Dr. David J. Hanson is a sociologist at the State University of New York at Potsdam who has studied alcohol and drinking for more than 40 years.
Right now we basically have alcohol prohibition for adults ages 18 to 20, and we are getting some of the same results we got through national prohibition in the early 20th century. Fewer young adults drink, but when they do drink they tend to drink more, and I'm mostly concerned about drinking to excess.
When you prohibit drinking legally, it pushes it into places that are uncontrolled, like fraternity houses. These are places that promote drinking games and excessive, rapid consumption of alcohol, which puts people in danger of getting alcohol poisoning, and that can be fatal.
Research suggests that the reduction in teenage alcohol-related fatalities that some point to as a reason for keeping the drinking age at 21 is in fact a result of nothing more than those fatalities being shifted to an older age group — people ages 21, 22 or 23.
Some also argue that the drinking age should be kept at 21 because the brain doesn't finish maturing until around age 25, but in that case we should also raise the voting age and the military age. We have to be consistent.
What we have been doing to prevent underage drinking so far hasn't worked. The DARE [Drug Abuse Resistance Education] program, for instance, which is used in about 70% of the schools in the country, is basically a scare tactic. There has not been a single scientific study of the effects of DARE that has found it to be productive. There have even been some studies that have found that the students who were exposed to DARE ended up using more frequently or more heavily.