Baggage Check: Age-Old Argument

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Dr. Andrea Bonior dives into the world of psychology.

THE Amethyst Initiative — not a hint-dropping ploy by someone who wants earrings for her birthday, but rather a movement by college presidents — has been gaining momentum and media attention recently. Leaders of more than one hundred American universities, many of them quite esteemed, have banded together in the interest of rethinking the legal drinking age in the United States.

The fact that a young adult can vote and fight in wars several years before they are legally allowed to kick back with a beer has long been a target of hypocrisy charges. Less clear is the exact role that the drinking age has when it comes to on binge-drinking on college campuses, a tremendous and growing problem that is the impetus for the Amethyst Initiative's existence.

It's hard to garner real empirical evidence for what would happen if the drinking age was lowered; you can't exactly put an entire country in a lab (can you imagine the smell?). Nonetheless, opinions are strong on both sides of the issue, and it's not just college presidents who have a stake in this, but parents deciding if, when, and how to expose their children to alcohol. Many believe that, like with the proverbial forbidden fruit, alcohol will be less likely to be overindulged in if teenagers have grown up with tastes of it all along, or, if for the 18-20 year-olds in college, imbibing moderately is not deemed illicit. Certainly, all-or-none thinking is a risk for many; it's not hard to imagine a student saying, If I'm already at risk for getting arrested, I might as well go down with the ship and drink the rest of the keg. Others argue that the argument "They'll do it anyway, so we might as well make it okay" is no way to make rules for the health and safety of young adults.

Neither intuition is yet backed by much scientific scrutiny. And certainly, as anyone who's hung out in bars in Eastern European night clubs knows, citizens of countries whose drinking ages are lower are not exactly immune from getting blasted to smithereens. Of course, as with any risky substance, the holy grail is balance and moderation: the real debate is what role Uncle Sam can have in getting us there.

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