[Acebot44]

I was looking up a bunch of info that I had heard earlier to present to you guys when I found this link which pretty much summarized everything really well.

# As reported in the last issue of Youth Truth, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which forced states to raise their drinking ages to 21 or lose federal highway funding, was signed into law in June 1984. Since then its proponents have trumpeted the success of the measure in preventing death and harm among young people. According to Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the organization primarily responsible for pushing the act through the legislature, the nationwide "proportion of drivers 16-20 years of age who were involved in fatal crashes, and were intoxicated, dropped 33 percent" from 1988 to 1998. But, they are quick to remind us, more needs to be done. In spite of such dramatic decreases in youthful fatalities, "young drivers" who "make up 6.7 percent of the total driving population ... constitute 13 percent of the alcohol-involved drivers in fatal crashes" .


Statistics may be used selectively to conceal information. In MADD's statement above regarding the 33% drop in the "proportion of drivers 16-20 years of age who were involved in fatal crashes, and were intoxicated", they fail to mention that the proportion of these intoxicated drivers aged 21-24 and 25 or older dropped drastically as well, according to the Centers for Disease Control . MADD's mention of the "young drivers" who are overrepresented in alcohol-related fatal crashes does not specify an age range; according to several sources, drivers aged 16-20 are involved in about 13% of all alcohol-related fatal accidents, so that is probably the group they mean. But they fail to mention that this is about the same percentage of non-alcohol-related fatal accidents they are involved in - which would indicate that driving experience, rather than alcohol, might be the problem for this group. They also ignore the 21-24 year olds, whose share of alcohol-related accidents is even higher.

Statistics are mightily confusing. Various sources may present comparisons of different periods of time, or different age ranges, or numbers and percentages with slightly different definitions. Methods of gathering statistics may change, making accurate "before and after" comparisons impossible. MADD's own statistics on actual numbers of traffic fatalities do not agree with the numbers given by the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration . While MADD's figures show, for all age groups, a 34.5% decrease from 1982 to 1997 in alcohol-related crash fatalities, they also indicate that there was a 35.6% increase in non-alcohol-related crash fatalities during the same years, causing the highway death toll to remain about the same. This is badly at odds with FARS statistics for the same time period, which shows an increase in non-alcohol-related crash deaths of only about 16%, and a moderate reduction in the total number of accident fatalities.

Another problem with statistics concerns terminology. Does "intoxicated" mean having a certain blood-alcohol level that is measured, or must one be noticeably drunk? or perhaps an officer may record, during the investigation, his or her own suspicion, or someone else's testimony, that someone in the crash was drunk? does the term mean the same thing to all police officers, in all states, and in all statistical sources where it appears? And the term "alcohol-related" was the subject of a recent report by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention and the International Center for Alcohol Policies , which criticized as misleading and overly inclusive the definition provided by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, in which a crash is "alcohol-related ... if either a driver or nonmotorist (usually a pedestrian) had a measurable or estimated blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.01 g/dl or above". A BAC of 0.01 is well below the lowest legal limit in any state (0.08). With this definition, the presence of this level of alcohol may be "estimated", and any person involved in the accident - even an innocent victim - could, if judged to have consumed alcohol, qualify the accident as "alcohol-related".

Having taken all of these problems into consideration, it is still pretty clear that since the signing of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, fatal traffic accidents, which were already on the decline, decreased even more substantially - for all age groups! According to FARS statistics, during the years 1975 to 1984, the number of fatal crashes per 100,000 people in each age group decreased 7.8% for 15-20 year olds and 7.9% for people 21 and older; during 1985 to 1994, the decreases were 12% for 15-20 year olds and 12.6% for people 21 and older. In fact, the total U.S. per capita consumption of all alcoholic beverages, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, continually and significantly declined after reaching an all-time high in 1981.

How could keeping people from drinking until the age of 21 stop so many fatal accidents for people over 21? It probably didn't. After the nation's drinking age was raised to 21, the 21-24 age group quickly assumed the greatest share of alcohol-related fatal accidents. In The Scapegoat Generation (p.210), author Mike Males presents his findings that the first year or two after a person can legally drink alcohol - regardless of what age is chosen - is the period in which that person is most likely to be involved in an alcohol-related accident.

For the rest of the population, these accidents decreased. A whole host of factors could have contributed to reducing impaired driving and promoting traffic safety in general. There were reductions of highway speed limits and improvements in auto safety equipment, such as shoulder harnesses and airbags, along with media campaigns extolling safety measures. There were, for all drivers, increased enforcement of drunk driving laws, roadside checkpoints, and harsher penalties, also widely discussed by the national media. (Prior to the 1980s, people did not use the expression "designated driver" - in common use today.) The potential for lawsuits against establishments who continued to serve alcohol to over-imbibing patrons (however unfair one may feel such lawsuits are!) gave rise to "server training programs" to assist bartenders in recognizing and dealing with intoxicated customers; bar owners were also motivated to help these customers find alternatives to driving home. Many community and school-based programs began to appear, to educate people about the risks and effects of alcohol; some were found to be ineffective, but even the poorest programs contributed to the public awareness of this renewed concern and caution about alcohol.

While overall traffic safety definitely seems to have improved in the past 20-25 years, there appears to be little change in the consumption patterns of alcohol by people under 18. In his above-mentioned book (p. 204), Mike Males compared survey responses by high school students asked comparable questions about their drinking in 1952, 1978, and 1991. For each of these three years:

the percent reporting they'd "ever had a drink" ranged from 87-90%
the percent reporting drinking "weekly" ranged from 46-48%
the percent reporting "problems with drinking" ranged from 15-16%
the average "age of first drink" was the same in each survey - 12

A survey from the National Institute on Drug Abuse called Monitoring the Future, which compares students' responses from 1975-1999, tends to confirm (for the years it covers) the consistency of this pattern. One type of drinking behavior, however, does seem to be increasing somewhat: binge drinking. After a reported low point in 1993, the percentage of high school seniors reporting having five or more alcoholic beverages on a single drinking occasion within the previous two weeks rose gradually from 28% to 31%. This may not seem like much of an increase, but it is almost entirely attributable to the responses of male students, of whom 39% reported this level of consumption on one or more occasions in the past two weeks.

Surveys of college students show greater differences. In Wechsler, et al. "College Binge Drinking in the 1990s" (Journal of American College Health), v.48 no.1, 2000, p. 199-210), the authors found an increasing "polarization" between abstainers and heavy drinkers on college campuses, with fewer students who reported drinking moderately. Between 1993 and 1999, the authors recorded an increase of 24.7% in students who consider themselves "abstainers", and an increase of 14.5% in "frequent binge drinkers". In 1999, 44.1% of the students surveyed identified themselves as frequent or occasional heavy drinkers; 36.6% were classified as "nonbinge" or moderate drinkers, and 19.2% didn't drink at all.

A 1997 study, the College Alcohol Study of the Harvard School of Public Health, did find slight decreases in the number of students who binged, compared to 1993, but it also reported an increase in the frequency of binge drinking among these students, with more of them choosing "to get drunk" as their reason for drinking. Dr. William DeJong, an instructor at the Harvard School of Public Health, was recently quoted in *Advances: the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Quarterly Newsletter* (issue 1, 1999) as saying:

Just about everyone in the substance abuse field
says the nature of drinking has changed over the
past 15 years or so. Teens ... are doing what we
call industrial-strength binging. They use all
kinds of apparatus - funnels, beer bongs, pumps.
There's an intensity to it that you seldom saw
years ago.

These comments should surprise no one who understands human nature! Fifteen years before the above statement was made, there was no National Minimum Drinking Age. Prior to that, alcohol use by high school students - within limits - was looked upon as a normal form of experimentation and a mild exercise in rebellion. Drinking by 18-20 year olds was a legal, acceptable part of their adult lives, something they were expected to learn to do responsibly. But since the mid-1980s, people under 21 have been considered so incapable of handling alcohol that they are no longer even permitted to touch sealed containers of beer or wine on their jobs. Any drinking by anyone under 21 has come to be considered criminal behavior. When one is labeled "irresponsible", when one engages in behavior that is considered "criminal", the concept of moderation ceases to have much meaning.

and here here are some nifty stats