From the AP:
College presidents from about 100 of the nation’s best-known universities, including Duke, Dartmouth, and Ohio State, are calling on lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age to 18 from 21, saying current laws actually encourage dangerous binge drinking on campus.
The movement called the Amethyst Initiative began quietly recruiting presidents more than a year ago to provoke national debate about the drinking age.
“This is a law that is routinely evaded,” a former president of Middlebury College in Vermont who started the organization, John McCardell, said. “It is a law that the people at whom it is directed believe is unjust and unfair and discriminatory.”
I’m all for this. I think the increase in the drinking age (which increased from 18 to 20 just before I turned 18 and from 20 to 21 just before I turned 20) was a stupid idea, but with the greatest of intentions, of course.
I can’t see it ever happening, though.
MADD is way too strong.
And, no state rep or senator is going to support it.
And, we’ll lose federal funds.
Bar owners might like it.
The alcohol industry would like it, but could never support it publicly.
Police? Probably hate it. But be serious, no one’s not drinking who wants to. They just do it in private. I think.
Source: College Presidents Want Lower Drinking Age – By Justin Pope, Associated Press, by way of the New York Sun
