@mathyone that’s the conundrum isn’t it? All the statistics seem to indicate that raising the drinking age as been effective big time. All the anecdotal evidence suggests that the way (some) kids drink has changed and not for the better. It’s certainly possible for both to be true.
Every year kids from my (private) high school got expelled for drinking. It never seemed to stop the girls who wanted to drink from drinking. Plenty of my kids in our high school take to the local woods to drink, if they don’t have parents who turn a blind eye to what is going on in the basement. But the move to shots and getting drunk as fast as possible, does seem like a real difference in the way kids are drinking.