earlier MLDA exposure also predicts elevated risk for a past-year drug use disorder in middle adulthood. Approximately 51.8% of adults in our target cohort would have been allowed to purchase alcohol before the age of 21, and we found that MLDA exposure increased the odds of a current substance use disorder by 33%; together, these figures suggest that if the minimum legal purchase age had been set at 21 years in all states throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, then the prevalence of past-year alcohol or substance abuse disorders among adults born in the US between 1948 and 1970 would have been about 14.6% lower than we observe it to have been over the past 20 years.1 Our estimates were similar for alcohol and other drug use disorders, for clinical diagnoses of both substance abuse and dependence, for both males and females, for blacks, Hispanics, and others, in all age groups, and among respondents who had already started to drink before the age of 16 as well as among those who had not.
