NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE O n November 26 of last year, the Wisconsin Badgers football team played their final game of the season against their hated rivals, the Minnesota Golden Gophers. The game saw 54 people ejected (27 of whom were students), 16 people arrested, and another 16 cited (one for the overly polite-sounding charge of “disposing of human waste”).

Compare that crowd to the one that gathered the previous weekend at Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers and the mecca of professional drinking in America. Despite the doctoral levels of inebriation among fans watching the Packers defeat the Dallas Cowboys, there were only five arrests and eleven ejections. (If you are designated “the drunk” at a Packers game, you have achieved bacchanalian immortality.)

These are two stadiums, around the same size, in the same state, with the same drinking culture. And yet, according to numbers provided to me by UW-Madison police, more arrests and ejections occur among the Badgers devotees than among the seasoned NFL crowd. When the college team played Washington State, 45 people were ejected, 36 of whom were students. During the game against New Mexico, 66 people were ejected, 24 of whom were students. By contrast, the numbers for Packers games hovered in the single digits — during the final game of the year against the Detroit Lions, there were only four arrests and eight ejections.

These stats may confuse people, considering that alcohol is actually served at Packers games. How is it that a college crowd can be so much more sauced despite the lack of beer flowing at the concession stands?

The answer is simple. Knowing there’ll be no chance to get their hands on a cold one during the game, under-21s pound as much as they can outside the stadium before the game begins. The kids get themselves good and hammered, knowing the buzz is going to have to last three hours.

But this is a perfect distillation (pun intended; it’s not just beer they’re imbibing) of the argument that enforcing Prohibition-like alcohol policies for 18- to 20-year-olds remains one of the most backwards policies in America today.

The arguments for lowering the drinking age are familiar. In many states, a 19-year-old can serve on a jury, sign contracts, and enlist in the military. Yet if two 19-year-olds get married, they can’t be served drinks at the open bar at their own wedding. In many states, at age 18 you can own a shotgun but can’t shotgun a Pabst Blue Ribbon at the local bar.

Further, in 2021, 147,000 babies were born to mothers between the ages of 15 and 19. How is it we trust people that young to care for another human but not to enjoy a post-work Aperol spritz?

Setting the drinking age at 21 simply shoves young people into the shadows, where undergrads will ingest as much alcohol as possible because they don’t know when they’ll be able to obtain it again. They do shot after shot at house parties or fraternity ragers rather than at bars, where a trained bartender can assess whether they are too drunk to keep going. At a public place like a tavern, at least there is some form of supervision.

This effect has been borne out as the number of students who can’t handle their alcohol has expanded. Ten years ago, a female University of Iowa student became a drinking legend when she blew a .341 on a Breathalyzer (more than four times the legal limit) after she was arrested trying to run onto the field during a game. The student (whose Twitter handle was, appropriately, “@Vodka_samm”) took to social media while in lockup, tweeting, “I’m going to get .341 tattooed on me because its so epic.”

Of course, alcohol overuse on campus is a time-tested tradition. (By the time I graduated, my GPA was roughly the same as my BAC.) But the number of students getting blackout drunk is growing. As a result, over 140 college and university presidents have signed the Amethyst Initiative, which urges a lowering of the national drinking age.

“In my experience it was a rare occurrence that I would see someone binge drink to excess, to the point of vomiting or passing out,” said Therese Wright, who began college at the UW-Madison in 1981, when the drinking age was 18.

Wright told the student paper that “alcohol was available and accessible” at that time, whereas “today it seems as though students will abuse alcohol when they are able to get access to it.”

This unintended consequence is, of course, the byproduct of the National Minimum Drinking Age law, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. The law punished states that refused to set their minimum drinking age at 21 years of age. Those states that refused to raise their drinking age would lose 5 percent of their federal highway funds in the first year and 10 percent every year after that. Rather than go to federal-funding rehab to kick their addiction, they all quickly capitulated.

The primary concern was that if some states kept a lower minimum drinking age, young people would hop in their cars, drive to the next state over, drink excessively, then drive drunk back to their home states. A uniform drinking age would thus ameliorate the “bloody borders” problem causing carnage at state lines.

But the national-drinking-age law appeared to be punishing the wrong drivers. In 1984, the Council of State Governments conducted a study that showed that more than 99 percent of licensed drivers aged 19 to 20 had never been involved in an alcohol-related accident, and only 0.6 percent were responsible for drunk-driving accidents. Furthermore, the study showed that 18- to 20-year-olds were less likely than drivers in the 21 to 25 or 45 to 54 age groups to be involved in an alcohol-related accident.

More recently, a 2009 Harvard study found that minimum-drinking-age laws do little to reduce traffic fatalities and almost nothing to reduce underage drinking.

A number of things could be done to reverse the damage being done by the current minimum drinking age. For one, states could implement what I have previously called a “drinking license”: allow 19- and 20-year-olds, with parental permission, to take a class on alcohol safety and obtain a special license allowing them to drink in the state in which the license is issued. The license wouldn’t be good in any other state, which would prevent the “bloody borders” problem. And the revenue collected from the fee assessed to these young people for the license could offset the federal revenue lost by having a lower drinking age.

Or, Congress could simply lower the minimum drinking age, dispensing with the fiction that people under 21 don’t drink. This proposal should especially appeal to free-market Republicans, who have some work to do to lure college-aged students to vote for them. Faux-GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy recently proposed increasing the voting age to 25 years old, and a notable Republican attorney argued that it’s too easy to vote on college campuses. Republicans — some of them, anyway — evidently believe that young people are a problem that needs to be solved, rather than working on ways to appeal to them.

The U.S. has seen major changes in just the past few years. Public policies we never thought we would see are now part of the landscape: Roe v. Wade has been overturned, there are cannabis storefronts in many major cities, and college athletes are able to rake in money from the use of their images and likenesses.

But one of the silliest, most counterproductive laws on the federal books is still in effect. America appears to have forgotten the lessons of the Prohibition era, during which people killed themselves drinking what was essentially paint thinner in an attempt to get a solid buzz. You want the young adults of today to act like adults? Start treating them that way.