At 20 years old, an American can drive a car, buy cigarettes and pornography, vote for the next leader of the free world, and even die for his or her country by enlisting in the military. But that same person cannot order a beer with friends while watching the game at a sports bar. Because of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, some Americans can put themselves in front of terrorists with machine guns, but not a Heineken.

Most proponents of the legal drinking age of 21 use the dramatic decrease in traffic fatalities and drunk driving that have occurred since 1984 as a cornerstone argument. According to the Century Council, an organization founded to prevent drunk driving, underage drunk driving fatalities decreased from 5,655 in 1986 to 2,642 in 2006.

This 54 percent drop in drunk driving deaths is important, but attributing the decrease solely to the drinking age ignores other factors contributing to the drop in deaths. The Ad Council, along with the U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) launched a nationwide campaign to educate citizens on the dangers of drunk driving in 1983. According to a press release, the “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” campaign of 1990 resulted in a 10 percent drop in drunk driving rates among 16-24 year olds, the largest annual drop yet recorded.

In addition to the landmark ad campaign, driving on U.S. highways changed dramatically in 1974 as well. The National Maximum Speed Law, part of the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, prevented much death on U.S. highways, and the New York Times reported that 45,000 lives had been saved by 1984. This sharply decreased traffic fatalities, and clouds the statistics about the benefits of the drinking age.

Furthermore, resources are wasted on trying to prevent underage drinking. It is impossible to stop underage people from drinking. Even Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) admit that only 31 percent of parents of 15- to 16-year-olds believe their child had a drink in the past year, compared to the 60 percent of teens in that age group who reported drinking.

The most reliable way to reform underage drinking is to decrease the amount of people who are legally underage. By lowering the drinking age to 18, still higher than most countries in the world, we could decrease the number of “minor in possession” cases greatly. According to Jeralyn Merritt, a writer for the politics magazine TalkLeft, the “juvenile courts are jammed with ‘minor in possession’ cases. If they weren’t, they might have more time and funds to deal with the kids with more serious issues.”

If the amount of money that was spent prosecuting 18 to 21-year-olds was spent on alcohol education in schools or on assistance for low-income families who are much more likely to abuse alcohol, we might get somewhere. By preventing the problem through alcohol education, rather than treating the symptoms of a too-high drinking age, countless dollars and hours could be saved.

In response to growing numbers of college students participating in binge drinking — defined as five (for men) or four (for women) drinks within a one-to-three-hour period — heads of major universities across the country have advocated lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18. The Amethyst Initiative, signed by 130 universities (at press time) including Johns Hopkins and Dartmouth, encourages the lowering of the drinking age to cut down on “a culture of dangerous, clandestine binge-drinking, often conducted off campus,” according to an official statement.

While Northwestern has yet to endorse the Amethyst Initative, it cannot be ignored that binge drinking happens here, on and off campus. The most recent, startling and tragic example of this is the death of Matthew Sunshine (SESP ‘11) last June.

Though it is impossible to stop all dangerous drinking, lowering the drinking age would help to decrease the number of binge drinkers in a way that alcohol education has not. By removing the stigma of underage drinking, especially for college students, drinking may become less of a sport and, consequently, much less dangerous.