Amethyst brings drinking age debate to the Capitol

Author: Kelly Janis

Last week, the non-profit organization founded by President Emeritus John M. McCardell Jr. in 2007 to foster dialogue about underage drinking relocated from the cramped Middlebury store front in which it was born to a new office in southeast Washington, D.C., just blocks from the Capitol. Although McCardell will continue to live and work in Vermont, he plans to travel regularly to the new headquarters, where a small staff - including Grace Kronenberg '06 and Nick DeSantis '07.5 - is still slogging through unpacked boxes.

"I think having a presence in Washington makes a statement that you mean to be a serious player in these discussions, and I think the fact that we have gotten the level of financial support to be able to do this means that there are at least some people out there willing to support us in getting the discussion and the debate going," McCardell said in an interview with The Campus on Tuesday evening, prior to addressing several hundred students at American University's Bender Arena. The event was organized by Kennedy Political Union, a student-run speakers' bureau, in conjunction with National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week.

McCardell responded with a smile when a student informed him that AU is a dry campus, on which alcohol consumption by any student, regardless of age, is prohibited.

"You mean it's not even a little moist?" he joked, before resuming a serious pose. "You tell me how that's working."

According to some students, not particularly well.

"Drinking goes on, even on a dry campus, " said Bryan Avolio, a junior in AU's Kogod School of Business. "But it's closet drinking, which is more dangerous than open, leisurely drinking."

Carlos Guruceaga, a sophomore in AU's School of International Service, had his first beer with his father as a 14 year-old growing up in Venezuela, where the legal drinking age is 18.

"It's something you have to be introduced to," he said. "You can't learn by yourself. I know the effects of it. I'm not holed up in my room, drinking shots, trying to get drunk."

"I am!" exclaimed Emma Hardy, a junior in AU's College of Arts and Sciences, only half-jokingly. "High five!"

Hardy recalled her experiences studying abroad in Mexico this summer.

"I would just sit and have a beer and there was no pressure, because I could drink legally," she said. "It was kind of like, 'well, this is anti-climatic!' I feel like lobbyist groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving that have a lot of influence. And younger people don't have that influence. So I'm glad these college presidents stepped up and said 'maybe we should take a look at this.'"

AU President Neil Kerwin has refused to join 130 presidents and chancellors of colleges and universities across the United States - including current Middlebury College president Ronald Liebowitz - in signing the Amethyst Initiative, a public statement declaring that it is "time to rethink the drinking age" in response to the "culture of dangerous, clandestine 'binge-drinking'" which has cropped up around it.

"I am interested in the policy debate underway and the arguments and alternatives," Kerwin said in an Oct. 2 article in the University's student newspaper, The Eagle. "At this time, however, I have not seen compelling evidence to suggest that dropping the drinking age will deter the epidemic of destructive behavior prompted by alcohol abuse that we've seen on our own campus."

McCardell takes Kerwin's decision in stride. In fact, the majority of the schools at which he has spoken this fall - including St. Michael's College, Keene State College and Ball State University - are headed by similarly weary administrators. But the notion that such institutions are willing to engage the issue by inviting him to campus anyway, he said, demonstrates that they are "Amethyst in spirit, if not in fact."

In his talk, McCardell praised signatories of the Initiative for "acknowledging the fact that alcohol is a reality in the lives of young adults." The United States can either change that reality, he said - likening such a recourse to prohibition - or it can "create the safest environment possible" in which to contain it

Not everyone in Washington is welcoming the organization and its goals with a warm embrace.

"College officials who have signed on to the provocative proposition that the legal drinking age of 21 isn't working say that they just want to start a debate," wrote The Washington Post in an Aug. 24 editorial. "Perhaps when they get done with that, they can move on to whether Earth really orbits the sun. Any suggestion that the current drinking age hasn't saved lives runs counter to the facts."

The piece goes on to reference findings that rates of alcohol-related traffic crashes involving young people have decreased since the legal drinking age was raised from 18 to 21 in 1984.

In his presentation, McCardell disputed the precision of such statistics. He noted that fatalities began to dip two years prior to the increase in the legal age, shot up subsequent to its implementation and have stayed mostly flat for the past 12 years. In addition, he said, automobiles have become safer, and "designated drivers" more common.

"Certainly, raising the age was a factor," McCardell said. "But that's the most and best that can be said about it."

McCardell believes it is time for a change.

"I think we can do better," McCardell said. "I think the status quo is unacceptable. I think young people - having reached the age of adulthood - can and should be entrusted to carry out adult responsibilities, with care and with judgment. And most of the time, they will award the confidence placed in them with appropriate behavior."

He concluded by emphasizing the movement's urgency.

"The longer we delay in recognizing the unintended consequences that our current policies have wrought, the more at risk we put the long term health and safety of our population, off the highways even more than on.'"