In 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, officially banning the sale and manufacture of all alcoholic beverages in the United States.
A movement intended to reduce alcoholism in the U.S., Prohibition lasted 14 years before it was abolished by the ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment. To say that the United States was “dry” during this period would be a gross exaggeration. In fact, Prohibition created a culture of alcohol sale and consumption that pervades American society to this day.
The main flaw of Prohibition was that drinking alcohol was at that point too deeply embedded in the American way of life, and merely outlawing it didn’t stop anyone, as was seen by the immediate emergence of moonshiners. On college campuses today, a similar dilemma has been presenting itself and, like the United States in the 1920s, the solution is not prohibition.
In many colleges and universities in the United States, a strict ban on underage alcohol consumption is enforced, with penalties in place to discourage the consumption of all alcoholic beverages. However, an x-ray image of any American dorm on a Friday night would quickly display the inefficacy of this policy, as would the fact that roughly 80 percent of college students drink alcohol.
Outside of supplying students with a good education, a college’s primary responsibility is to ensure the safety of its students, and that simply cannot be guaranteed with the current “zero tolerance” policy seen on most campuses. While the legal drinking age in all 50 states is 21, schools need to recognize, like the federal government did in 1933, when a policy is simply ineffective, or even worse, is counter-productive.
For while schools may think that they are doing their best to prevent students from participating in dangerous and illegal activities, more often than not, those who wish to drink, will. The only difference is that those wishing to consume alcohol are now forced to do so behind closed doors, a dangerous and potentially deadly alternative.
Strict alcohol policies encourage students to drink alcohol more quickly, in greater quantities, and in shorter time periods, with disregard to not only their safety, but the safety of their friends as well. Adopting a single-serving-per-person policy, in which an individual carrying a single unit of alcohol on campus cannot be penalized, would drastically change the culture of, for lack of a better term, underground binge drinking.
If colleges truly value the safety of their students, drinking policies must be amended.
More often than not, the results of an institution’s actions fall far from its intentions. Pro-abstinence advocates thought banning condoms in high schools would reduce teenage sex. Instead, teenagers continued to have sex, only this time, without condoms.
The point is, it is very hard to restrict people’s behavior. However, reforming that behavior is very doable. Regarding the failure of Prohibition, humorist Will Rogers famously said, “Why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years, Americans would the smartest race of people on Earth.”