Rethinking the drinking age of 21America's alcohol law has led to increased fatalities and a culture of binge drinking at colleges. It must be re-examined
- guardian.co.uk,
- Friday August 22 2008
In the academic world, as in the world at large, there are data, statistics, charts, correlations and formulae. These methods, of course, have great value. They allow us to take a macro view of significant public problems and see patterns that can lead to informed decision-making.
Such an approach has informed much of our public policy on the subject of alcohol over the past 25 years. We have studied and restudied traffic fatalities, rates of binge drinking and brain development. Even when the findings are inconsistent, even contradictory, we have tried to frame policies whose effects can be best measured by more data, statistics, charts, correlations and formulae.
But also in the academic world, as in the world at large, behind every individual statistic is a human story, and sometimes those stories, individually and even cumulatively, challenge what the supposedly objective data appear to show.
This reality, too, has informed how we view alcohol and its effects, and it is this increasingly frequent conflict - between what science purports to show us and what experience in fact demonstrates - that we might locate the current debate over the effects of America's 21-year-old drinking age.
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