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Nov 20, 2008 9:34 pm US/Central
Debate Stirred Up Over Drinking Age
Some College Presidents Want Public Discussion
CHICAGO (CBS) ―
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Some university presidents want to debate the issue of whether the drinking age should be lowered from 21 to 18.
CBS
It is called the Amethyst Initiative, and it is a national effort by 134 university presidents to start a drinking age debate. They want to lower the legal age from 21 to 18, saying that the culture of binge drinking by underage drinkers is a dangerous problem.
Call it a rite of passage, call it reckless immaturity, but underage drinking in America is a way of life for many, CBS2's Rob Johnson reports.
"If you want to drink you can drink, you can get a fake ID, you can have someone buy it for you, you can go to a bar," said 19-year-old Robert Pabalan, one of four young adults who recently discussed the issue. "It's really easy."
Of the four, only Michael Schultz thought lowering the drinking age was a bad idea.
"It goes against everything...all of the progress that has been made towards lowering these accidents, and so I don't think it makes any sense."
His counterparts disagreed, for a variety of reasons.
"I just think a huge part of it is educating kids in high school and even earlier maybe to understand the effects of alcohol," Annie Boyle, 21, said.
It's that type of undeniable reality that led interim Chicago State University President Frank Pogue to sign up in support of the Amethyst Initiative, one of five Illinois college presidents to do so.
An educator for 45 years, Pogue simply wants a debate on the data.
"Now, you can say well, we change the law more people are going to get killed or kill themselves or do this and that," he said. "I don't know that, you see. What I do know, though, is it's worth examining where we've been, where we are and where we need to go."
But other groups like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have their own data that shows over a five-year period, "minimum-21" laws saved more than 4,400 lives.
"I remember just when finding out for sure, I went upstairs and just closed my bedroom door and screamed," Rita Kreslin said.
Her 19-year-old son, John, was a sophomore at Butler University in Indianapolis. After drinking in his dorm room with friends, John got into a passenger seat of a car on Aug. 30, 2002. That car careened out of control and hit a tree, killing him instantly.
As a heartbreaking coincidence, John wrote an essay on underage drinking two years before his death. He said, in part, "on a single instance, a person may ruin the rest of their life."
"When you're under the influence, you can't possibly make a responsible decision," Kreslin said. "No one will ever convince me of that because I know that he knew better."
The college presidents simply want to engage in a debate about the issue.
However, when we asked our local students whether they thought the drinking age would ever be lowered, they all said "no."
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