Judging by the title, many of you are probably sitting there thinking this is going to be some spiel about an underage kid who just wants to get drunk all the time and doesn't want to wait until he or she turns 21. I'm here to tell you you're wrong and to hopefully point out the flaws and harm this restriction is actually imposing on young adults. The second you turn 18, a window of opportunities and responsibilities is unlocked for you in this country. To name a few things that come with this age: you are legally allowed to take up arms and defend our great nation by joining the military, you can legally marry, and even vote for public officials. You are capable to take on these responsibilities and many others, but you are not allowed to have an alcoholic beverage until 3 years later. At this point young adults are just getting toyed with their so called adult title. Most people would perceive the drinking age to be in place to protect underage people from the dangers of irresponsible drinking, but it has merely gone in the opposite direction. More dangerous drinking habits have occurred in younger aged kids due to this age restriction on alcohol and has become more of a problem than a solution. The only way to fix this increasing problem is to lower the drinking to 18, and to educate the youth on the responsibilities and dangers that correlate with alcohol.

To better understand this problem, one should learn both sides of the story. For instance, why the drinking age was raised to 21 in the first place. One of the main reasons why the drinking age was raised is due to an increase of alcohol related accidents with teens when the age limit was at 18. "Between 1970 and1975, 29 States lowered their MLDA's (minimum legal drinking age); subsequently, scientists found that traffic accidents increased significantly among teenagers" (Toomey, Rosenfeld, and Wagenaar, 1). To combat this, the age limit was raised and statistically it has reduced the number of alcohol related accidents in teens. On the other hand, this does not take into account of all the other things available since then that help reduce the number of accidents not just raising the age limit to 21 like; "education concerning drunk driving, designated driver programs, increased seat belt and air bag usage, safer automobiles, lower speed limits, free taxi services from drinking establishments, etc" (Engs, 1). These are other factors that need to be thought about that affect the credibility of the drinking age and all it entails.

However, drinking age limits are entirely up to each individual State: it is not federal law. So with some states increasing their drinking age limit and others leaving it at 18, there still posed a problem of minors in the eyes of some states obtaining alcohol illegally. An 18 year old could simply cross state lines into an 18 and older alcohol ruled state, purchase booze, then return back to the 21 and over state where which they reside. This still put teens at risk of the alcohol related accidents the government was trying to get rid of by raising the drinking age. Teens driving across state's borders to buy alcohol, then returning back to their home state, put them on the road longer than if they were just running down to the corner mart to buy a 6 pack. Therefore, the teen's accident rates they wanted to diminish, although smaller, was still in play. Their plan was obviously not working the way government officials had wanted it to, so they needed to come up with a different plan to fix this problem as best as they could. No matter what they imposed, kids will still find a way to get alcohol illegally. That's a problem that will never get fixed, and will continue to be a problem. Statistics back in 1998 said, "Of the 8 million college students in the United States more than 2 million drove under the influence of alcohol and over 3 million rode with a drinking driver. More than 500,000 full-time 4-year-college students were unintentionally injured under the influence of alcohol, and more than 600,000 were hit or assaulted by and more than 70,000 experienced a date rape caused by another student who had been drinking", that's nearly all of the students who were enrolled that year (Heeren, Hingson, Wechsler, and Winter, n.p.). According the National Highway Safety Administration, there were 16,885 alcohol-related drinking fatalities in 2005. That accounts for 39 percent of the total traffic fatalities for that year, and equates to "one alcohol-related fatality every 31 minutes" (More than 100 ... , np). The drinking age was set to 21 to prevent things like this from happening. I believe if it was set to 18 and the proper amount of education was given on the subject matter that number would diminish substantially. 

The government decided that if they can't control the kids who are purchasing alcohol illegally, then they can manipulate the State's laws to make it harder for them to do so. In order to solve their problem, the federal government forced each state to change their drinking age limit to 21. How they did this was by passing a law that said that if your state does not change their drinking age to 21 then the federal government would not fund roads and transportation for that state. This quickly turned our nation into a 21 and over drinking country during the 1970's, and has remained that way since then. No state wanted to lose all that money and have to try and fund road repairs and highways themselves. The drinking age was raised with good intentions to try and keep America's youth safe and to solve a particular problem. However, another problem is on the horizon as a ripple effect of this law change.

Now that you know the main motives for raising the age limit; I'm here to tell you why they made a mistake and should revoke the law and should lower the drinking age back down to 18. First and foremost, it comes down to the point I made earlier about the military. When you turn 18, it is customary for males to sign up for the draft in case the military needs more men to go over and fight for our country. The point I'm making is that: you can take someone else's life away from them, their family, and whoever else they might have an impact on, but in the United States they see you as not responsible enough to drink alcohol. On the other side of that is you can give your own life defending your country that you can't even have a beer in. To me it seems unjust, you have to ability to murder someone, or even worse, get killed, and at the end of the day, if you make it back alive, you wouldn't be able to unwind and have some alcohol. The trauma and stress those men and women go through on a daily basis while fighting a war are way more tremendous and hold so much more responsibility than drinking alcohol, and you can do this all at the age of 18 (Anderson, np).

A fellow University of South Carolina student and recipient of the military's highest honor, The Congressional Medal of Honor, Kyle Carpenter, was 19 years old when he joined the United States Marine Corps. He was shipped to fight the war on terror over in Afghanistan. While he was deployed he came across a life changing situation; he jumped on a grenade to risk himself in order to save his brothers. He was not expecting to live at all after he made that decision to sacrifice himself, luckily he made it, but not without a lot of injuries that will stay with him for the rest of his life. This took more responsibility and maturity than anyone could ever have, he protected his teammates with his own life. He did his job to the fullest, and with our laws that are in place, our nation would deny him and someone of that magnitude of patriotism and courage the right to buy alcohol. To me this is one of many flaws the minimum drinking age of 21 has. How can someone determine that you are of age and mature enough to face some obstacles in your life of that magnitude by serving our country like Kyle did, and still be denied the right to purchase alcohol? Think about it (Corporal William "Kyle" Carpenter ... , np).

Coinciding with being able to join the military at the age of 18 comes other responsibilities in our society. For example, you can vote for public officials. This means you can contribute in electing who makes all the executive decisions as a nation all the way down to your local city council. That holds a tremendous amount of responsibility and it is given to you at the age of 18. Also, the ability to marry is awarded at the age of 18; you can make a life decision to spend your life with someone else but your local liquor store will call the cops on you for trying to purchase wine for your anniversary dinner. If this is the case, also at the age of 18 the law sees you as mature enough to go to real jail as well. I'm sure they don't ID in jail for toilet wine. These are a couple of amenities and responsibilities that come along with turning 18 and being seen legally as an adult, sort of. David Packman brings up a good point in his podcast that "it's the disproportionalities of the other privileges given at age 18, yet you're not given the ability to go into a bar and purchase a glass of wine or a beer" (1.54).  The injustices of the minimum drinking age being at 21 are staring to burst at the seams.

Finally comes the worst ripple of having a minimum drinking age of 21: binge drinking. A rough definition of binge drinking is excessive amounts of alcohol being consumed in a short period of time. To be more specific; "consumed at a single sitting, five drinks meets the clinical definition of "binge" or "heavy episodic" drinking" (Carpenter and Dobkin, np). How the drinking age affects this is simple. The majority of 18-19 year olds go off to college and are surrounded by alcohol. Weather you like it or not a majority of college is based off of alcohol. Ever since you knew what college was besides having to go there to get a degree to land a good job was attending the legendary college parties. College is a mix of all types of people and ages, some old enough to drink, some not. But, like the problem they faced back in the day during the prohibition era, if you want to drink illegally, it's not that hard. Especially on college campuses, for example, "according to the results from the 2006 -- 2007 National Health Interview Survey, adults age 18 -- 25 report that on average they drank on 36 days in the previous year and typically consumed 5.1 drinks on the days they drank" (Carpenter and Dobkin, np). So what over 100 college presidents and other higher education officials have decided to do to help combat this problem is something called the Amethyst Initiative. What this is, is a "reexamination of the minimum legal drinking age in the United States" (Carpenter and Dobkin, np). Their reasoning behind this is to help eliminate the amount of alcohol related problems that so many of these college presidents deal with on a daily basis. Also in agreement with lowering the drinking age to 18 is the Chief of police in Boulder, Colorado, Mark Beckner. Part of Beckner's jurisdiction is the college campus of the University of Colorado at Boulder. When asked about why he believes it should be lowered he gave a common scenario of busting a house party with hundreds of underage drinking going on. He describes how they sit there all night and give the underage kids citations for drinking. He believes this isn't solving the problem, it is only making it worse; "all we did is we pushed it further underground," Beckner said (CBS News, 1). The further underground the drinking goes, the more dangerous it becomes. So with the drinking age being lowered back down to 18 it would actually make alcohol consumption a whole lot safer.

 With that information comes the harsh reality of what binge drinking is. If you are underage and plan on going out to a party, or some type of social event, and are planning on drinking; to eliminate the risk of getting caught by the police drinking in public, you are going to drink as much alcohol as you can as quick as you can. The reason for this is, one you are in a safer environment where you can control the majority of the risk factors of drinking underage as opposed to going out in public. And two, you eliminate the risk of using a fake ID and potentially getting busted with that is a whole another world of problems along with the underage consumption of alcohol. The biggest problem binge drinking has on these young adults is that it is unsafe irresponsible drinking. There are multiple deaths due to alcohol poisoning because these young kids aren't taught the effects of alcohol on the body. There are plenty of Minor in possession, public intoxication, public urination, sexual assaults, rape, and other charges these kids can get that correlate with binge drinking. This is exactly what the Amethyst Initiative is sought out to deal with. They want to diminish the many accounts of underage kids getting way to drunk and not getting the help they need to save their lives because their friends are afraid of calling the authorities due to them being underage and risking getting in trouble. This unfortunate event happened to an 18 year old at the University of Colorado after pledging a fraternity and being made to drink an irresponsible amount of alcohol. His friends hesitated to call the authorities until the morning when the kid didn't wake up, and by that time it was too late. His parents believe that if the age limit was lowered to 18, his friends wouldn't have hesitated to call the police to get him the help he needed and odds are he would still be alive today. If the drinking age was lowered to 18 these young adults would not have to be so risky and irresponsible with their drinking habits, and a lot of deaths and crimes could be prevented. I personally would still have a few of my friends with me today it the drinking age was still 18 (CBS News, 2).

Finally, I am going to tell you what needs to be done in order to make drinking safer for everyone. First of all just by changing the drinking age to 18 isn't going to fix the problems alone, but it's the first domino that starts the chain reaction. These kids need to be educated on alcohol so they know what to expect and how to control themselves when they do drink. Much like how you have to take a series of driving classes and tests in order to get your license. Glaser stated, "we don't hand teenagers car keys without first educating them about how to drive. Why expect 21-year-olds to learn how to drink responsibly without learning from moderate models, at home and in alcohol education programs" (Glaser, np)? What she means by this is that just by turning 21, you don't automatically gain the knowledge of what alcohol does to the human body and the effects. There needs to be educational classes that teach kids the ins and outs of drinking responsibly. And with this hopefully it will decrease the amount of alcohol related problems in our country. 

We could learn from our counterparts across the pond. The majority of European countries have drinking ages of 18 or even lower. And in their cultures modes of transportation are primarily based around driving cars like we do. They have trains that can take them anywhere they need to go and other modes that eliminate drunk driving tremendously. Statistically in 2015, "about, 25% of all road fatalities in Europe are alcohol related whereas about only 1% of all kilometers driven in Europe are driven by drivers with 0.5 g/l alcohol in their blood or more" ( About 25% of all ... , np), and their legal BAC limit is .8 g/l. This proves that for one they have less alcohol related road fatalities than us, and that lowering the drinking age to 18 isn't more dangerous. And alcohol isn't seen as such a big of a deal to them because it is a customary part of their society. They don't have the same amount of binge drinking problems in their youths as us Americans because they are taught at an early age the responsibilities of drinking. Also, alcohol isn't seen as such a forbidden fruit like our society portrays it as, so younger kids don't go crazy and abuse it like we do. Along with this, the law where states don't receive federal money to repair roads and help transportation needs to be expunged. 

In our society at the age of 18 you are granted a dubious amount of responsibilities. You can go to war, get married to your loved one, vote for public officials, and even go to the big house if you are rather unfortunate, but yet we are told that we cannot purchase or drink alcohol until we are 21. I find this to be an injustice in our legal system and society as a whole. With this higher legal drinking age poses a problem of irresponsible drinking on the so called "adults" who can do pretty much everything an adult can do besides drink. With lowering the drinking age back down to 18 I think in due time our nation will be way more responsible drinkers. Of course with the help of education on the subject, we can reduce the amount of alcoholic related problems, from death to unnecessary charges. The legal drinking age of 21 was put in place to make drinking safer, but what it really did was make a bigger problem like binge drinking. With the right tools I think we can strengthen our nation even more and check off one domestic problem at a time.

