The fact that an 18 year old can serve in the United States military, with all of the extraordinary risks and responsibilities associated with that decision, and then return to Wisconsin and be legally prohibited from drinking a beer, is absurd.
Three Republican lawmakers have introduced a bill that would lower Wisconsin’s drinking age from 21 to 19. One of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Adam Jarchow, says he chose age 19 to avoid the prospect of 18-year-old high school students drinking.
The legal drinking age in Wisconsin has not always been 21. For example, between 1972 and 1984, the legal drinking age was 18. From 1984 until 1986, the legal drinking age was 19, before going up to 21 on Sept.1, 1986.
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In 1984, President Reagan signed a law, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. The law effectively coerced states into raising their legal drinking ages to 21 by threatening the loss of a significant percentage of its federal highway funding if theydid not do so.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, if Wisconsin now passed a law to change its legal drinking age to 19, we would lose 53.7 million dollars in federal highway funding. This is the biggest impediment to a lower drinking age in Wisconsin.
But if the federal highway funding were not at issue, should we lower the drinking age?
We allow 18 year olds to engage in lots of behavior that can be risky. For example, we allow 18 year olds to have sex and purchase and use firearms. We allow 18 year olds to engage in other adult activities, such as voting, working, getting married and serving on a jury.
Overindulgence in alcohol certainly has disastrous effects on many of our citizens and produces great societal costs, including injury and death. But the fact that car accidents, injuries and fatalities sometimes occur because of alcohol consumption does not necessarily mean that lowering the drinking age would cause a measurable increase in those areas.
Groups opposed to lowering the drinking age often make the point that drunk driving fatalities went down after the federal government passed the 1984 law regarding a 21 drinking age. While it is true that fatalities decreased, fatalities had already been declining since the 1970s, long before the 1984 law went into effect.
Other countries with lower drinking ages than the United States, such as Canada, saw similar declines in alcohol-related traffic fatalities. Many European countries, with lower age restrictions on alcohol, do not have nearly the same societal issues with binge drinking and traffic deaths that we do in the United States.
The CATO Institute published a 2009 report and study by Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University and Elina Tetelbaum of Yale Law School titled “Did the Federal Drinking Age Law Save Lives?” The report reads, in part:
“The results of our analysis are striking. Virtually all the lifesaving effect of the [21 legal drinking age law] came from a few states that adopted the restriction before the [1984] federal law was passed, not from the larger number of states that adopted the restriction under federal pressure. Further, any life-saving effect in the early-adopting states was temporary, occurring largely in the first few years after adoption...Thus the [law] did not produce its main claimed benefit overall, and any such benefit was in precisely those states where no federal coercion occurred.”
It is no secret that the overwhelming majority of college students, many of whom are under 21, drink alcohol on a regular basis. According to a 2001 analysis by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, underage drinking accounted for a staggering 17.5 percent of total consumer spending on alcohol nationwide.
As a University of Wisconsin-Madison alumnus, I can personally attest to the completely un-shocking fact that the vast majority of students under the age of 21 drink alcohol. The students who illegally drink often do so at unregulated house parties in basem*nts where unsafe binge drinking occurs and where there is little protection from overdosing.
If the drinking age were lowered and these students drank at regulated bars and taverns, where bouncers and staff can stop serving obviously highly intoxicated people, it would mean less students at the more dangerous, unregulated house binge drinking parties.
The federal government should allow states to lower their drinking ages to the nearly universal age of adulthood, 18, without the coercive threat of losing millions of dollars in federal highway funding. The fears espoused by opponents of this move are often overstated.
Adults ought to be able to make adult decisions, such as whether to consume alcohol.
Casey Hoff is a criminal defense attorneybased in Sheboygan.
