21 Turns 30

Thirty years ago this month, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act was enacted in July 1984, which coerced the states into raising their drinking ages to 21 by 1987 or lose 10% of their federal highway funding.  While Ronald Wilson Reagan (666) was originally against such a fascist power grab, he was nonetheless  persuaded by Candy Lightner and the rest of MADD to go along with it, and of course 1984 was an election year, after all.  While some states put up a fight and challenged it in the 1987 Supreme Court case South Dakota v. Dole, they lost, and all 50 states and DC eventually capitulated by 1988.  Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands, however, decided to keep their drinking age at 18 despite the highway funding penalty, although Guam eventually raised it to 21 in 2010 as well.  And as they say, the rest is history.

So what has changed in the past three decades?  Public opinion sure has not, according to a recent study.  Americans appear to be just as prudish about the issue as they were 30 years ago, with 74% of adults being against lowering the drinking age to 18.  This is what we are up against, people.  However, other things have changed since 1984.  Alcohol-related traffic deaths are way down for a variety of reasons, such as safer cars and roads, tougher drunk driving laws, tougher enforcement, better education, and the fact that drunk driving is no longer anywhere near as socially acceptable as it once was.  Teen drinking is also at a record low as well.  While the pro-21 crowd likes to credit the 21 drinking age for these trends, that argument rings hollow considering that Canada saw similar or greater trends despite NOT raising the drinking age to 21.   Also, several studies cast doubt on the idea that raising the drinking age actually saved any lives, most notably Miron and Tetelbaum (2009), which found that any supposed lifesaving effect was essentially just a mirage all along.  But logic has never exactly been the pro-21 crowd's forte, to put it mildly.  And there is still that ever-popular moral panic about teen drinking these days, undoubtedly due in part to the idea that while young people are drinking less today than they did 30-40 years ago, apparently the more they do when they do.  Or something.  Thus, that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

So after three decades of the greatest alcohol policy failure since Prohibition, can young Americans FINALLY have their civil liberties back now?  Apparently not, according to the neo-prohibitionists.  FEH.

Baby Boomers are Not the Best Model for Today's Youth

Essentially all American studies of the effects of raising or lowering the legal drinking age were based on a single generation:  the Baby Boomers.  And the latest junk science study is no exception.  Remember, many states lowered their drinking ages in the early 1970s and raised them to 21 in the 1980s, so that was the generation most affected by such changes.  But there is a fundamental question that is rarely asked, especially by the pro-21 crowd:  Could the Baby Boomers (i.e. those born from 1946 to 1964) have been an exceptional generation that was actually affected perversely by the changes in the drinking age?  That is, could the effects that some studies found actually be the opposite of what would have happened for other generations?

We at Twenty-One Debunked believe that the answer is yes, that they are a unique generation that was likely affected differently (if at all) by the changes in the drinking age, and that studies that only look at them are outdated and obsolete for determining the supposed effects of lowering the drinking age in 2013.   There are several reasons for this:

• Baby Boomers came of age at a time when America's drinking culture was very different, a fact that was true regardless of the drinking age.
• Baby Boomers (and early Gen-X) were more affected by lead poisoning that any other generation that is still alive today, thanks to the leaded gasoline (and paint) that was used when they were children.  Lead is a neurotoxin that causes serious and often permanent damage to the developing brain, resulting in reduced intelligence, increased impulsivity, and arrested development.  And changes in crime statistics and standardized test scores verify this fact.
• Baby Boomers were exposed to numerous other developmental toxins as well:  mercury, PCBs, DDT, dioxins, fluoride, and many others.   And they did lots of drugs as well.
• Baby Boomers, for whatever reason, were apparently raised to be rather narcissistic and self-important as a rule.
• Baby Boomers, regardless of the drinking age in their home states when they were growing up, succeeded in becoming the drunkest and druggiest generation in American history (at least since the Founding Fathers), yet they have the audacity and hubris to overwhelmingly support the 21 drinking age and other anti-youth laws.
• And most ironically of all, the Baby Boomers also became the wealthiest generation in American history despite screwing up the economy for everyone else (to say nothing about what is happening to our planet).

That is not to say that all Baby Boomers are reflected in these facts, since a rather large number of them defied these trends.  But enough of them were so as to call into question the wisdom of using that generation as a model for the effects of policy changes on today's youth.  And we certainly should not continue punishing today's youth for the sins of their Boomer parents.  Perhaps some generations can indeed handle freedom better than others--and the best statistics are indeed more on the side of today's generation of young people.

Let America be America again, and lower the drinking age to 18.  If you're old enough to go to war, you're old enough to go to the bar.  'Nuff said.