www.alkoholpolitik.ch

The Datasphere has launched a long process of collating information about young drinkers.
Our ongoing series, Under 21, which looks at college drinking and the Amethyst Initiative to re-examine the legal drinking age, didn’t take a summer break. This summer, we sent an alcohol policy and discipline survey to all 44 of Virginia’s four-year residential colleges — schools that give students what might be called the traditional college experiences of dorm life, dating, friends, fraternities, sororities and so on. (Source: Google Alkohol Alert, 9/6/09) roanoke.com, 9/6/09

Last year about this time, a group of more than 100 college presidents caused a stir by launching a push to lower the drinking age to 18. Their goal: to cut down on the pernicious, sometimes lethal problem of binge drinking on campus. They called their initiative „Amethyst“.
Now there’s a sobering new study that should spur those presidents to rethink Amethyst.
Researchers writing in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry state that raising the drinking age to 21 has been largely effective in reducing binge drinking everywhere, except — you guessed it — on college campuses. The study says that among men between 18 and 20 who were not in college, binge drinking plummeted by more than 30 percent from 1979 to 2006. At the same time, such drinking among college men was „as prevalent as ever,“ it says. (Source: Harvard World Health News, 8/21/09) Chicago Tribune, 8/20/09