arduous task. But there are, in fact, strategies that seem to be working — especially those that track the National Academy of Sciences’ call for a coordinated, consistent approach at all levels of society.

Such has been the case at the University of Rhode Island, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, moved aggressively to crack down on underage drinking, and at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, which realized a drop in high-risk drinking among first-year college students from 61 percent in 2005 to 43 percent in 2007.

This debate is important to the future of young lives already at risk from the multiple mixed messages they absorb every day from a culture — and media — that glamorizes drinking, not to mention other risky behaviors often linked to alcohol. So, it’s not the discussion that is discouraging but rather a predetermined prescription by some that comes precipitously close to reversing years of progress in understanding and addressing underage drinking and the thousands of lives it affects — or ends — each year.

And all in the interest of ignoring yet another inconvenient truth.