End Drinking Age Restrictions

Will Wilkinson of Forbes writes a convincing, coherent and rational argument in favor of repealing all age limitations on drinking. He argues our current restrictions increase the abuse of alcohol and abandon the principals of individual responsibility and freedom.

UCLA professor of public policy Mark Kleiman, an ex-advocate of age restrictions, told PBS that he came around to the no-limits position when he saw a billboard that said, "If you're not 21, it's not Miller Time--yet." Age limits make drinking a badge of adulthood and build in the minds of teens a romantic sense of the transgressive danger of alcohol. That's what so often leads to the abuse of alcohol as a ritual of release from the authority of parents. And that's what has the college presidents worried. They see it.

It's too bad the debate is constantly framed around irrational, emotionally led arguments predicting doom and gloom. It's tempting to label the leaders of those arguments as demagogues.

Then there are the car crashes. It is an article of faith among much of the U.S. government that raising the drinking age to 21 averted thousands of grisly traffic deaths. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with deceptive five-figure precision, puts the number at 21,887 through 2002. But even this statistical factoid, the neoprohibitionist trump card, deserves scrutiny. A recent research paper by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron and his former student Elina Tetelbaum shows that states that raised the drinking age to 21 since 1984, in response to Congress' road-funding threats, enjoyed no statistically significant decrease in traffic fatalities for 18- to 20-year-olds. They point to the decades-long, steady decline in the rate of
traffic fatalities (deaths per billion passenger miles), a decline due in large part to safer cars, improved driver education and better medical technology. Raising the drinking age did little or nothing.