A new research study challenges the idea that lowering the legal drinking age from 21 to 18 will help lower binge drinking on college campuses.
A team of seven public health researchers and mathematicians wrote the study, now available online, which will be published in the January 2011 volume of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. The study was first submitted for publication in 2009.
Many college administrators have argued that the current drinking age encourages unsafe alcohol use by prompting underclassmen to drink behind closed doors. The Amethyst Initiative, a petition launched in 2008 that has been signed by 135 college presidents, calls for renewed debate on the minimum drinking age.
President Shirley Tilghman did not sign the petition. In 2008, she told The Daily Princetonian that there were more pressing policy issues concerning the University, though personally, she could not “reconcile allowing 18-year-olds to fight and die for their country and then forbid them from imbibing a legal substance such as alcohol.”
Rather than making a philosophical argument, the group of researchers, funded by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, devised a mathematical model to examine the issue.
Read the full story at the Daily Princetonian.
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