“Legal age 21 is not effective.”

This was one of the opening remarks made by President-Emeritus of Middlebury College John McCardell during a lecture about his new non-profit organization, Choose Responsibility.The lecture was held at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house on Thursday evening.

“The current drinking age is a bad social policy and an indefensible abridgment of the age of maturity,” McCardell continued. “The law is breeding unintentional consequences that are too risky and dangerous.”

Choose Responsibility promotes a revision of both the mentality towards and the regulation of underage drinking as a way to curb abusive drinking by teens. The most dramatic of these potential revisions is the return of the legal drinking age in the United States from 21 to 18.

Thursday’s event was sponsored by the Beta Theta Pi lecture series and gave McCardell the opportunity to expand on his organization’s mission as well as to seek support from those in attendance.

McCardell explained that Choose Responsibility grew out of an op-ed piece he wrote in 2005 for the New York Times entitled, “What your college professor always wanted to say.” McCardell wrote that underage drinking occurs in massive amounts on college campuses nation wide and that there is very little done to curb the problem. The response he received was, as he said, “completely unexpected and amazing.”

Julian Robertson, a successful investor from the firm Tiger Fund, became a fast friend of McCardell and agreed to provide half of the $40,000 that McCardell and a group of other university presidents deemed necessary to launch the non-profit.

“We are a shoe-string, start-up operation,” McCardell said. “We operate out of a single room above a storefront in Middlebury, Vt., with a three-person payroll, including myself and two recent Middlebury graduates.”

Despite its relatively small size, Choose Responsibility has generated a large amount of media attention.

“George Will contacted us, Parade Magazine contacted us, in the next three weeks we will have a spot on 60 minutes,” McCardell said. “This is an issue the public is ready to debate.”

Much of this attention and grassroots commitment could be due to the unique stance that Choose Responsibility has on underage drinking.

“We have a generation of experience with Legal Drinking Age 21 [instituted in 1984], and we can see that it is not reflective of social reality,” McCardell said. “Legal Age 21 has banned underage drinking from public view and forced it underground or into great levels of illegality with fake IDs. Underage drinking now occurs in the riskiest of environments. It might be dry on campus, but wet situations are prevalent at off-campus locations at universities nation-wide.”

McCardell supplemented the lecture with a slideshow that included a variety of statistics and charts of alcohol-related deaths during the 24 years since the drinking age was changed to 21.

“Sometimes, you have to look at the framing of the argument before you accept it,” he said. “With many of these statistics, the advocates are talking politics instead of science.”

McCardell gave the example of a popular statistic showing a decline in teen alcohol-related car accidents since 1984. However, he noted, looking at every other age group above the teenage years shows the same effect. Alcohol-related deaths have been reduced in age groups across the board since 1984.

“How much effect can one claim Legal Age 21 has had, given this knowledge?” McCardell asked.

Having made the point that his organization opposes the current drinking laws, McCardell spent the later portion of the lecture outlining the prospective changes that Choose Responsibility would like to instate.

“Too often, alcohol education uses scare tactics to educate,” McCardell said. “We believe in a multi-faceted approach to alcohol education and change in consumption regulation.”

McCardell expressed that Choose Responsibility promotes a waiver of the current federal law ordering that any state that does not set its drinking age at 21 will forfeit 10 percent of its annual federal highway appropriation. Additionally, the organization believes a semantic change should occur in that young adults “should be treated and referred to as such.”

The most drastic change revolves around a license program for teens graduating from high school. McCardell explained that recent high school graduates would be able to go through an alcohol education program and receive a license to possess, purchase and consume alcohol.

While the specifics of the drinking program were not immediately apparent, this fresh perspective on underage drinking generated a lot of buzz on Thursday, judging by the question-and-answer session that followed McCardell’s talk and the large number of people who stayed after to speak with him.

“I think the lecture was engaging and interesting,” said President of Beta Theta Pi Newman Hoffman ’09. “Mr. McCardell’s views are different, but there could definitely be something to what he’s saying.”

McCardell encouraged everyone in attendance to consider the current situation of underage drinking for themselves.

“Have we created a more or less safe environment for social reality?” he posited.

Choose Responsibility flyers are available at the fraternity. Additionally, http://www.chooseresponsibility.org offers options to join the cause and donate to it.