Experts to debate drinking age in Statehouse today
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By Louis Porter VERMONT PRESS BUREAU - Published: January 21, 2010
MONTPELIER — Two national experts will trade points over drinks — or at least over the drinking age — in the House of Representatives chamber today.
One, John McCardell, is well-known to Vermonters. The former president of Middlebury College is now the head of Choose Responsibility, a national organization arguing that states should be able to lower their drinking ages if they choose, without federal interference. That interference comes in the form of a sanction in federal highway money for states that lower their drinking age.
"The Constitution is clear that the right to set the drinking age is exclusively with the states," said McCardell. And he questions the value of the now more than two decades old higher drinking age in terms of teaching people — particularly college-age people — about dealing with alcohol appropriately.
"Twenty-five years later we see a worsening binge drinking problem," he said in a telephone interview this week.
Meanwhile, on the other side in the Statehouse at 10 a.m., will be David Jernigan, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Jernigan, who will also talk at Montpelier High School this evening, has examined research on the effect of the lower drinking age and believes it is responsible for dramatically decreasing drinking among teens and young adults — even though it has not had as much of an effect on drinking among college students.
"This is perhaps the most studied thing we have done to reduce young people's drinking," he said. "The findings are clear."
In 1982 about 79 percent of high school students said they had consumed alcohol in the last 30 days. That number has dropped to 44 percent by 2007, Jernigan said in a telephone interview.
The discussion is happening because several bills or resolutions now in the Statehouse deal with the matter. One would urge Congress to allow states to lower their drinking age without the 10 percent penalty in highway aid (roughly $17.5 million in Vermont). Another would simply lower the drinking age in the state, and one that may also be introduced would allow underage Vermonters to drink in their own homes with parental supervision.
"We thought that hearing from these experts would provide us some context in thinking about this issue," said Rep. Helen Head, the Burlington Democrat who chairs the House General Housing and Military Affairs Committee, which is hosting the meeting.
The debate over the drinking age has been focused too narrowly on highway safety, when the matter really deserves broader consideration of how young adults in particular are educated about and deal with alcohol, McCardell said this week.
"Personally I do believe the age should be lowered," said McCardell, who lives in Cornwall (although he will this summer take the reins of Sewanee, the University of the South). But the current debate is not really about whether people should be able to drink at 21 or younger. "That's the next round," he said.
The question now is whether the federal government should be regulating the drinking age through a transportation funding measure, he said.
"The only way that point of view can be presented and taken seriously is if this penalty is taken away," McCardell said. "Why on earth is a law in effect setting a national drinking age embedded in a highways bill? It ought to come out of the transportation bill"
But the inclusion of that measure in the transportation funding bill starting in the 1980s worked, Jernigan said.
"We were facing such high rates of carnage on the highways," he said. "It is working. I would not try to fix something that is not broken."
Drinking by college students is a problem and it has not decreased along with other reductions. But the problem is one of education, of alcohol taxes not increasing with inflation, not that the drinking age should be changed, Jernigan said.
"The problem with 21 is not the law. It is that so much else in our culture runs counter to it," he said. "We have hung 21 out there as the one thing we will do around this issue."
And there are places where it makes sense for the feds to be involved in public health issues, Jernigan said.
"The federal government plays a public health leadership role," he said.
louis.porter@rutland herald.com
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