Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Tupelo

An unfolding debate about lowering the legal drinking age from 21 to 18 nationwide as a means of curbing underage drinking is both bad policy and politically doomed.

We realize that many of those most strongly advocating a return to a lower legal drinking age are angry and frustrated university presidents in some states who have tried, with limited success, to deal with binge drinking by lowerclassmen — and even deaths related to alcohol abuse.

It would be difficult to find a major public university where underage drinking doesn’t create problems.

In many ways the suggestion is “deju vu all over again,” to borrow the great Yogi Berra’s famous malapropism.

Congress doesn’t require a nationwide legal drinking age set at 21, but it made choosing anything lower for any kind of legal alcohol beverage punitively expensive for states using federal highway funds, which is all 50 of them. The government said if the drinking age is lower than 21, a 10 percent reduction in highway funds would be made to the non-complying states.

The provision preserved states’ rights, at a cost, but it also responded to a soaring rate of alcohol-related deaths in traffic accidents among late adolescents.

The teenagers who had been legal drinkers, at least of beer, before 1984, were generally unhappy about the change — especially when they went away to college — where beer (and other alcohol) is almost ubiquitous on most campuses, legal or not.

Mississippi, it is worthy of note, was one of the states with a legal age set at 18 for beer. However, the plain fact is that deaths related to drinking and driving among that age group dropped nationwide. Beer and harder spirits, though still usually obtainable by the wiles of those determined enough, became harder to buy below age 21. All sorts of retail outlets started “carding” purchasers more carefully under stiffer penalties for underage sales.

A substantial number of older teenagers arguably became more cautious.

We recognize that some feel passionately that people old enough to vote and fight for our nation should be able to drink whatever is legal, but statistics of alcohol-related accidental deaths suggest a personal judgment factor also must be considered.

Safety advocates say the 21 drinking age saves about 900 lives every year.

Full-time traditional-age college students drink more than people the same age who aren’t in college, the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence says. It estimates that 1,700 18- to 24-year-old students die every year from alcohol-related injuries.

Some say that drinking at 18 — or younger — gives people a thrill. People with long memories also know that drinking illegally at almost any age in an officially dry Mississippi also gave people a thrill before 1966, when Mississippi legalized alcohol by local option.

We believe 900 lives saved is worth more effort and persuasion than legal alcohol at 18. We’ve been there, and it wasn’t a silver bullet.