About 75 students gathered Thursday in the University Student Commons to hear John
M. McCardell Jr., president emeritus of Middlebury College, discuss U.S. alcohol regulations,
which he said are “bad social policy and terrible law(s).”
McCardell presented information about Choose Responsibility, a nonprofit organization he
founded this year. Choose Responsibility’s main focus, he said, is to work toward legislation
that will lower the legal drinking age from 21 to 18. Choose Responsibility thinks lowering
the drinking age will bring social reform.
“Alcohol is a reality in the lives of young adults,”
McCardell said. “We can try to legislate it away, but
it will still be a reality.”
The laws McCardell hopes to change include
Virginia’s Alcohol Beverage Control Act, which prohibits
anyone younger than 21 to consume, purchase or
possess any alcohol beverage.
Students younger than 21 are further governed by
Virginia’s Zero Tolerance law, which targets underage
drinking by punishing violators who bear any trace of
alcohol with the loss of the violator’s driver’s license
for a year, 50 hours of mandatory community service
or fines up to $2,500.
McCardell said each state has the privilege to decide
if it wants to uphold this legal drinking age.
According to the 1984 National Minimum Drinking
Age Act, each state was required to raise the legal age
for purchasing or possessing alcohol to 21. Each state
had the right to set the drinking age differently, but a
condition this law enacts is that 10 percent of its state
highway funding will be withheld as a result.
“This is called incentive,” McCardell said.
McCardell said statistics show safety belts and
airbags save many more lives than the legal drinking
age laws.
Safety belts and air bags saved about 18,000 lives
in 2004, while the legal drinking age saved less than
2,000, according to data from the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration.
McCardell said binge drinking is what causes
deaths. According to McCardell, 18- to 21-year-olds’
binge drinking increased more than 56 percent between 1993 and 2004. According to
the Institutes of Medicine, 90 percent of all alcohol consumed by underage drinkers is
consumed while binge drinking.
“Those fatalities . aren’t happening out in the open,” McCardell said.
In addition to lowering the drinking age to 18, McCardell proposed providing focused
education classes that give an “alcohol license” to those ages 18 through 20 who have
completed the classes. This license would give them the ability to purchase, possess and
consume alcohol.
“We need to revisit alcohol education,” McCardell said. “We are never going to eradicate
underage drinking, but maybe we can provide some incentives to prevent it.”
Choose Responsibility states on its Web site that allowing 18- to 20-year-olds to choose
when and how to consume alcohol, after proper training, teaches them
responsible, lawful behavior and gives them appropriate responsibility for
their age group. McCardell said that if any alcohol license holder would be
found violating the laws, the license would be revoked.
McCardell said he hopes to have the 10 percent incentive removed. Choose
Responsibility is lobbying Congress and aiming for a 2009 hearing of its
proposed legislation.
“We see this as a serious issue,” McCardell said. “People are beginning
to pay attention to us and to the message we communicate.”
McCardell said he knows it’s strange for a former college president, at his
stage in life, to decide to “embark on a fool’s errand” by founding Choose
Responsibility.
“I find it very disappointing … (that) you only looked at alcohol versus
driving,” one female attendee said. “There’s significant data (you did not
look at).”
She said McCardell failed to address well-founded scientific evidence about
the harmful physical and psychological effects from alcohol consumption,
especially for young adults.
Another attendee disagreed with McCardell, asking if his education plan was
similar to giving birth control to children who will not practice abstinence.
“People are going to underage drink anyway, so we should educate them?”
he asked rhetorically.
McCardell responded to disagreeing attendees by saying he knew not
everyone would agree with his plan.
“You may or may not agree,” he said. “We are not an advocate of drinking.
We are advocates of choosing responsibility.”
McCardell is writing a book he said will be published in the fall of 2008.
He encouraged students to visit the Choose Responsibility Web site and get
involved by commenting on its blog: http://chooseresponsibility.org.
—
—
What you think?
VCU students speak their mind
“I feel if a person is
old enough to make
crucial decisions
like whether to go
into the military and
risk dying for our
country, or choosing
who the next
president is going to
be, then they should be able to make the
choice of whether they want to drink or
not. . If everything else is set at 18, why is
drinking special?”
– LaVonna Martin, junior psychology major
“In the United States,
with the age at 21,
kids try to hide from
their parents .
and they’ll go to a
party and drink. .
In some ways there
could be a benefit (to
lowering the age to
18). . But I don’t think just dropping the
age to 18 would help (solve all the issues).”
– Sam Corrie, senior mass communications major
What do you think? Let us know!
Go to commonwealthtimes.com to write on our
message boards or e-mail a letter to the editor at
editor@commonwealthtimes.com.