This June 30 editorial in The New York Times, “Binge Drinking on Campus,” raises some very good points and key study findings by researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, published in The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; a study based on information collected over a 27-year period by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Insciences.org’s post, “Higher Drinking Age Linked to Less Binge Drinking…Except in College Students,” goes further into the findings.
Both are well worth the read, especially when you couple them with recent findings reported by Join Together, “Federal researchers say that 21.1 percent of Americans ages 18 to 25 have alcohol or other drug problems serious enough to require addiction treatment, but few of them recognized their need for help or sought assistance from a treatment facility, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).” Additionally, the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2007 Call to Action to Prevent and Reduce Underage Drinking reports, “Young adults, ages 18-20, have the highest rate of alcohol dependence in the U.S. population.”
There is a great deal of debate about lowering the drinking age to 18. Proponents especially cite the facts that you can go to war and vote but you can’t have a drink as reasons to support this action. But there is a whole new body of research about brain development ages 12-25 and the detrimental impact of alcohol abuse on that development. In addition to what’s reported in the U.S. Surgeon General’s Call to Action linked above, I’ll close this post with a link to the American Medical Association’s summary of Brain Damage Risks, “AMA’s Report on Alcohol’s Adverse Effects on the Brains of Children, Adolescents and College Students.”
