There is a growing consortium of college deans and presidents that are joining the Amethyst Initiative.  Ooh, now this sounds exciting.  I’d like to pretend that it’s actually a secret cabal of Skull & Crossbones looking to dominate national politics by brainwashing college students through ultrasonic frequencies played throughout the classrooms and libraries.  As with most things in this world, it’s not that cool.  According to CNN.com, it’s actually a group of college presidents that is trying to lower the national drinking age from 21 to 18.

WTF?!?

I stand corrected.  The Amethyst Initiative is actually interesting.  A collection of 100 presidents from some of the highest profile colleges are pushing to have the drinking age lowered.  Presidents from places such as Duke, Ohio State, Dartmouth, and more.  Their rationale is this: students are drinking anyway, so let’s give them the ability to drink and hopefully they’ll be more responsible.  I quote the CNN article:

“This is a law that is routinely evaded,” said John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College in Vermont who started the organization. “It is a law that the people at whom it is directed believe is unjust and unfair and discriminatory.”

I went to college for eight years.  In that time, I filled every conceivable situation that a student can occupy while attending university: off-campus, dormitory, fraternity, under graduate, scholarship, work study, full-time job, graduate, home town, out of state, and distance learning.  I went to Oklahoma State University, a big state school (~23,000), as well as Marquette University, a private Catholic school (~10,000).  At one point, I was a stupid drunk frat boy … and at another, the prayer group abstainer.

So I feel sufficiently qualified in saying two things.  First, kids that want to drink are going to drink.  Doesn’t matter if they are 20 years, 11 months, and 29 days or if they are 15 years old.  Kids that want to smoke weed are going to smoke weed.  There is nothing that the police can do about it.  Most students feel it is a rite of passage and God-given right to act like complete dumb asses throughout college.

Second, lowering the drinking age is probably one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard in my life.  I’m going to cop a lot of flak from my fraternity brothers on this as well as my soccer mates, but I think it’s true.  Let me explain why …

When you first go into college for most kids, it’s the first time away from home, from parents, and from adult supervision.  I know for a fact that a bunch of dorm kids wanted to drink, but just couldn’t get their hands on the booze.  I didn’t drink my freshman year and I earned a 3.6 GPA my first semester.  Woo hoo for me.  Then I started dating a girl long distance, had sex for the first time, wracked up a $1,200 phone bill, and broke up about seventy five times.  My GPA the second semester was a 1.36.  I didn’t touch a drop of beer the entire time.

Can you imagine how jacked up my first year would have been had I been drinking with all of the other stress of paying bills, working, dealing with a crazy in Wisconsin, and studying in school?  I’d probably not even made probation to redeem myself my sophomore year.  Speaking of my sophomore year – I transferred to a new school out of state and started drinking half way through while at Marquette (God bless those Jesuits for ending my personal prohibition).  There’s no better party than one with drunken Catholics.

My GPA that year?  A solid 4.0 the entire year.  I lived in the dorm and paid one bill for all my meals, schooling, and room, though I was too poor to even buy text books.  I actually studied while with my dorm mates’ books while they were sleeping.  The reason I was able to do this was I had a year under my belt, I was coming off a hugely disappointing 1.36 semester, and everything was in order without much effort on my part.

Next year I came back to Oklahoma and joined the Fijis.  In my fraternity, I drank sporadically, played Golden Eye, hazed pledges, and preached the gospel of Al Green to any that would listen.  I think my average was about a 3.0 GPA, though much better when I lived out of house.  To my credit though I can recite every line from Good Will Hunting and Friday.  Just don’t ask me about the 12 Pledge Promises cause I don’t have a damn clue.

Graduate school.  I probably drank 4 nights of the week with my new found Laotian, African, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese soccer buddies.  And I wouldn’t say light drinking either.  We’d normally kill a 30-pack a night between 3 or 4 of us.  I was 23-ish and studying TCOM (huge mistake … don’t do it).  My final GPA ended up being a 3.78.

Here’s my point.  Notice that as I got older my GPA went up?  The only time it was high when I was pre-21 was when I was fighting to save my place in college after being put on academic probation for being a dumb ass.  As I got older, I discovered and perfected the most important skill that a college student can learn – time management.  I drank more as a grad student, but still took care of all my stuff.  There was no way in hell I could have done that as a freshman or sophomore.  No way.

One of the college students in the CNN article said this, “If you treat students like children, they’re going to act like children.”  Hate to rain on your parade dumb ass, but college students are going to act like children no matter what anyone else does, says, or decrees.  We had pledge brothers that thought it was funny to make penis puppets in the college library.  Or light farts with the lights out to see the blue glow.  Or go room to room playing a soft serenade on an acoustic guitar completely naked.

You know why college students act like this?  Because they have the bodies of an adult but the maturity of children.  It takes time to develop responsibility.  The first time I puked from over drinking, I thought I was literally going to die.  I was near tears, I dry heaved, I called to my drunk buddies for help (they never came), I pleaded with God to kill me mercifully.  As a grad student, I rarely puked because I knew my limits, paced myself, and didn’t mix liquor and beer.  When I did throw up it was all business – vomit privately, wash out my mouth, and get back to grinding on the least ugly girl that was available.

OSU was one of the last schools to keep the drinking age at 18 and man oh man did we hear stories from the former students and old fraternity guys of the sheer craziness on campus.  It’s like all of those college movies such as Animal House, Van Wilder, Road Trip, etc were based on actual facts back in the day.  In fact, I think that OSU was ranked in the top 10 party schools by Playboy one year.

If making alcohol illegal makes it just the slightest bit more difficult for pre-21 to get their hands on an 18-pack of Nattie Light, then good on you, mate.  Do you know that Americans are really the only culture that binges?  Even Australians, crazy dobbers that they are, don’t pound beers like we do.  Don’t take this to mean that we have a great tolerance – we’re shit compared to the rest of the world.  We pound beers and we get red-faced drunk.

Now if I were arguing for lowering the age, I wouldn’t use the lame excuse that the quoted student did above.  What I would have said is “18-year olds can fight in every branch of the armed forces, defend our rights as Americans, and die for this country.  We have to register for the draft should the military need personnel.  If I can die for my country, why then can I not have the full rights of a citizen?”

If nothing else preserve the right of passage of the 21st birthday.  They’ve waited long enough to go the bars that it makes the occasion special.  It’s like joining a secret club.  Get all of your legal pals, pile into an SUV, and get drunk for free before being found resting your head on a public toilet seat, drooling a trail of spit to the floor.  I remember with some mixture of fondness and trepidation the last shot I had on my big night, the one that did me in.  It was a triple shot of seven liquors called the Lethal Weapon at the Stonewall Tavern.  And lethal it was, brother.  But I remember puking my guts out in the 3rd floor bathrooms after we got back to the Fiji house, gleefully smiling the whole time between snot bubbles and dry heaves.

Just remember to steal a shot glass as a keepsake … you won’t remember much of it otherwise.