Drinking age paradox?

I don't always agree with George Will, but his recent article on whether 21 is the appropriate drinking age started with me nodding my head in agreement:

"Public policy often illustrates the law of unintended consequences. Society's complexity -- multiple variables with myriad connections -- often causes the consequences of a policy to be contrary to, and larger than, the intended ones."

However, the rest of the article, whose premise is that that the legal drinking age should be lowered, is filled with half-baked arguments and numbers without context. The basic argument is that lowering the legal drinking age to 18 will help 18-21 year olds become more responsible drinkers and reduce the incidence of binge drinking and alcohol-related deaths. Will's op-ed piece as well as articles at Reason and National Review put forward some of the intellectually dishonest arguments in favor of lowering the drinking age:

Reason: "Oddly enough, high school students in much of the rest of the developed world — where lower drinking ages and laxer enforcement reign — do considerably better than U.S. students on standardized tests."

Is he seriously arguing that a lower drinking age causes higher standardized test scores? I think there may be some other variables at play here. The author either 1) is a moron or 2) thinks the people reading his article are morons.

National Review: "When it comes to alcohol, the United States is more like Indonesia, Mongolia, and Palau than the rest of the world: It is one of just four countries that requires people to be at least 21 years old to buy booze. The only countries with stiffer laws are Islamic ones."

Good argument. If Islamic countries do something, it must be wrong.

George Will: "The drinking age of 21 was one of 39 measures proposed during the 1980s by a presidential commission on drunken driving; various measures adopted did dramatically reduce the problem. But according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, about 5,000 people under 21 die every year from vehicular accidents, other injuries, homicides and suicides involving underage drinking."

So if the measures reduced the problem, why do you want to roll one of them back? Is 5,000 less than it used to be? If so then you should be looking for ways in addition to the current measures to improve on this number.

Haven't there been academic studies on the link between the legal drinking age and drunk-driving deaths?

Yes! Hundreds in fact. But apparently these authors didn't do the 5 minutes of research it would have taken to uncover some of them. This survey of 241 studies, from the University of Minnesota showed that "the preponderance of evidence indicates there is an inverse relationship between the MLDA and two outcome measures: alcohol consumption and traffic crashes." In other words, higher minimum legal drinking ages are correlated with less alcohol consumption and fewer traffic crashes.