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Redlands Police Explorer Scout Charlene Mayotte, 17, walks out of a liquor store after unsuccessfully trying to purchase alcohol.
DAVID HUNTER / THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE

Alcohol in youthful hands
Campus tragedies spur pushes for enforcement; some question fairness of setting limit at age 21

BY PAT O'BRIEN
THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE
Whether it's spring-break silliness or a college freshman found choked to death on his own vomit, underage drinking keeps haunting the public conscience.
The question is: Are current drinking laws realistic and effective, given that many adults younger than the legal age of 21 admit to drinking either occasionally or frequently?
"It's weird that you can get married at 18 and you can't drink alcohol," said 18-year-old Danielle Typaldos, sitting in a shady spot on the Riverside Community College campus. "It seems that being married is a bigger decision than drinking alcohol."
An 18-year-old is also considered old enough to vote, to join the military or to be sentenced as an adult for a crime. He or she is regarded as legally an adult in every way except one: the right to buy or consume alcohol.
Typaldos, who recently moved to Wildomar from Anaheim, favors leaving the legal drinking age at 21 or, at most, lowering it to 19.
"Once you are an adult, you are an adult," Typaldos said, adding that perhaps all adult rights should be set at 21.

She does not think the drinking age should be lowered to 18 because it would make alcohol too available to high school students.

Underage drinking has been in the news recently, from President Bush's 19-year-old twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, pleading no contest to a charge of underage possession of alcohol in Texas to the death last week of CHP Officer Stephen Linen of Temecula, who was killed when a 20-year-old Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton crashed into his patrol car at a traffic stop. The Marine, Lance Cpl. Jerome Anthony Bates, has been charged with vehicular manslaughter and driving while intoxicated.
Obtaining alcohol is not much of a problem for those younger than 21. About two-thirds of teens who drink report that they have been able to buy alcohol, according to the National Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependencies. Although teens can't get into bars easily, there are plenty of retail stores that sell alcohol to them or adults who will buy it for them.
"I know a girl whose parents let her drink at home, and (her mother) tells kids it's OK -- just as long as it is at the house. They have parties there on the weekend all the time," Typaldos said.
A question of safety
For many teen-agers and young adults, having a few drinks is an experiment in growing up that they skate through without disaster. For others, it may lead to dangerous overdoses, serious accidents or eventual alcoholism. Do current laws help or hinder us in keeping young adults safe?
On one side of the issue, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Alcohol Free Kids have taken a firm stand that prohibition saves lives.
Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, called the minimum legal purchase law of 1984 that raised the drinking age to 21 one of the most effective public policies ever implemented and said an estimated 17,000 lives were saved from 1985 to 1996.
From 1975 to 1999, the number of alcohol-related crash fatalities involving drivers ages 18 through 20 declined an estimated 13 percent, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

On the other side, some college professors, newspaper and magazine columnists and even one state attorney general question whether the law simply drives underage drinking underground, where it becomes riskier. They contend that teaching moderation rather than legislating prohibition will save lives.
"My goal is less drinking, not more. We could change the culture so that college kids could have a few beers instead of a case," said columnist Steve Blow of The Dallas Morning News, who has suggested in print that the drinking age be lowered.
After three columns on the subject, he is amazed that the majority of reader reaction has been supportive.
"One woman said that her son is 20 and in charge of operating a nuclear reactor on a submarine, and yet we don't trust him to have a beer at the base club," he said.
Blow said he expects that groups such as MADD will be a force against lowering the age limit, however.
But he says the issue demands more consideration. "My basic thing is that we begin to talk about it and think about it."
Other columnists have also questioned the law, including conservative John Derbyshire, who wrote in The National Review: "I think this is ridiculous. No, that doesn't quite express what I think. Let me try again. I think this is GIBBERING LUNACY. A drink, for goodness' sake! However did we get so damn prissy?"
Two Inland-area lawmakers see no point in altering the drinking age in California.
Assemblyman Bill Leonard, R-San Bernardino, said he would not support legislation to change the drinking laws.
"I think the current drinking laws are proper," he said, adding that he'd like to see more stringent enforcement.
"I'm not one of those who advocates changing the drinking age," states Sen. Nell Soto, D-Pomona, said. "We have enough trouble without changing it."
In other nations

The United States is one of the few countries where the drinking age is 21. In France and Spain, it is 16; in Australia and South Africa, 18. In Britain, a 16-year-old can have beer with a meal, and an 18-year-old can purchase liquor. In Mexico, where many underage Americans go to party, the age is 18.
However, due to a spate of teen drinking problems, New Zealand is reviewing its 1999 decision to lower the drinking age to 18 from 20.
America's drinking laws have fluctuated over the years. After Prohibition was revoked in 1933, states set minimum ages from 18 to 21. In the early 1970s when a constitutional amendment granted 18-year-olds the right to vote and teen-agers were fighting and dying in Vietnam, some states chose to make the drinking age 18, as well. But in 1984,
when the federal government tied transportation funds for highway improvements to a minimum drinking age of 21, the states complied.
"Asking for disaster"
Sandy Golden, a co-founder and the first executive director of MADD, was instrumental in getting the age raised nationally in the 1980s.
"To lower the drinking age, that's asking for disaster," said Golden, now president of Alcohol Free Kids, which is based in Loma Linda. "By keeping the drinking age where it is, it gives young people a chance at life."
Golden saw a baby paralyzed by a drunken driver, and he has been a leader in the charge against irresponsible drinking ever since. The incident happened more than 20 years ago, when Golden was a reporter for CBS in Washington, D.C.
But, he said, "I'm not a neo-Prohibitionist."
His current campaign is to persuade California officials to set up a task force that would establish a code of standards to be implemented in communities statewide. If the strategy is successful in reducing the number of youths using alcohol (as well as tobacco), he wants to launch it nationwide.

"The concept is simple: People in communities don't know how to address this issue. They need a code of standards to follow," he said.
His plan is to bring together education, health and law-enforcement representatives to develop a road map of programs that have been proven to work -- such things as keg registration to keep tabs on beer kegs at parties and the use of decoys to catch adults who buy for, or sell liquor to, anyone younger than age 21, as Redlands and Fontana do.
He also wants instruction in schools that would teach not only the effects of substance abuse but also coping skills, and he wants more community-based programs to keep young people busy.
"A lot of kids are bored. They are drinking out of boredom," he said. "Despite two decades of work on underage drinking, it's still a problem. Obviously, we need to look at different things."
A license to drink
Sociology professor David Hanson of the State University of New York, Potsdam, has been conducting nationwide studies of collegiate drinking for 30 years, and he believes the legal drinking age should be lowered. He suggests a provisional drinking license to introduce 19- and 20-year-olds to alcohol gradually.
"Young people would learn to accept alcohol for what it is, a socially acceptable beverage in need of respect, rather than mythologizing it as a source of magical empowerment," he states in "Rethinking Alcohol Use by the Emerging Adult," an article he co-wrote with Dwight B. Heath, professor of anthropology at Brown University, and Joel S. Rudy, vice president and dean of students emeritus at Ohio University.
Hanson has served as an alcohol consultant to the Canadian government and testified on Capitol Hill. He has received research grants from federal and state agencies and discussed his views on such radio and television shows as National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and "CNN Saturday." His Internet site on alcohol has received 5 million hits in three years

The proposed license could include formal instruction in the effects of alcohol on the body and brain, an exam and restrictions on consumption. Hanson says it would be like a driver license, and taking that analogy a step further, he said parents would not hand over the keys to a car to a child who had not had any training behind the wheel.
Noting that you teach children ways to protect themselves from harm, he added that the just-say-no approach is "ideological and unrealistic."
Although a recent Associated Press poll found that a majority of adults and teens support the current law, Hanson said he does not feel as though he is swimming against the tide of public opinion by supporting a lower drinking age.
"I think we are swimming with the stream when it comes to majority of opinion in the country," Hanson said.
"A myth"
Wisconsin Attorney General Jim Doyle favors lowering the drinking age to 19 but only if it is adopted nationally.
"I think this idea that somehow we're going to keep kids between 19 and 21 from drinking is a myth," the father of two told the Telegraph Herald in Dubuque, Iowa.
One group is actively -- on a small scale -- trying to change the law. RALLY, for Realistic Alcohol Laws for Legal Youth, was founded at Syracuse University in New York in 1995 and is now headed by Boston University grad student Matthew Malone. The organization hopes to put a public-policy question on the ballot in the Boston area next year. The question to be asked: Should the representatives of this district be instructed to lower the age for drinking?
"Our primary focus is trying to influence the political process, getting on the ballot and trying to influence public opinion on the issue," said Malone, 33. "We promote responsible drinking. We are interested in having a step system for the drinking age, like a training-wheels type of program."
Pat O'Brien can be reached by e-mail at pobrien@pe.com or by phone at (909) 782-7584.

Published 8/19/2001By the numbers
· ACCUSATIONS: Between July 2000 and June 2001, there were 26 accusations of sales to minors in Riverside County, 15 of them to minor decoys. There were 11 accusations of sales to minors in San Bernardino County, five of them to minor decoys
· LICENSES: Of the 39,288 retail liquor licenses active in the state on June 30, 2000, 2,246 were in Riverside County, 362 of those in the city of Riverside. There were 2,734 licenses in San Bernardino County, 358 of them in the city of San Bernardino.
· FORMULA: The number of new liquor licenses issued in the county is dictated by population. The formula is 1 per 2,500 inhabitants for off-site general liquor licenses and 1 per 2,000 for on-site general liquor licenses (bars and restaurants).
· ACCIDENTS: In 1999, drivers who had been drinking were involved in 77 fatal accidents and 1,550 injury accidents in California.
SOURCES: ABC, CHP
THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE

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