Twenty-One Is The New Eighteen

A graph in a story in yesterday's Strib on the dangers of binge drinking on your twenty-first birthday and what people are trying to do to minimize the risks caught my eye:

Twenty-one-year-olds think they're invincible and they can do crazy things and get away with it," said Ed Ehlinger, director of the University of Minnesota's Boynton Health Service. "The 21st birthday is probably the riskiest time. More kids get in trouble on that day than any other day of their 21st year."They are now legal and there is a lot of pressure to celebrate this big event. They intellectually know that alcohol can kill you, but they don't internalize it and they do respond to the peer pressure."

We're talking twenty-one-year-olds, right? I can understand peer pressure and feeling invincible when you're eighteen, but shouldn't you have matured past most of that by the time you hit twenty-one? It wasn't that long ago when an average twenty-one year old might have already served a stint in the military, be married with a child (or one on the way), and be holding down a regular full-time job.

So what's changed? Perhaps part of it is the expectations we now set. When you make the drinking age twenty-one, you're sending a message that people can't be trusted with controlling their drinking until that age. You set the stage for abuse and misuse of alcohol up until that point (and after) and create an allure of the mystery of the forbidden fruit.

Instead of trying to come up with a largely arbitrary age (why twenty-one and not twenty or twenty-two?) when you let people drink legally, why not make it the same age that we legally consider people adults, eighteen? But instead of making it a milestone for being able to drink as much as you want, let's return it to an event that carries with it added responsibility along with its freedoms.

You're eighteen. It's time to grow up and act like an adult. It's time to be serious about your life. You can drink and have fun, but you'll be expected to drink like a adult.

Part of this would involve introducing alcohol at an earlier age in controlled settings. There's no reason a sixteen-year-old shouldn't be taught how to enjoy a glass of wine or beer with the family at dinner. Alcohol shouldn't be a taboo and drinking shouldn't be all about getting loaded and acting stupid. Kids should be taught both the positive side and the peril of drinking. The message shouldn't be all or nothing, that you're either a teetotaler or an alcoholic. The path of moderation is one that far too few Americans discover until well past the time they should have.

What we're doing now is clearly not working. You can further infantilize society by move the drinking age out again, you can prohibit people from drinking at midnight on their twenty-first birthday (as Minnesota does), and you can warn people all you want about the dangers of binge drinking. But until you change the culture of drinking in America and teach people how to drink responsibly before they reach adulthood, it's not going to make a difference.