The Purchase Independent

By Beth Scorzato

Managing Editor

In 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, forcing all states to raise their minimum drinking age to twenty-one or face having 10% of their federal highway money docked. For states like New York where the minimum age had previously been eighteen, this was a huge change for college students in particular.

But now, a new movement is being started to encourage the lowering of the drinking age by an unlikely group: college presidents. This summer the Amethyst Initiative launched to encourage  “an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21 year-old drinking age.” The Initiative currently has 130 signatories including Purchase College’s President Schwarz.

“I think it’s important to all schools. I think it’s important to all students that we have this conversation. It’s not just limited to Purchase,” said Schwarz.

According to the Initiative’s mission statement, “The twenty-one year-old drinking age encourages “a culture of dangerous, clandestine ‘binge-drinking’ – often conducted off-campus – has developed.”

But is binge-drinking a problem at Purchase?

“I don’t think it’s a problem,” said Lauren Cicitto, a senior. “It happens, but I don’t think we have crazy numbers like other colleges.”

Others feel differently. “I know a lot of my friends that I think do drink too often and too much at a time,” said Audrey DeRocker, also a senior.

But everyone agreed that lowering the drinking age would be a good thing.

“It [drinking] would be less exciting if they could do it earlier cause it’s less exciting now that I’m twenty-one,” said Kristopher W. Imperati, a senior. “I think eighteen is perfectly appropriate. At eighteen… you do everything a responsible citizen of this country should be doing. You should be allowed to, at the end of your equally long and crappy day, have a drink like the rest of us!”

DeRocker also felt that lowering the minimum would be beneficial. “I feel a lot of times as though binge-drinking and over-drinking happens when it begins freshman year when people are fresh out of high-school… I think that if drinking were less taboo and were just legal from an earlier age, people would not be so inclined to do it,” she said.

For more information on the The Amethyst Initiative’s mission visit them at www.amethystinitiative.org. Signing is currently only open to college and university presidents, but it’s up to you to speak up for students.

“If students want to have this debate on this campus I certainly would be willing to participate,” said President Schwarz. “I am of the view that most of these kinds of things should be organized by students.”

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