Can Lowering The Drinking Age Be The Healthful Move?
Next week, when President C.D. “Dan” Mote welcomes freshmen to the University of Maryland, he will inform them that the college police will enforce underage drinking laws “with terrific ferocity.” And then he will turn around and, recognizing that most students do drink, tell the teenagers “to take care of each other when they see someone who’s passed out, to take advantage of all of our services for students who abuse alcohol.” “We have a real conflict here,” Mote says, and he’s talking not only about the College Park campus but about every university and about our entire society. We live in a time when efforts to enforce the prohibition on drinking before age 21 are more aggressive than ever, yet there is a common assumption that most young people routinely violate that law. Mote is tired of living that contradiction, which is why he joined more than 100 other college presidents in signing a call for action, the Amethyst Initiative, a collective statement that the 21-year-old drinkin
