Ready for a Lower Drinking Age

So you’re 18 and you want a beer? The federal government isn’t stopping you. A constitutional amendment set the national drinking age to 18 after prohibition ended in the 1930s. The 21-year-old age requirement started with Candy Lightner and the Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaign of the 1980s. After Lightner lost her daughter in a drunk driving accident, she lobbied to raise the drinking age. In a rickety compromise, Congress agreed to subsidize transportation exclusively for states that mandated a minimum drinking age of 21. Not surprisingly, 48 out of 50 states complied, traffic fatalities plummeted, and lawmakers dusted off their hands, well pleased with themselves.

Unfortunately, legal doctrine does not age like a fine wine, and 30 years later, I think it’s a failure in principle and in practice.

The philosophical implications of the law disgust me. We live in the only country where you can be drafted before you can have a draft, where it is easier to shoot automatic rifles than Don Perón. Moreover, the illegality gives alcohol a special appeal among underage drinkers, while their international counterparts have accepted booze as an everyday pleasure, no more thrilling or badass than cute shoes or Netflix.

More importantly, the 21-year-old age minimum fails to accomplish its already dubious purpose. Shell out $100 for a fake and you can finagle your way past most bouncers, bartenders, and BevMo cashiers. Even if you can’t afford a fake, friends or parents will usually gift you alcohol, and come Friday night, you can bet the fraternity brothers won’t ask for your license.

While an underage Cal student looking to turn up will run into more University restrictions than federal laws, these restrictions exist because our school, as a public university, must conform to state law. Any change must therefore come top-down from California or Congress. And a change must come, because the legal drinking age of 21 endangers the health and well-being of students in the Berkeley community.

After the deaths last semester linked — at least by the media — to binge drinking and rage culture, the campus community may shy away from the topic of alcohol in general, much less a proposal to reduce the drinking age; however, a lot of the risks that lead to life-threatening situations come not only from alcohol, but from the culture of illicit partying that our ridiculous drinking age has created.

When underage students can’t buy alcohol at an event, like a football game, a concert, or a party at a club, they simply pre-game harder, cramming a night’s worth of alcohol into a few hours. This huge intake of alcohol in such a short time span poses health threats that the same volume, spread out over several hours, does not.

Students without apartments also lack the option to stay at home or go to a bar. For the most part, 18, 19, and 20-year-old students living in the dorms can only obtain alcohol at the raging parties thrown by fraternities. It is no big secret that people drink on fraternity row. The University knows it, parents know it, and students from all walks of life know it. Even as campus policy prohibits drinking, freshmen are required to take an online Alcohol Education course that reads more like a how-to manual that offers valuable advice like “one ounce of cognac counts as one standard drink.” What’s cognac? What does an ounce look like? One standard drink means how drunk, exactly?

Since dorm-room drinking is expressly prohibited, curious freshman can’t experiment with alcohol in a safe, contained environment; they turn to the frats to answer their questions. Fraternity parties in turn become less controlled because many of the people there have only begun to try alcohol and don’t know themselves as well. This carefree, uninformed, haphazard drinking culture can quickly tailspin into life-threatening scenarios.

Today’s drinking age also complicates emergency situations. No one should hesitate to call 911, but no one thinks clearly when their friend is passed out cold, clammy, or coughing up bile.

What if her parents find out? What if I get her in trouble, and she gets mad at me? She already got  busted last month. What if there’s a fine? Can she afford this?

Concerns about police action, university prosecution, legal fees de-incentivize lifesaving decisions in scenarios that demand immediate action.

In a less drastic vein, citations for underage drinking can find their way onto a student’s permanent record, threatening their chances of landing a job and jeopardizing their chance of earning or keeping a scholarship. Write ups from law enforcement can also shut down Greek houses or co-ops; because underage drinking violates state law, it constitutes a huge insurance liability that most alumni oversight bodies (Cal fraternity, sorority, and co-op houses belong to panels of each organization’s alumni and not to its current residents) will not tolerate.

Most importantly, the law creates an unsafe environment for young women. Without the freedom to drink at home, underage women cannot always choose their drinks or drinking buddies.

Flashback to freshman year. Friday night: my friends and I are looking to take the edge off after a long and strenuous week. I’d settle for a glass or two of red wine, Netflix, and maybe drunk Taboo, but with our Draconian RAs prowling the halls every fifteen minutes, we decide not to break open the fancy merlot I’ve stashed in my dresser. Instead, we slip into glittery tanks and slinky black skirts, heels, makeup, fake eyelashes, and lip stain. We primp our hair, kiss the mirror, and wobble toward frat row.

As a sophomore, I know how to navigate the party scene. I’ve figured out my limits, I know what drinks will make me sick. I can tell the paw-handed freshmen that if he wants to dance like that, he can go gyrate on the wall. I can tell that dashing, wild-eyed senior that I’m “down to make out, but that’s it.” My freshman self choked on those words like she did her first swig of Vitali.

Immature, naïve, and desperately curious, the cookie-cutter freshman girl will spend her freshman year in strange, male-dominated drinking environments. While a girl is never “asking for it” if she gets drunk, predators are more likely to abuse her if she can’t defend herself, and fear of legal repercussion might prevent a survivor from reporting a sexual assault that happened against a backdrop of illegal drinking.

Let the administration preach about “just not drinking at all,” but the Berkeley pressure cooker hardly encourages temperance. Students are going to drink, and the  state drinking age compounds, rather than alleviates, the dangers of drinking at college.  Increased fines for driving under the influence would probably deter drunk driving as effectively without interfering with, and even endangering, the lives of legal adults. Whether the Cal campus works out a specific arrangement with the state, or whether the state reduces the drinking age to a more reasonable 18-year-old minimum, the current drinking age of 21 has proven ineffective in the college environment and demands reevaluation.