Should drinking age be raised to 21?

Should the pub-drinking age be raised from 18? That question will now be asked following research from the US suggesting that a minimum legal drinking age of 21 may have prevented a 'significant amount' of alcoholism and drug abuse.

The study even puts a figure on it: having a minimum age of 21 instead of 18 reduces alcohol and substance abuse disorders by 15%.

In the study, researchers found that adults living in states that permit the purchase of alcohol before age 21 were more likely to have alcohol and drug problems later on than adults living in states that prohibit people under the age of 21 from buying alcohol.

The researchers of the study, published in an early online edition of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, reckon it's 'highly possible' that the higher legal drinking age may help keep a lid on the amount of alcohol consumed before age 21.

'It seems plausible that frequency and intensity of drinking in late adolescence may have long-term effects on adult substance use patterns,' said Dr Karen Norberg, of Washington University in St. Louis.

It breaks down like this in the States. Although all states now have a minimum drinking age of 21 because of a 1984 federal law, until the mid-1980s, many states allowed people to purchase alcohol at the age of 18.

Norberg and colleagues found differences in rates of alcoholism and drug abuse US adults exposed to different minimum legal drinking age laws. They looked at 33,689 US adults about half of whom (52%) would have been allowed to buy booze before their 21st birthday.

15% reduction in abuse

After adjusting for factors that might skew the results, the researchers found that people who lived in states that permitted buying and drinking alcohol before age 21 were about 30% more likely to have suffered from alcoholism and 70% more likely to have had a drug problem in the past year. This was true even among people in their 40s and 50s. (All told, about 10% of all of the people studied had abused alcohol in the previous year and about 3% had abused marijuana or other illegal drug in the previous year.)

Norberg and colleagues calculate that had the minimum legal drinking age been set at 21 in all states throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the prevalence of alcohol and substance abuse disorders among adults born in the US between 1948 and 1970 would have been nearly 15% lower.

In the UK, one of the hardest-drinking countries in Europe, alcohol-related deaths nearly doubled between 1991 and 2005 - from 6.9 to 12.9 per 100,000 people. Earlier this month, the British Medical Association's called for a ban on drink advertising in the UK.