Underage drinking laws
reduce fatal accidents, saving 732 lives per
year
Wednesday, April 8,
2009
State laws that prohibit people under the age of 21 from purchasing
or possessing alcohol, and from driving with any alcohol in their
system save 732 lives a year in the United States, according to a
study released today that has examined 23 years of research on the
subject. The study further shows that if every state adopted 'use
and lose' laws—suspending the license of anyone under 21 cited for
possession, consumption or attempt to purchase alcohol—an
additional 165 lives would be saved.
The study appears today in the online version of the journal
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research (ACER). It was
funded by the Substance Abuse Policy Research Program of the Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation.
Researchers analyzed data from 1982 through to 2004, using the
Alcohol Policy Information System (1998-2005); the Digests of State
Alcohol-Highway Safety Related Legislation (1983-2006); the Westlaw
database; and the Fatality Analysis Reporting System data set
(1982-2004). They looked at six key underage drinking laws and four
general impaired-driving and traffic safety laws, and found the
most significant impact came from four underage laws.
Three of the four more general laws that target all drivers also
were effective in reducing drinking driver crash deaths for all
ages, the study found. These included laws that make it illegal to
drive with over .08 blood alcohol content (BAC); suspend a license
for exceeding the .08 BAC while driving; and enable a police
officer to pull over a driver who was not wearing a seatbelt. While
the direct effects of laws targeting drivers of all ages on adult
drinking drivers aged 26 and older were similar, the results were
of a smaller magnitude compared to the findings for those aged 20
and younger.
"These results provide substantial support for the effectiveness of
under age 21 drinking laws and point to the importance of key
underage drinking and traffic safety laws in efforts to reduce
underage drinking-driver crashes," says James C. Fell, M.S., of the
Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) in Calverton,
Maryland.
Another important finding from the study was that beer consumption
per capita across all ages in states has a direct relationship with
underage drinking and driving. The authors discovered that the
higher the beer consumption per capita, the higher the youth crash
rate.
"This could be because adult alcohol consumption is correlated with
youth consumption," Fell says. "The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) found that if the adult binge drinking rate is
high, it is also high for youth."
Two underage drinking laws—registering kegs and graduated
licensing—were found to have almost no impact on fatality rates,
according to the study.
"We didn't find that laws mandating that beer kegs be registered to
the purchaser made any difference in reducing underage drinking and
driving fatal crashes. In fact with this particular law, we saw 12
percent more drinking-related traffic fatalities amongst those
under 21," says Fell.
He said possible reasons may be that the law was not well enforced,
or that in states that adopted keg registration laws, to circumvent
the issue of registering beer kegs, young people choose instead to
bring their own beer or liquor to underage parties, and as a result
become more intoxicated from consuming their own booze than if a
beer keg was the only source of alcohol.
Forty-four states have laws that restrict young drivers with an
intermediate license from driving late at night, but Fell says this
had no demonstrable effect on preventing underage drinking-related
fatalities. The authors did not account for the start times of the
night restrictions, instead focusing on whether a state had this
law.
"So it could be that restrictions that start at 9:00 p.m. may have
an effect, but the ones starting at 1:00 a.m. are very unlikely to
make an impact because they begin too late," says Fell.
Last year, Fell and colleagues found that laws making it illegal to
possess or purchase alcohol by anyone under the age of 21 had led
to an 11 percent drop in alcohol-related traffic deaths among
youth; secondly, they found that states with strong laws against
fake IDs reported 7 percent fewer alcohol-related fatalities among
drivers under the age of 21.
"People who want to lower the minimum drinking age say that the
positive effects of raising it to 21 only took place in the 1980s
and has since lost its impact," Fell says. "But we looked at these
numbers over a 23-year period. This study shows the impact is still
strong, and is keeping the numbers of underage drinking and driving
deaths down—more so than if the drinking age is lowered."
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Thanks to Substance Abuse Policy
Research Program for this article.