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Americans have been arguing for ages that our drinking age should be lowered, or even left up to individual states.
After all, most developed countries have a much lower drinking age than the United States. The argument from most is that the drinking age should be lowered to something closer to European countries, like 18.
The logic is that lowering the age will bring down irresponsible binge-drinking behaviors driven by partying, and that it encourages dependency later on in life after it being out of reach for twenty-one years.
However, new public health research says that lowering the drinking age may not be as beneficial as people think.
In fact, says the study, lowering the drinking age has been linked to “increases in teen traffic fatalities, decreased educational attainment, and even higher rates of alcohol use disorder and heavy drinking later in life.”
They studied two data sets from periods in history when drinking ages were rapidly shifting from state to state. This period was between 1978 and 1987. This allowed them to control all of the other factors and come up with a more accurate answer than just speculation.
Here are the results, pulled from the paper’s abstract:
“Only the [drinking age] of 18 predicted high school dropout. Exposure was associated with 4% and 13% higher odds of high school dropout for the censue and NLAES NESARC samples, respectively. We noted greater impact on women (5%-18%), Blacks (5%-19%), and Hispanics (6%). Self-report of parental alcohol problems was associated with 40% higher odds, which equals a 4.14-point increase in dropout rate for that population.”
This is based on a theory that a drinking age of 18 would mean that younger high school students could get access to alcohol earlier through peers in their senior year.
Of course, one study isn’t definitive evidence. But it stands to reason that solving the problem of binge drinking isn’t as simple as letting kids drink earlier.
