Outrage Over Proposal To Change Drinking Age

Written by Terry Hunter - thunter@kgmb9.com

August 22, 2008 08:32 PM

A push by college presidents nationwide to try to change the legal drinking age to 18 has some outraged.

Friday, Lt. Governor Duke Aiona and Mothers Against Drunk Driving called the idea "irresponsible."

The college presidents, including Leon Richards of Kapiolani Community College, believe that lowering the drinking age might reduce the dangerous amount of secret, underage binge drinking that students do off campus.

They say it's hard to educate young people about drinking responsibly when their job is to prevent them from drinking at all.

But academics' call for open debate on the subject has been completely rejected.

"This new effort does not solve the serious problem of underage drinking and the backers are showing what I would call irresponsibility on a par with those who binge drink and put themselves and others in harm's way," Aiona said.

"The research shows that when the drinking age was 18, binge drinking was actually at about 41 percent as opposed to now, it's at about 26 percent with the drinking age at 21," said Leah Marx of MADD.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving points out that there has been an 11 percent drop in the amount of alcohol related fatalities among teenagers since Hawaii raised the drinking age to 21 more than two decades ago.

William Walker lost two friends who were driving drunk.

"You don't know what it's like to pull two people out of a truck knowing that you were probably held responsible for it," Walker said. "If they lower the age to 18, there's gonna be more instances like that."

Still, it's undeniably true that large numbers of young people will choose to drink no matter what the laws say.

"Just because someone's gonna do it anyway, does that mean you should make it legal? I don't know what's right or wrong about it, but I think especially students need to get more education on the subject," said student John Delapp.

In the end, the arguments for and against may come to nothing because of a federal law that says any state lowering its drinking age will lose 10 percent of its federal highway money.