Quote:
Originally posted by dakareng
I, too am old enough to remember the two tiered system in Ohio that was similar to the one he described in Kansas.
The issue when voters in Ohio raised the drinking age from 18 to 19 was high school students (and yes, I was going to bars while in HS) coming in hung over. Ohio was one of the last holdouts for the 21 law and it was enacted from pressure from the feds. It has created the "forbidden fruit" aura and I see more binge drinking now.
Greeks are NOT the ones who should spearhead any effort to change it. That would feed into every stereotype out there. It should come from 18-21 year olds demonstrating community activism and using the voting/ serving in the military factors.It won't happen as long as Harvard and other places are publishing data about binge drinking, etc unless someone actually does a well designed study that compares pre/post academic perfomances/ death & injury from alcohol and PROVES that raising the drinking age to 21 has backfired.
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We're going to agree and disagree -- but first some housekeeping:
I am in favor of lowering the drinking age -- at least for beer -- to 18. So is one of our chapter advisors who happens to also be the City Attorney in his small college town.
That doesn't really solve any problems, though, because as was the case when I was an undergraduate, if you can drink beer, you want to go the next step and get fake ID's or have older folks buy you wine and hard liquor. We did.
OK.
First, the changining of the drinking age in Ohio had nothing to do with high school students -- nor did it have anything to do with Vietnam and the draft. Ohio, like every other state in the nation, was forced to raise the drinking age by the Federal Government under the threat of losing U.S. highway funds if they didn't.
As for surveys, I'm pretty sure they were done some years ago, and I'm reasonably sure they proved that the teenage highway fatality count did decrease when the drinking age went up.
At our recent international conference, I attended a Risk Management seminar and, you guessed it, by far the largest number and amount of insurance claims for Delta Tau Delta were alcohol related. In fact, the number one cause of claims resulted from "falls from high places," and every single one of them was alcohol related. I can't remember any category mentioned that wasn't top heavy with alcohol caused incidents. Those included such things as sexual assault and fights.
I doubt than other fraternities would have statistics that varried greatly.
Because of the above, and the reputation that Greeks have, I also think we would be the wrong group to spearhead a drive to lower the drinking age. I think that our reputation, and unfortunately, our history in this area would be a huge detriment.
Sorry.
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