SAAS/LAC Underage Drinking Statement
Statement by the State Associations of Addiction Services and Legal Action Center on Underage Drinking
As nonprofit organizations dedicated to advocating for sound policies in the areas of addiction prevention and treatment, the State Associations of Addiction Services and the Legal Action Center understand the devastating impact underage drinking has had on individuals and families in States, communities, and campuses across the country. While we support engaging in a dialogue on the national crisis of underage drinking, we unequivocally do not support lowering the legal drinking age.
The State Associations of Addiction Services is a national association of state associations of drug and alcohol addiction prevention and treatment providers, and the Legal Action Center is a national organization that advocates for people with drug and alcohol addiction histories, criminal records and HIV/AIDS. We support the goals expressed in the Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent and Reduce Underage Drinking, focusing on reducing the number of underage drinkers and preventing children and adolescents from beginning to drink, in order to reduce the number of people who experience the devastating effects of alcohol dependence. The current 21 year-old drinking age is an essential step towards achieving those goals, as part of a comprehensive strategy to advance health lifestyles and addressing the negative consequences of youth alcohol use.
We support facilitating an open dialogue on the national crisis of underage drinking. To be effective, this dialogue must utilize the extensive research that has recently been undertaken and literature that has been published on the subject of underage drinking. Research conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found that underage drinking is associated with future alcohol dependence. This proposition holds both for youth who have a parental history of alcoholism and youth who do not have such a history.
The Problem of Underage Drinking
As the NIH has stated, “underage alcohol remains a pervasive and persistent problem with serious health and safety consequences.” There are 11 million underage drinkers in the United States.
Research shows that not only do underage drinkers use alcohol in more harmful ways than adults, but they experience the effects of alcohol in differently, and often more detrimentally. NIH concluded that there is more binge drinking among adolescents than among the older population. This binge drinking leads to a higher prevalence of death from injuries, risky sexual behavior, and physical and sexual assault.
In addition, research on brain development shows that alcohol use affects adolescents differently than it affects adults. Humans’ brains are not fully physiologically mature until a person reaches his or her early- to mid-twenties, and different parts of the brain mature at different rates. As a result, the plasticity of teens’ brains makes them particularly vulnerable to the effects of alcohol, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).
Alcohol use may affect the development of adolescents’ brains in ways that make them more susceptible to future alcohol dependence. NIH research indicates that people who begin drinking before age 15 are four times more likely to develop alcohol dependence during their lifetimes than people who begin drinking at age 21.
Effects of Changes in Minimum Legal Drinking Ages
The results of several studies indicate that if the drinking age is lowered, more adolescents will drink and would start drinking at younger ages. Lowering the drinking age would make alcohol more accessible to youth, and the harmful effects of underage (under the age of 21) drinking which already exist could be exacerbated. This increase includes not only those in the 18-21 year-old range, but also 15-17 year-olds who would experience increased access through their older friends and siblings. There is evidence, on the other hand, that the higher drinking age has had positive effects on the health and safety both of individual youths and society as a whole.
Research on alcohol-related fatal traffic accidents illustrates how increases and decreases in the legal age of alcohol consumption have affected youth and society. According to and article published in NIAAA’s Alcohol and Research Health Journal, when states lowered the drinking age to 18, alcohol-related traffic crashes increased by ten percent. Consistently, when states raised the drinking age back to 21, alcohol-related crashes among people younger than age 21 decreased an average of 16 percent. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that this change has saved 25,000 lives.
Studies show that lower rates of underage drinking are connected with periods when 21 is the specified minimum legal drinking age. For example, in the two decades after the drinking age was changed to 21, the number of high school seniors who said they used alcohol throughout their lives decreased by over 20 percent.
Contrary to popular opinion, evidence does not suggest that less campus alcohol use took place during the period when the minimum legal drinking age was 18. Further, according NIAAA, other countries with lower drinking ages than the U.S. have at least comparable, if not higher, rates of risky behavior associated with alcohol use than the U.S.
Effective Methods of Reducing Alcohol Dependence
Framing the problem of underage drinking as a community-wide struggle illustrates that lowering the drinking age would merely foist a problem that currently plagues college campuses onto high schools and their surrounding communities, instead of directly addressing it. Fortunately, community-based, comprehensive strategies aimed at prevention have produced positive changes thus far. Many factors influence adolescents’ decision-making processes regarding alcohol use, only one of which is laws setting minimum drinking ages.
As NIAAA has stressed, factors such as parents, peers, and community influences, including advertising aimed at youth, all affect an adolescent’s decision to drink or not to drink. A comprehensive prevention effort should focus on all these aspects of an adolescent’s life. In order to develop such a strategy, the community must promote debate on and promote awareness of underage drinking issues ranging from minimum drinking age laws to genetics.
The State Associations of Addiction Services and the Legal Action Center are eager to participate in ongoing and informed discussions about the next steps in a nationwide alcohol dependence prevention effort. We encourage the inclusion of a broad range of stakeholders, including community and campus representatives, parents, providers of prevention services and other experts, State health-related agencies, and others with an opinion on this crucially important topic. From the opinions of stakeholders with different objectives we hope to achieve an overarching goal: reducing the number of young people and adults who suffer from alcohol dependence.
