The impact of minimum legal drinking age laws on alcohol consumption, smoking, and marijuana use revisited.

In volume 30, issue 4 of this journal, we used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, 1997 cohort (NLSY97) to estimate the impact of the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) laws on alcohol consumption, smoking, and marijuana use among young adults. In our analysis, we used a restricted sample of young adults and considered only those who have consumed alcohol, smoked cigarettes, or used marijuana at least once since the date of their last interview. In this paper, we revisit our original study using the full sample. We show that our results for alcohol consumption in the full sample are similar to those from the restricted sample. However, the effect of the MLDA on smoking and marijuana use is smaller and often statistically insignificant.