Student Most Likely to Drink and Drive When They Turn 21

Statistics show that students who drink and drive are still a major cause of concern, as far as public health goes. Young adults tend to engage in risky behaviors throughout their college years, but none is arguably more dangerous than drinking and then getting behind the wheel. According to a new research, it would appear that the number of car crashes in which drunk students are involved spikes when the youngsters reach the age of 21. The findings are even more worrying when taking into account that more than a quarter of students regularly report having driven a car while intoxicated in the past month.

Even higher percentages of respondents generally say that they have driven their cars after consuming some alcohol – but insufficient to make them drunk – or that they were in vehicles driven by drunk peers. These already-worrying statistics became even worse when the researchers took into account the age of the students. A noticeable upturn in accident numbers was recorded when the youngsters turned 21, the team behind the investigation says. Details of the findings will appear in the upcoming August issue of the esteemed scientific journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

“Drinking and driving endangers the safety of not only the drinking driver and passengers, but also other individuals on the road. College students have limited driving experience, making drinking and driving possibly even more hazardous. [While] other studies have examined drinking and driving among college students, to our knowledge this is the first to have examined how the behavior changes over time in the same sample of students,” says University of Maryland School of Public Health expert Amelia M. Arria, who was the corresponding author of the paper. She is also the director of the UM Center on Young Adult Health and Development.

“Other studies have demonstrated that freshmen tend to drink more than upperclassmen. This may have led some to the erroneous conclusion that existing college alcohol-safety programs are effective. This study tends to demonstrate that alcohol-related problem behaviors increase with age, perhaps due to greater opportunities for risk taking such as owning a car or the ability to patronize bars and purchase alcohol. If college programs were successful, we should be able to at least prevent an increase in risky drinking and driving during the period the students are at the university,” adds the director of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) Impaired Driving Center, Robert B. Voas.