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Fast forward almost 40 years to 1970. The U.S. is becoming further embroiled in the Vietnam War, and men being drafted for service argued that fighting and dying in a foreign war allowed them the privilege of legally consuming alcohol. Many states responded by lowering their drinking age from 21 to 18.
By 1984, however, public sentiment about alcohol consumption among teens had shifted dramatically.
Mounting claims that teenage alcohol use was out of control and becoming an epidemic, as well as a new leader in the modern prohibitionist movement - Candy Lightner, president and founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving - brought the issue to the forefront once again.
This time, Lightner had some powerful allies among legislators in Washington. She and other members of MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, lobbied to tie the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 to the states' ability to get federal funding for highway projects.
The measure passed both the House and Senate by majority vote and was signed into law July 17, 1984.
In 2008, the debate has come full circle, this time among college and university presidents who say current laws only encourage binge drinking among students on
campus.
Here's a look at how both sides in the argument stack up.
Those in favor of lowering the nation's drinking age from 21 to 18 say the present law engenders a sense of irresponsibility about alcohol consumption among those younger than the legal age, which often leads to binge drinking and alcohol-related fatalities.
"Although the legal purchase age is 21, a majority of young people under this age consume alcohol, and too many of them do so in an irresponsible manner," said Ruth Engs, professor of applied health sciences at Indiana University in Bloomington. "This is largely seen by these youth as enticing, 'forbidden fruit,' a badge of rebellion against authority and a symbol of adulthood."
Additionally, Engs said, the U.S. is the only country with a drinking age of 21; the majority, including Australia, Great Britain and Ireland, have set the drinking age at 18.
John McCardell, the former president of Middlebury College in Vermont, started the Amethyst Initiative to provoke a national debate about the drinking age in the U.S.
"This is a law that's routinely evaded," he said. "It is a law that the people at whom it is directed believe is unjust and unfair and discriminatory."
Since he began recruiting college presidents to the initiative more than a year ago, members from Duke, Dartmouth and Ohio State have come out in favor of having an informed debate on the issue, stopping short, however, of endorsing a younger drinking age.
Student groups have come out in favor of a repeal of the minimum drinking age act.
Representatives from Underage Drinkers Against Drunk Driving say they demand the repeal of underage drinking laws as a way to save lives. Further, members of the group maintain being of voting age as well as of an age to defend one's country in military service are marks of responsibility, and the right to consume alcoholic beverages should be added to those acts.
Finally, there are others, including David Hanson, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Potsdam, N.Y., who say the ideological argument that raising the drinking age to 21 has been beneficial is largely false.
"People become responsible by being properly taught, given responsibility and then held accountable for their actions," he said. "We don't tell young people to 'just say no' to driving, fail to teach them to drive and then, on their 18th birthday, give them a drivers' license and turn them loose on the road. But this is the logic we follow for alcoholic beverages because neo-prohibition underlies our alcohol policy. It's time for our alcohol policy to be based on science rather than ideology."
Those opposed to lowering the drinking age say science is on their side.
Members of MADD are often the driving force behind maintaining the legal drinking age as 21 as a socially and medically sound policy that helps parents, schools and law enforcement protect American teens from the potentially life-threatening effects of underage drinking.
Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of the organization, has come out against university presidents who have signed the Amethyst Initiative.
"As the mother of a daughter who is close to entering college, it is deeply disappointing to me that many of our educational leaders would support an initiative without doing their homework on the underlying research and science," she said. "Parents should think twice before sending their teens to these colleges or any others that have waved the white flag on underage and binge drinking policies."
MADD also claims that 25,000 lives have been saved thanks to 1984 adoption of an underage drinking law.
SADD, the student version of MADD, has also come out against the Amethyst Initiative and a debate that could lead to lowering the legal drinking age to 18.
Stephen G. Wallace, SADD's national chairman and chief executive officer, said alcohol is already used by young people more frequently and more heavily than all other drugs combined and that the average age teens start drinking is 13.
"Add to those sobering statistics the fact that close to 1.5 million college students are killed, injured or assaulted each year as the result of alcohol and you can see why a rallying cry to maintain the current law can be heard across the land," he said.
Finally, there are those, including Jim Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, who cite statistic after statistic about how the consumption of alcohol by minors has been proven to be deadly once those individuals get behind the wheel of a car.
Since the law was adopted and began to be enforced in 1986, findings show that the minimum legal drinking age has decreased the number of DWI arrests, youth suicides, marijuana use crime and alcohol consumption by youth, he said.
"State Age-21 laws are one of the most effective public policies ever implemented in the nation," Hall said. "I am chagrined to report that some supposedly responsible officials would like to repeal them."
Michelle Rupe Eubanks can be reached at 740-5745 or michelle.eubanks@TimesDaily.com.