Minnesota Opinion: Leave Minnesota’s drinking age alone

From Forum News Service
A recent editorial from a Minnesota newspaper.
Leave Minnesota’s drinking age alone
Yes, state Rep. Erik Simonson of Duluth is co-sponsor of a bill this session to lower Minnesota’s drinking age.
No, that does not mean Simonson wants to lower Minnesota’s drinking age, a move that would risk undoing of a lot of good done since the legal age went from 18 to 21 during the second half of the 1980s; since then, alcohol-related accidents and fatalities among young people have tumbled dramatically.
“The only reason I signed on to it - and I did two years ago, too - was (because) it does prompt a lot of calls and emails and questions, and those are great conversations we need to be having,” Simonson said yesterday in a meeting with News Tribune editorial board members.
Those conversations tend to start with Simonson being asked if he’s crazy.
“No, I’m not really crazy - well, maybe a little bit,” he said. “(But) once I explain what my reasons are, they’re, ‘OK.’ And then I say, ‘While I’ve got you on the phone, let’s have this conversation about how we work to resolve this. … How do we prevent traffic fatalities and injuries and crashes in this age group from about age 21 to 25? What are some of the determining factors? And oftentime, alcohol is involved, so how do you work to prevent that? How do you teach someone to drink responsibly? Because there’s no class that you can really take. It’s just kind of learn on your own.
“It’s a very difficult conversation to have,” Simonson said.
Frustratingly, it’s also an issue for which a cure-all solution has proven elusive.
But progress has been made since Minnesota and other states, under the threat of losing federal transportation money, raised drinking ages across the country to 21.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began tracking alcohol-related crash stats in 1982, and the number of those younger than
21 killed in drunken-driving crashes has dropped 78 percent since then, from 5,215 per year to 1,174 in 2012. Also, the rate of those younger than 21 dying in alcohol-related crashes per 100,000 people declined 46 percent in the past decade, according to the administration.
Still, on average, more than three people younger than 21 are dying daily in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, the administration reports.
So conversations like the ones Simonson is helping to spark about underage drinking can continue. They demand to continue as long as young people make poor decisions involving alcohol.
And those are the decisions too often being made. Sunday brought yet another example when the Duluth Police Department exhausted “significant resources” to search for a college student who had been drinking and who was reported missing by his roommates. In dangerously frigid conditions, officers feared the worst, that “he may have passed out in the bitter cold,” as Chief Gordon Ramsay posted on his Facebook page.
Just last winter, another college student in Duluth who had been drinking passed out on the front porch of a neighbor’s house in subzero cold. She was lucky to survive and that frostbite only claimed parts of her feet and her fingers. She returned to school this fall.
Sunday’s incident had an even happier ending. “The missing student showed up at his residence, saying he awoke in an unknown house,” Ramsay reported.
As relieved as we can all be about that, underage drinking clearly remains a dangerous issue in desperate need of a solution. And if it takes a misguided legislative proposal with no chance of passing and that probably won’t even get a hearing this session for us to start talking and to work toward that solution, then so be it.
Lowering the drinking age would only encourage irresponsible drinking. Simonson recognizes that, but he was willing to attach his name anyway just to raise awareness.
“If you don’t have the solutions, you at least have to generate the conversations,” Simonson said.
The least the rest of us can do is participate.
- Duluth News Tribune