Binge Drinking (citations)
By changing the environment surrounding alcohol consumption for young adults, something interesting happened; Legal Age 21 unintentionally changed the way young adults drink. Now young adults who have not reached the age of 21 must drink behind closed doors and drink quickly in fear of getting caught. This type of drinking—drinking to get drunk—is often identified as a problem of college, but new data show that binge drinking is becoming more common much later in life as well. By introducing young adults to alcohol in an unsupervised setting where the objective is to get as drunk as fast as possible, Legal Age 21 is establishing drinking practices that have negative, lifelong effects.
Binge drinking is a particularly serious problem on college campuses across the country. Recent studies report that 44% of college students have engaged in a night of binge drinking in the past two weeks. 1 While drinking has always been a part of the college experience in recent years it has become something far more central to collegiate life and in many ways far more dangerous. Two decades ago, there was hardly any mention of binge drinking in the news. And strangely enough it was also two decades ago, in 1987, that the National Minimum legal drinking age forced states to standardize the drinking age at 21.
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1 Wechsler, H., Lee, J.E., Kuo, M. & Lee, H. (2000). College binge drinking in the 1990s: A continuing problem (results of the Harvard School of Public Health 1999 College Alcohol Study. Journal of American College Health, 48(5), 199-210.