Drinking solution not age

No sane or sober person wants a bunch of young people stumbling -- or God forbid, driving -- through their teens and early 20s in a drunken haze. Obviously, the more we can do to cut down on dangerous drinking, the better.

But raising the legal drinking age won't help.

On Thursday, the Middlesex-London health board proposed six measures to reduce alcohol-related deaths and injuries, including raising the legal drinking age to 21 from 19.

The idea, which will be submitted to the Association of Local Public Health Agencies in June, is well-intentioned. But it might just make things worse.

London police Chief Murray Faulkner has reservations.

On the one hand, Faulkner agrees reducing the legal age "might" reduce the number of drinking-and-driving fatalities among young people.

And he concedes reducing the legal drinking age "might" cut down the early-morning closing-time antics police often contend with downtown. It's even possible, he says, that a 21 year-old will behave more maturely than a 19-year-old.

But Faulkner says he definitely doesn't think raising the legal drinking age will help solve the problems surrounding rowdy parties at student housing. "The real issue here is not the age. I'm in favour of raising the drinking age, but that doesn't get to the root of the problem . . . In my view, the problem is our whole puritanical view of alcohol, and how it's consumed and where it's consumed."

An American specialist agrees.

Barrett Seaman, a longtime reporter and editor at Time magazine, has written a book called Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You.

In the book, Seaman concludes it would actually be better to lower the legal drinking age.

"Lowering the drinking age is a solution," says Seaman, reached at his home in Westchester, N.Y. "Keeping the drinking age at 21 (as it is now in the U.S.) is a mistake."

Seaman spent two years investigating a dozen U.S. colleges, and discovered big differences between drinking behaviour there and at McGill University in Montreal, where the legal drinking age is 18.

"The students at McGill were much saner and much more civilized in their drinking behaviour than their American counterparts," says Seaman.

"And my conclusion is that's because it's not the forbidden fruit we've made it here in the States."

Seaman argues that barring 18-to-20-year-olds from drinking in bars does nothing but isolate and drive them underground.

"I think the separation of adults from young people at a time when you know they're going to be experimenting with alcohol is the wrong step to make," he says.

"I think you need adults around to say, 'Hey, I think you've had enough.'

"Or to just see somebody have two drinks and stop, which these kids never see because they're in their closets and off-campus apartments doing shots of vodka and tequila."

Seaman says that when the legal drinking age was raised in 1984 in the U.S., there was an initial decrease in alcohol-related fatalities involving young people, but those numbers have since increased.

And he argues the fewer fatalities may have had more to do with other factors, including safer cars and roads, than the older drinking age.

The idea, of course, is to show young people that alcohol can be enjoyed and integrated into everyday life, but not abused.

Indeed, a landmark study by Harvard University professor George Vaillant in 1983 found that men who grew up in families where alcohol was forbidden at dinner but consumed away from home were seven times more likely to be alcoholics than men raised in families where wine was tolerated, but drunkenness was not.

So instead of trying to ban booze a few more years, maybe we need to expose our young people to it earlier, and in a more regular and responsible way.

It's legal, too: Many people don't realize the Liquor Act allows parents to supply liquor to people under 19 in their own home.

So instead of trying (unsuccessfully) to prohibit it, maybe we should periodically provide our young people with a glass of wine at dinner -- and a real-life model of moderate consumption.

London Free Press