Beer and wine, served one drink at a time: that’s how the North Carolina General Assembly should let 18 to 20-year-olds enjoy alcohol.
While it’s something of a youthful tradition to malign the loftiness of our current minimum legal drinking age, we take this proposal to lower it seriously. After all, abuse of alcohol exacts a huge social cost on North Carolinian society.
The most recent available chunk of Center for Disease Control data on the topic — covering the period of 2006 to 2010 — shows that 2,767 deaths in North Carolina stemmed from excessive alcohol consumption. Furthermore, many studies have connected a minimum legal drinking age of 21 (as compared to lower legal drinking ages popular in states during the 1970s) to concrete benefits.
These include decreased alcohol-related traffic fatalities among young people and reductions in binge drinking. Such comparisons can muddy the issue, though, because an all-or-nothing drinking age statute is just one public health tool to reduce alcohol-related tragedy (and it’s a particularly blunt one). A better implement would be a statute restricting alcohol purchase for under-21 adults, rather than outright prohibiting it — a legislative guardrail rather than a brick wall.
Such a law would ban 18-to-20 year-olds from buying alcohol in bulk (i.e., any more than one drink at a time) while letting them purchase beer and wine by the glass in restaurants and bars.
The rationale behind this reform is simple, but well-supported by research: the more expensive alcohol is, the less people drink. A crucial secondary advantage would be the pre-preemption of a “trickle-down” effect (a feared consequence of lowering the drinking age wherein voting-age high school students buy alcohol for their younger classmates).
This type of legislation would still leave the strongest argument for a hard-line 21-or-none approach, its effect on traffic fatalities, unaddressed. But we’d like to point out that lowering the drinking age doesn’t mean legalizing reckless behavior.
“Zero tolerance” laws, which prohibit under-21 year olds from driving with any measurable alcohol in their bodies, have proven their effectiveness in reducing highway fatalities, while not infringing on any adult’s reasonable freedoms.
North Carolina already has such a law, and it should stay on the books. In this case, we agree with the principle behind proponents of the 21 minimum: prohibit immature brains from mixing alcohol and cars, and you prevent some tragedies on the roads.
