Back to school
The move to lower the 21-year-old drinking age is picking up a bit of steam with the Amethyst Initiative, a brainchild of John McCardell, President Emeritus of Middlebury College and Founder of Choose Responsibility. I interviewed McCardell last year about his idea for a learner’s permit for young drinkers (read it here).
The initiative is essentially a statement that says it’s time to re-think the legal drinking age, to begin “an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21 year-old drinking age.” It’s already attracted the signatures of 100 college presidents.
No surprise, the Prohibitionists are up in arms. MADD calls the presidents “misguided, and says they’re shirking their responsibility.
I see a few local college presidents on the list, including Elizabethtown, Lafayette, Gettysburg, Moravian, Widener and St. Joe’s.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:20 am
[…] I was going to do a story on the Amethyst Initiative today after having read about it, in all places, The Bulletin, Philadelphia’s crazed right-wing successor to the grand old and long-gone Evening Bulletin on the R5 train yesterday afternoon on my way into the city (the paper is free in case you’re wondering how I came to get a copy), but Don Russell beat me to it. […]