ROBBY SOAVE: Congress, End the Hangover: Abolish the Federal Drinking Age.

Activists, administrators, and national policymakers concerned about a supposed epidemic of rape on college campuses should stop trying so damn hard to regulate students’ sex lives. Instead, their efforts would be better spent lobbying Congress to abolish a law that puts students at risk of sexual assault by encouraging them to consume alcohol recklessly: the National Minimum Drinking Age Act.

Just over thirty years ago, in response to public concerns about teen drinking and driving, Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which punished states for failing to raise the legal drinking age from 18 to 21 by taking away their highway funding if they refused. Within a few years, all 50 states and D.C. had fallen in line, making the U.S. one of only four countries with a drinking age higher than 18 (the others are Japan, South Korea, and Iceland).

Did the law decrease drunk driving? Many experts doubt it. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard University economics professor and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, has argued that the law had “little or no life-saving effect.” While a few states that adopted a stricter drinking age on their own saw limited, temporary success, the vast majority of states that prohibited teen drinking in response to federal bullying had little to show for it—other than the federal dollars they got to keep.

There is some evidence, however, that raising the drinking age might have actually worsened the teen binge-drinking problem. It’s easy to imagine why that might be the case: if drinking any amount of alcohol is illegal for 18-year-olds, those who want to drink anyway have every incentive to down as much booze a quickly as possible, thus minimizing the amount of time they could be caught by the cops holding a beer in their hands.

Yep.