Actually, the drinking age varied by state: in New York you could drink at 18, in Colorado you could drink 3.2 beer. The Reagan Administration pushed to make th

Actually, the drinking age varied by state: in New York you could drink at 18, in Colorado you could drink 3.2 beer. The Reagan Administration pushed to make the drinking age a uniform 21, with the notion that this would produce as a great a reduction in traffic fatalities as the airbags it did not wish to mandate.