Alcohol, Education, Logic

A sorority girl fell off the roof of her house last week.  She was, of course, staggeringly drunk. She messed herself up pretty badly but she will live. Accidents of this kind happen regularly in our college town. Kids fall off roofs, kids drive drunk and kill someone or themselves, or kids just binge-drink themselves to death. It's regrettable that we've become accustomed to such stories. I think it's the saddest thing: a family raises a child for twenty years, sends him or her off to college with great hopes -- and two weeks later the kid has crashed the car, fatally, or choked to death on her own vomit.  

As a result of this latest incident, the neighbors have been engaged in an internet war. One noisy faction insists that it's our policies that are at fault -- that kids drink themselves to oblivion because alcohol is legally prohibited until age twenty-one. If alcohol were legal, the argument goes, students would then do their drinking in a controlled environment, such as an adult-supervised party or a bar with rules on over-serving, and they wouldn't indulge in private. It's a paradoxical argument -- alcohol would be safer if it were not prohibited.

After a great deal of back-and-forth and uninformed argumentation, one of the neighbors, an epidemiologist who has actually studied the problem, presented some data. That when New Zealand lowered the drinking age from 21 to 18, binge drinking and accidental deaths increased. That binge drinking is higher in European countries, some of which allow alcohol at age 16, than in the U.S. That underage drinking declines, sometimes by as much as 40%, when rules are enforced. That when alcohol is less available, alcohol consumption decreases, and conversely, when it is made more available, consumption increases. That the unformed brains of teen-agers are particularly subject to being addled by alcohol. 

The advocates of lowering the drinking age were unmoved by the evidence. One resident, whom I will call BB, wrote in to say this: "Surely, had this 20 year old woman been of legal drinking age, she would have been in the regulated environment of a drinking establishment and not at an underground party. The likelihood of her being overserved in that regulated environment and then ending up drunk on the roof of her sorority would be considerably diminished. Unlike Dr. F's and others' studies, this is a real life study that happened right down the street. Let's open our eyes and start to learn from these events."  BB's takes the position that we can ignore the data, forget the scientific studies, and replace them with his interpretation of this particular event. BB's is a good example of what is called "anecdotal thinking." But anecdotes, standing alone, are not evidence nor can they replace the systematic gathering of evidence and statistics. Meanwhile, another neighbor of long standing, KW, answers the evidence with his own simple argument: we all drank when we were young, there were laws in place then but we ignored them, nothing will ever change, why make it hard for kids, let them drink at 18. KW is not much more logical than BB. He argues ahistorically, quite oblivious to the fact that alcohol is used differently in different cultures and in one culture a different times in history. 

BB says, it's cold today, there can be no such thing as global warming;  KW says, there's always been weather, and it's always been warm

When I was a teacher, I tried over and over again to explain to my freshmen that a) you can't build an argument on an anecdote, and b) that the experience of an individual is not necessarily universal -- that to gather data, to consider the context, and to apply logic were the hallmarks of the educated individual. Neither BB and KW, both of whom, I believe, graduated from college, ever took the first step in their freshman "critical thinking" class. They have their views, and they're not going to let facts get in their way. 

Is it relevant that both BB and KW are Republicans?  I believe it is.

But what should we do about alcohol abuse?  It's an intractable problem we're not going to solve it immediately, but we have an instructive analogy in the case of tobacco, where in the U. S, the consumption of tobacco has declined significantly. We decreased tobacco use by a) prohibiting advertisements that made smoking glamorous and alluring, b) increasing taxes, c) disseminating information on lung cancer and low birth weights, etc, and d) by making tobacco less available. We could try the same with alcohol, where billions are spent by distilleries and breweries to make make alcohol use seem sophisticated and ennobling. Instead, we could discuss incarceration rates, fetal alcohol syndrome, homelessness, domestic violence, puking in the streets and choking in the bed. We could limit the number of bars and alcohol outlets. We could make drinking more expensive by raising the taxes to cover the civic cost in police, judiciary, accidents, and prisons. We could tax wine less and hard liquor more. We could rigorously enforce existing drinking-age laws. We could also encourage the use of less dangerous drugs.  

In addition, we could try to improve our educational system, so that when the neighbors came to talk about alcohol abuse, they could conduct their discussion with respect for fact and logic. 

Comments

[Vivian de St. Vrain]

Dr. M. does not detect any "blind vitriol" in his post. He's read and re-read, but nope, it's not there.

[Jonathan]

You've got an interesting thing going on. Very witty and insightful. However, certainly not devoid of the type of fallacious thinking you attempt to denounce.

Your barb about Republicans in this little piece is highly ironic. People who identify as members of the GOP are more likely to have gone to college than their Democratic counterparts, at last according to the last political science course I took.

(Sure enough, a brief search backs this up. Please see: Fried, Joseph, Democrats and Republicans — Rhetoric and Reality (New York: Algora Publishing, 2008), 74–5.)

Your insinuation (that Republicans are uneducated and lack basic critical thinking skills)is based more on the anecdotal than on the empirical. You commit the same crime you spent the entire post decrying. Poetic justice, if there ever were such a thing.

A great blog overall, but try to write your next blog with "respect for logic and fact"...and preferably less blind vitriol directed at people with different political inclinations than you.

[Lew Bryson]

You think your "Republican" neighbors are ignorant, yet have you actually looked at the studies your epidemiologist friend presented? Because I have looked at studies of that type, closely, and at more than the abstracts of the studies. When you actually look deeper into these studies, you find that their construction is often -- not always, but more often than not -- designed to find the results desired. They are not good studies; they are poorly designed, they do not follow the basic scientific method (hypothesis first, conclusion last), they rely on changing definitions (like that of "binge drinking") to mold the data. In the end, they are hardly less anecdotal than your neighbors' stories.

As just one example -- because without a solid example, this is simply an anecdote -- the widely quoted study by Dr. Ralph Hingson of the NIAAA that "found that drinking-related accidental deaths among 18- to 24-year-old [college] students have been creeping upward -- from 1,440 in 1998 to 1,825 in 2005." Pretty scary, until you read the actual study and find that these numbers are pure guesses, extrapolation from very small data pools. The "guess" nature becomes evident when you realize that 1,440 and 1825 -- which sound like carefully researched numbers -- are exactly 120 deaths a month and 5 deaths a day, respectively. What are the odds?

Particularly when the only people I know of who have actually counted drinking-related deaths, real recorded deaths, not estimates, were some investigative reporters at USA Today. About five years ago, horrified by Hingson's research, they dug out college-age deaths over a five-year period...and found that the actual number was closer to 36 drinking-related college deaths a year. Still tragic, but hardly an epidemic. Think about it: if five college students were dying in booze-related accidents EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR...don't you think somebody would notice?

Be as careful of false precision as you are of anecdote.