Opinion: You have to drink whenever someone says ‘teachable moment’

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Whatever its other consequences, I hope the ‘beer summit’ involving President Obama, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley makes a dent in the the priggish neo-Prohibitionism that regards a sip of Miller Lite as a form of substance abuse.

Over-consumption of alcohol is bad, and for many alcohol is addictive. But roughly since the founding of Mothers Against Drunk Driving in 1980, a sort of anti-alcohol zealotry has crept into the culture.

In Pennsylvania, where I wrote many editorials in favor of privatizing the state liquor stores, neo-Prohibitionists, many of them politically liberal, were part of an unholy anti-reform alliance that also included organized labor (fearful that state liquor-store clerks would lose their jobs), teetotalers from Pennsylvania’s Bible Belt and ministers from Philadelphia who believe, wrongly, that state control of liquor sales keeps young men in their communities out of mischief.

The most conspicuous casualty of Alcoholic Correctness has been a rational debate over the drinking age. When a group of college presidents broached the possibility of an 18-year-old drinking age, they were savaged by critics -- including MADD, which accused them of waving the white flag in the battle against binge drinking on campus.

Actually, the presidents’ point was that an unrealistically low drinking age might actually encourage binge drinking.

Intuitively, this seems right to me, but it’s been a long time since I was a college student in the 1970s. When I became the editor of the student newspaper, I inherited the practice of holding a kegger in the newspaper’s office to introduce potential reporters to our rag. We advertised the event in the paper, never worrying that a ‘townie’ in a blue uniform would see it and bust us. One of the resident advisers in my freshman dorm advised us that we weren’t likely to be arrested for possession unless we took the beer bottles into the street.

Were there binge drinkers at my college? Sure, including me one night, but I didn’t have a car and the hangover sobered me in more ways than one. Maybe a new look at the drinking age will require that a cop in Cambridge arrest a Harvard student for having a beer on his porch.