by Joe Pirone
The Lantern (Ohio State U.)
U-Wire
The recent riots near the Ohio State University campus were, as all similar riots have been, an inexcusable abomination.
Students arrested for their involvement should be expelled. Students and non-students who were involved should spend time in jail.
City officials in the future would be justified in instituting a curfew to keep people off the streets after football games to prevent similar occurrences. University officials should seriously consider suspending the Buckeyes' participation in postseason play as a result of fans' actions.
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That being said, President Holbrook has asked what can be done about the nationwide problem of college student riots. One answer, paradoxically, is to lower the drinking age to 18.
The current law that sets the drinking age at 21 does not prevent a single college student from getting alcohol if one wants it. What the law does do is label something "illegal" that virtually every college student between the ages of 18 and 20 does at least occasionally. When this unreasonable law turns students into lawbreakers when they drink, it causes respect for the law to decline. (For another well-known example of this phenomenon, recall the U.S. Prohibition Era in the 1920s.)
When one is already engaging in "illegal behavior" simply by drinking, a relevant line has already been crossed, and it becomes easier to engage in other forms of illegal behavior, particularly when one's judgment is impaired by alcohol. Obviously it doesn't work this way for everyone, but the student riots that our president has described as "national and ongoing" seem to provide ample evidence that it works this way for a significant number of people.
Lowering the drinking age to 18 would allow larger numbers of college students to drink socially in more supervised settings such as bars, and even on campus. Not as many would turn to illicit off-campus parties where sexual assaults, exploitation and other forms of injury are all too common.
I'm sure that Columbus law enforcement would agree riots would be much easier to control and prevent if the masses of students who currently fuel them were not present on the streets.
Lowering the drinking age to 18 would also allow our university residence life and student affairs professionals to treat drinking realistically and constructively as an issue of student health and welfare, rather than as a discipline issue. For students with serious, life-impairing drinking problems, this would be a life-saving shift.
Lowering the drinking age to 18 would allow younger students to socialize more with older students, allowing older students to model responsible, more mature social drinking behavior. Over time, this would help to change the culture surrounding drinking among our young people.
Many argue that lowering the drinking age would cause the number of drinking-and-driving-related injuries and deaths to skyrocket. However, if this is the problem about which we are concerned, then this is the issue our law should address. We should not discriminate against an entire age cohort of citizens because of the harmful actions of a minority, particularly when there are serious negative consequences to doing so. If we are serious about preventing drinking-and-driving, then we need to do the following things:
A first offense must be a felony, regardless of whether any injury or property damage resulted, and must result in both jail time and a multi-year drivers license suspension. A second offense must result in permanent license revocation, and a long jail term.
We must make a national effort to make driving after drinking absolutely unacceptable and to make alternative forms of transportation and accommodation readily available.
When 18-year-olds can vote, marry, defend our country in the military, and are considered adults in our society in every other way, not allowing them to drink is an absurd legal and social incongruity. As the riots and the other negative consequences discussed above demonstrate, the effects of this law are not trivial.
While the law has reduced the numbers of young people who kill and are killed in drinking-related car accidents, it has spawned and exacerbated a host of other social ills. There are other ways to keep people from drinking and driving if we are serious about it.
Young people should organize and demand the law be changed. Older people should support them and our leaders should hear them and act in our collective best interest by reducing the drinking age to 18.
