Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.

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Dan Casey

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Should the drinking age be lowered to 18? Should we even have a debate about it?

Citing an alarming amount of binge drinking on college campuses, more than 130 university presidents and chancellors from across the country want such a discussion.

Among them are Hollins University's Nancy Gray, Virginia Tech's Charles Steger and Washington and Lee's Kenneth Ruscio. They admit they don't have the answers -- they're merely raising the question.

I am no academic, but I have some familiarity with the subject, both as a long-ago teen drinker and a 50-year-old parent of teens. I offer these views in the spirit of such a discussion.

Back when I was in high school, the drinking age was 18, which as a practical matter meant that we high schoolers could easily get beer, wine and sometimes liquor, at 15 or 16.

To say we took advantage of that would be an understatement.

The drinking livened up our weekend parties. It seemed we danced more, laughed louder and flirted more easily.

It wasn't unusual to binge -- getting drunk was the point, after all. Often somebody got sick or (I am not at all proud to say) didn't have the sense not to drive. Most of the time, we made it home safely.

Most of the time.

As a parent, you have a very different perspective of the issue. Fear and horror are two of the words that come to mind.

Seeing your own son or daughter drunk, and dealing with the consequences of it, can be heart-wrenching.

It gives you a very different view of the "fun" you experienced back in those carefree teen days.

There is no shortage of studies on teen drinking. Some of the best publicized and most sobering originate from Monitoring the Future, an annual survey of 50,000 eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders from across the country.

Read the charts that accompany those studies. What you can't help but notice is that since the drinking age was raised to 21:

n Rates of high schoolers who report alcohol use in the past 30 days have steadily dropped, from nearly 80 percent of seniors in early 1980s to just more than 60 percent in 2008.

n Percentages of younger teens who disapprove of binge drinking have steadily climbed. So has the percentage who view binge drinking as a "great risk."

n It is harder than ever for teens to get their hands on alcohol -- although it's still too easy for them to get.

Another study, by Duke University Medical Center in 2006, shows that teenagers' brains are far more susceptible to damage from alcohol than are adults' brains.

Yet another study, by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, suggests that the younger people begin drinking, the more likely they are to become alcoholics later in their lives.

So sure, let's have a discussion about the drinking age. But let's make sure it doesn't occur in a vacuum.

Don't limit it to whether 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds are old enough to drink.

Don't limit it to whether lowering the drinking age would help solve a problem that university administrators perceive on college campuses.

We don't want to push the problem back to the high schools and middle schools.

Because that could be trading one discrete set of troubles for other much bigger ones.

Dan Casey's column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.