Editorial, 08/19/2007 - Time to revive drinking-age debate

How many lives — of drinkers and their traffic victims — might be saved by no-nonsense, no-abstinence-preaching education about drinking?

Last Sunday’s Parade magazine, part of The New Mexican’s news package, carried a cover story calculated to get the libertarian juices flowing. The article’s headline: “Should the Drinking Age Be Lowered?”

That’s a question certain to get a rise out of neo-prohibitionists whose influence in Washington is, for now, enormous. How dare anyone even think such a thing when drunk-driving fatalities are declining — and kids, who caused so many of them, are running scared from rafts of anti-alcohol laws?

But are the traffic-fatality numbers being lowered by prohibition — or by seat belts, air bags and the prevalence of police checkpoints? And has the Reagan-era repeal of a majority of states’ lower drinking age really reduced youngsters’ drinking — or have we created a society of solitary teens binge-drinking, facing all the dangers that go with heavy over-indulgence?

More and more 18- to 20-year-olds are being hospitalized for alcohol poisoning — and some aren’t that lucky; you’ll find them in graveyards. Natural selection, some may scoff. As for 21-year-olds, they’re the ones involved in the most drunk-driving fatalities — so that age doesn’t hold up as one of maturity. In fact, it’s an indication that, once free of parents who’ve been spared the duty of teaching responsible drinking, some people go hog-wild.

How many lives — of drinkers and their traffic victims — might be saved by no-nonsense, no-abstinence-preaching education about drinking? Responsible drinking could be emphasized; so could the tragedies that too often go with irresponsible drinking. Add to that an honest look at alcohol’s short- and long-term effects, and it could be a credible and heeded program.

Let such courses be the first step toward “drinking licenses” — for which a youngster with a high-school diploma would become eligible at age 18 if he or she hasn’t been convicted of underage drinking. That would be incentive for many a teen to avoid the stuff, or at least go lightly on it.

B-b-but if 18-year-olds can drink, goes the thinking in vogue, won’t they share with their 17- and 16-year-old schoolmates? Well, holding a permit, and risking its loss, might avoid that. So might a requirement that 18-year-olds drink under adult supervision. That would allow college freshmen legal beer if 21-year-old juniors or seniors are on hand. As for keeping the quaffing to a low roar, there’s that threat of a pulled permit. As things stand now, frosh wheedle seniors into buying ’em hard stuff for unsupervised binges.

Lest newly enfranchised drinkers be tempted to buy bunches of booze for their younger friends, let that permit be a photo-ID, electronically keyed one — with a punch-card effect limiting purchases to, say, a 12-pack a week.

Congress would be the ideal leader in a movement like this, since it was Congress that pre-empted states’ rights in raising the drinking age. But how likely is that?

Might our state Legislature, holding the liquor lobby scrupulously at bay, debate the merits of a lower drinking age — and the demerits of the dangerous drinking patterns the law is encouraging in some young people today?

Maybe. Just maybe. State regulators have applied today’s laws in such a gung-ho manner that some of our senators and representatives should be wondering aloud what kind of police state they’ve wrought. Kids can’t do grocery-store checking-out of customers buying alcohol. Licensing-law enforcers troop through bars like something out of World War II movies. Still, today’s federally forced law goes more than merely flouted in New Mexico; it’s scorned as well — and disrespect for one law can spread to another. Could this be a case for the action-oriented Think New Mexico?

Eighteen is old enough for jury service. It’s old enough to join the military. It’s old enough to be off to college, often enough to live away from home. It’s old enough to contract debt. Those and other realities led 29 states to lower the drinking age back in the 1960s.

Since then, drunkenness, especially drunkenness behind the wheel, has been cast — properly — as the behavior of social pariahs.

The time is ripe for turning that comparatively fresh public opinion into educated thought about — and action on — drinking.