Minimum Drinking Age Laws Effects on American Youth: 1976-1987. Monitoring the Future. Occasional Paper Series, Paper 28.

This research was undertaken to delineate cross-sectional differences among U.S. high school seniors and young adults that may be due to variations in recent years in state-level minimum drinking age laws, and to examine the effects of recent changes in minimum drinking age laws on alcohol consumption, and on other relevant attitudes and behaviors. Analyses were conducted using existing data collected by the Monitoring the Future project which involved national surveys of 15,000 to 19,000 high school seniors and annual followup surveys of recent graduates. The major findings were that: (1) higher minimum drinking ages were associated with lower levels of alcohol use among high school seniors and recent high school graduates, even after multivariate controls; (2) lower levels of alcohol use were observed across a broad spectrum of demographic variables; (3) the lower levels of use persisted into the early 20's, even though everyone was of legal age; and (4) lowered involvement in alcohol-related fatal crashes among drivers less than 21 years of age appeared to be due to less drinking of alcohol, in particular less drinking in bars or taverns. (Author/BHK)