Research Supports Current Legal Drinking Age of 21

As some of you may know, over the past two years about 100 college presidents and administrators in the U.S. have been supporting the Amethyst Initiative, which advocates lowering the legal drinking age to 18 years. The argument is that if the legal drinking age is lowered, young adults, specifically those on college campuses, won't be so tempted to binge drink. Well, a recent study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs recently found that lowering the drinking age did NOT lower the amount of binge drinking on college campuses. Hooray for research! Keep reading for the full story from CADCA:

A group of researchers have successfully debunked the myth that lowering the drinking age would reduce underage drinking, at least amongst college students.

Prompted by speculation by the two-year-old Amethyst Initiative— a group of more than 100 college presidents and other high-ranking administrators who want to reduce the Minimum Legal Drinking Age from 21 to 18, claiming that reducing the legal drinking age could result in less alcohol use on college campuses—researchers at BioMedware Corporation in Ann Arbor, Mich. extended the model previously developed by Dr. Richard Scribner of the Louisiana State University School of Public Health to conclude that lowering the drinking age would not cause students to drink less.

The study, “Heavy Episodic Drinking on College Campuses: Does Changing the Legal Drinking Age Make a Difference?” published this month in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, used data available from 32 U.S. campuses nationwide. Researchers took a cross-section geographically, some were primarily commuter campuses, some students lived in dorms and some campuses and even the surrounding communities were “dry,” researcher Robert G. Rommel says.

Lead author, Jawail Rasul, Ph.D., says, “Our goal was to reduce binge or “heavy episodic drinking” among college students.”

Since 2006, the group of epidemiologists and mathematicians has been working on modeling student drinking in terms of drinking types (abstainers, social, “heavy episodic” and problem) and reasons students transition between these types—processes of individual risk, social interactions and social norms. The group had built up a model where campuses are characterized by alcohol availability, which they call “wetness.”

The team, including Dr. Scribner, who returned for the new analysis, organized the underage students from the legal-age students on campus and assigned them different “wetnesses” (higher for legal age). They also altered the social interactions between social and “heavy episodic drinkers” for underage drinkers to model the misperception effect emphasized by the Amethyst Initiative. They then measured the effects of policy change by focusing on total “heavy episodic drinkers.”

Researchers discovered that the wetness increase on the campuses for the expanded legal age drinkers always outweighed the effects of misperceptions.

“The imbalance became even worse for drier campuses with strong enforcement of underage restrictions, where the Amethyst initiative says the misperceptions are the strongest,” Dr. Rasul says.

Authors say other alcohol-related problems such as impaired driving, tend to increase as access increases, as well.

Rasul concluded, “Since there was no evidence that high misperceptions of peer drinking are the norm, it was highly unlikely that lowering the drinking age would reduce student “heavy episodic” or binge drinking.”