Lower drinking age to 18? Look at costs

Any time you talk about setting age limits for behavior, you've got a fight on your hands.

You can drive in most states at age 16, fight for your country and vote at 18, but not drink until 21. Some people don't see this as logical, which is why clear-eyed and sober (pun intended) examinations are so important.

Thankfully, we got some of that on the alcohol front recently.

Three years have passed since a lot of college presidents and chancellors flashed on the national stage by signing the Amethyst Initiative, which encouraged the nation to rethink the 21-year-old age limit for legally consuming alcohol.

I use the word "flash" because that's how the media works these days. A few stories (elections, war) have staying power. The rest, whether it be nuclear meltdowns in Japan or tornadoes in the Midwest) flash momentarily if they have enough of what it takes to get people to raise eyebrows and talk for a while. Then they quickly disappear back into the darkness.

We're lucky the Amethyst Initiative just flashed, even though it continues as a cause. So far, the number of signers is up to 136, which is just a few more than the 115 when I first wrote about this in 2008 (Westminster College President Michael Bassis was the only local college president to sign).

Why are we lucky? A new study by a pair of economists, Christopher Carpenter of the University of California at Irvine and Carlos Dobkin at the University of California at Santa Cruz, adds a bit of perspective.

The college presidents believe that the 21-year-old limit, in the words of the initiative's web site, "is not working, and, specifically, that it has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking on their campuses."

Because under-aged college students have to go into the shadows to drink, the thinking goes, they tend to do so irresponsibly. Lower the age to 18 and you also would reduce binge drinking and save lives.

Which may sound good, except that it probably isn't true. Carpenter and Dobkin found instead the result likely would be an increase in deaths among people in the 18-to-20 age group. Their study, "The minimum legal drinking age and public health," was published in the spring issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. (To read the full report, go to pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.2.133).