An 18-year-old drinking age requires responsibility

My eldest daughter is 18 years old. When she was born, this earmark of young adulthood seemed light years away. But I blinked, and now here she is, a young woman, and that magic age is upon us. As most of the island’s young people know, Guam is a great place to party, because the legal drinking age here is 18, unlike in the mainland United States, where it is 21 years old. As a parent, I’m not too thrilled about my young adult being able to drink, but I realize you cannot keep them under your wing forever. We tell her that if she decides to drink, to make sure she’s still in control of her faculties (there are plenty of examples of what happens to young women who lose control) and that she should never drink and drive. 

In 2006, I was among many that voted to raise Guam’s drinking age to 21, but the business side of the house campaigned about how it would ruin the economy and people would lose their jobs and the sky would fall, so the effort failed.

Today, seven states are considering whether to lower their drinking age to 18, and over 100 college presidents issued a statement calling for a debate on whether the drinking age should be 21 or 18. The concern seems to be over binge drinking. An extensive article in the Los Angeles Times in September 2008 quotes the college presidents’ petition as saying: "Our experience as college and university presidents convinces us that twenty-one is not working. A culture of dangerous, clandestine 'binge-drinking' – often conducted off-campus – has developed."

Those who study teen drinking behavior say that it’s the “forbidden fruit” syndrome, and that if you lower the drinking age from 21 to 18, 18-year-olds will be less inclined to drink themselves into oblivion and, in 1700 cases per year, die in alcohol-related incidents.

The classic age-18 argument, which certainly applies here on Guam, is that if you are old enough to serve your country, you should be old enough to have a beer. Yet the pro-21 side of the argument has the support of most health and safety evidence, according to the LA Times article.

If the experts want more data, they should check out the Guam Department of Public Health 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey. According to this survey, the men on our island binge drink 65 percent more than do men in the United States. One might assume that this is due in part to our 18-year-old drinking age, but the survey shows that across all ages, our binge drinking rate is higher. Also, between the ages of 18 and 44, Guam’s number of constant heavy drinkers (as opposed to those who just binge drink) is two to five percent higher than the number of lushes on the mainland.

Given the influence of the business community and the impending military buildup, I don’t think it would be possible to raise our drinking age to 21. Still, we should debate the issue. A reporter from Okinawa told me flat out that the reason Okinawans want the Marines off their island is because of the increased crime rate. While it’s not fair to paint all of our servicemen as a bunch of violent thugs, drinking too much alcohol does tend to bring out the worst in young men who’ve been cooped up on a ship or deployed to a foreign country for months at a time. 

Hosting an 18-year-old drinking age requires responsibility on the part of the entire community: restaurants and bars, alcohol distributors (who could do much more than the occasional “Drink Responsibly” ad), parents, and young people themselves. If we don’t want to compound our already higher-than-the-national-average alcohol abuse issues, then we need to put some serious effort into a campaign about alcohol and responsibility - now. Guam doesn’t need to be designated as the example of why the nation should not lower its drinking age.