The United States is one of only four nations with a legal drinking age as high as 21. The others are Malaysia, South Korea, and Ukraine. As yet there's no organized campaign to lower the standard in the United States.
The current nationwide legal drinking age of 21 was set by the U.S. Congress in 1984, following a furious campaign led by activist groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Since then, any state that dared to lower the drinking age would face the loss of federal highway funds. That's a powerful hammer, since the federal government typically pays 90 percent of new highway costs.
Still, the idea of lowering the drinking age is bubbling of late.
In May 2003, veteran reporter T.R Reid wrote an article that appeared on his newspaper's opinion page. It was titled, .
He described his working days in London, where the legal drinking age is 16. "My daughters were drinking safely, legally, and under close supervision in the friendly neighborhood pub two blocks from our home," Mr. Reid wrote. He added that, to his way of thinking, teen drinking is far more dangerous in the United States because young people who must drink secretly often do so to excess.
Whether one agrees with Mr. Reid or not, the fact is that a lot of American kids under 21 are consuming alcohol on a regular basis. Richard Keeling is a medical doctor who once ran college health services in Virginia and Wisconsin and now edits the He says there is little dispute that drinking is at the core of almost every college health issue.
"It has tentacles that link it to cigarettes and other drugs and to virtually all of the sexual behaviors that cause risk," he said. "It's associated in studies with suicidal behavior. It's associated, not with just binge drinking and binge eating. Alcohol really is central to many of the problems that affect college students' lives."
Yet Dr. Keeling notes that young people view alcohol consumption as "a marker of maturity." It helps them connect with others, it's perceived as fun and "edgy," and, despite many efforts to curtail it, it's a venerable ritual of fraternity and sorority life. Getting drunk, which can loosen inhibitions for sex, is sometimes the whole point of parties.
"And as a withheld privilege, it has a certain extra allure or charm," said Dr. Keeling. "And getting it early is therefore of a lot of interest to students, which is why drinking under age is a very big behavior on college campuses."
Dr. Keeling adds that lecturing students about the evils of drink will have no effect so long as alcohol provides this powerful social bond.
"Students come to expect that drinking will produce for them what they see in the alcohol ads," he explained. "It'll make 'em sexy and beautiful and hot and charming and interesting and wealthy. And all of that will happen just because they picked a particular brand of beer." Abusive drinking takes place under the noses of school administrators, Richard Keeling points out. He says college presidents have told him they'd love to test the idea that rolling back the drinking age might create a less intense drinking atmosphere on campus, and make the community safer. But he says they would never dare suggest it.
"If you say, 'Why not?' they say, 'cause I'd last 36 hours in my job," said Dr. Keeling.
America's high legal drinking age has spawned a cottage industry of fake identity cards and a shadow system in which older friends, and even some parents, supply teens with beer and liquor.
"In many of the tragedies associated with college drinking, there is in fact a background of encouragement, where others were cheering on someone who was drinking or helping or forcing or facilitating someone's, say, having 21 shots of liquor on a 21 birthday, or being involved in some sort of competitive exercise with other college students to try to see who could get the most [alcohol] in, without vomiting," Dr. Keeling reminded.
All of which, T.R Reid argues in his newspaper column, just adds to the mystique of drinking. "It makes me glad," he wrote, "that my teenagers had the legal right to go down the street to that pub."
Alex Kornoknay Palicz, 21, argues that all the current drinking age does is encourage teens to "get drunk before the cops come."
Mr. Palicz is president of the National Youth Rights Association, an organization of about 3,000 young people with chapters in several U.S. states. He says his organization favors the European model, where moderate drinking, in the presence of adult role models, is introduced at a young age within most families.