Lower legal age would not curb binge drinking, study says

A team of seven public health researchers and mathematicians wrote the study, now available online, which will be published in the January 2011 volume of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. The study was first submitted for publication in 2009.

Many college administrators have argued that the current drinking age encourages unsafe alcohol use by prompting underclassmen to drink behind closed doors. The Amethyst Initiative, a petition launched in 2008 that has been signed by 135 college presidents, calls for renewed debate on the minimum drinking age.

President Shirley Tilghman did not sign the petition. In 2008, she told The Daily Princetonian that there were more pressing policy issues concerning the University, though personally, she could not “reconcile allowing 18-year-olds to fight and die for their country and then forbid them from imbibing a legal substance such as alcohol.”

Rather than making a philosophical argument, the group of researchers, funded by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, devised a mathematical model to examine the issue.

The researchers tried to determine the specific circumstances in which lowering the drinking age would result in less episodic drinking. Looking at data from 32 college campuses in the United States, they focused on two variables: “wetness,” the availability of alcohol on campus, and perceived norms about the amount of alcohol students consume. The campus’s level of enforcement was measured by the difference in wetness levels for legal and underage drinkers.

Their model focuses on the phenomenon of underage students perceiving that more people drink than actually do and increasing their level of drinking behavior in order to fit in.

Though this phenomenon is regularly cited by those in favor of lowering the drinking age, the researchers concluded that college campuses would be unlikely to benefit from such a change.

Only under certain unrealistic circumstances would lowering the drinking age lead to benefits which outweigh the consequences of more readily available alcohol, the researchers concluded.

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According to the study, a lower drinking age would only curb binge drinking if the misperception of campus alcohol consumption and level of alcohol enforcement were high. On drier campuses, this level of misperception would need to be even higher for a change in the drinking age to be worthwhile.

“Our results suggest that an unrealistically extreme combination of high wetness and low enforcement would be needed for the Amethyst Initiative policies to be effective,” the researchers concluded.

In her 2008 interview, Tilghman took issue with the petition’s claim that lowering the drinking age would improve safety. She cited a lack of conclusive data as a reason against inserting the University into the political debate. “One place where I differ with the Amethyst Initiative is that I think the data is not compelling in one way or another,” she said.