
To everyone in America, it is common knowledge that the legal minimum age to consume alcohol is twenty-one. Many people do not really think twice about it because it is just a normal rule that everyone is used to. I personally have always been interested as to why the drinking age is twenty-one instead of eighteen, and as a college student, it interests me now more than ever because some students can legally drink and I cannot. I believe that it should be lowered to at least eighteen. It just does not make very much sense to me as to why it would be higher than the legal age for just about everything else such as purchasing tobacco products, being able to vote, buying lottery tickets, and many other adult-only things. Teenagers can even work a job and operate a car at the age of sixteen. Eighteen is the age where teenagers officially become adults, so why should adults not be allowed to drink or purchase alcohol? Most college-aged students do it anyways, so what is the point of it being against the law? I personally am victimized by this law because I do drink, and I actually have gotten an underage drinking ticket before. I know that many other countries have the drinking age set at eighteen, some even lower, and some do not even have one at all and it works out well for them. The drinking age in the United States should be lowered to at least eighteen. I feel as if lowering the age would have its cons, but the pros would definitely outweigh them. Forbidding the consumption of alcohol to teenagers just makes it more desirable, so everyone is doing it and hiding it, which encourages binge drinking. It is a law that simply is ineffective and even counterproductive, causing more issues than it is helping.

Prohibition has been attempted twice in the United States to try and control alcohol issues and has come out unenforceable. Prohibition for everyone has been proven to not work, and prohibiting alcohol to young adults under the age of twenty-one is proving to do the same thing- be completely ineffective. For awhile, the legal minimum drinking age was in fact eighteen, until the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 went into effect, which punished every state that allowed people below twenty-one years old to purchase and publically possess alcoholic beverages by reducing its annual federal highway apportionment by ten percent. The states want all of the funding they can get, so this law made all of the states to increase the legal drinking age to twenty-one. This was done to reduce drunk driving accidents. Some people make hasty claims such as "The age 21 law, despite being widely violated and indifferently enforced, has reduced mortality and morbidity among young people" (Blanchette 1). The amount of drunk driving accidents has indeed decreased, but raising the drinking age is not all to blame. A professor from Indiana University has done extensive research on the topic and concludes:

 The decrease in drinking and driving problems are the result of many factors and not just the rise in purchase age or the decreased per capita consumption. These include: 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 3)

This makes perfect sense because research starting from the 1980s to the present shows that there has been a continuous decrease and then an evening out in drinking and driving accidents. These steady declines happened to start in 1980, many years before the twenty-one-year-old legal age minimum was put into effect, proving that the National Minimum Drinking Age Act is not the reason for the decrease in drunk driving, which was the reason the law was put into effect initially.

Having the drinking age set to twenty-one legally forbids it for teenagers, making it more desirable. Kids get a rush from doing things that we are not supposed to do. It is incredibly popular on campuses to participate in heavy, dangerous, fast drinking, where the goal is to get as drunk as possible and to pregame as hard as you can in dorm rooms and taking a ton of shots. This brings out many dangers that would be much lesser if drinking was not against the law. "Some experts suggest lowering the drinking age, and teaching teens and young adults to drink responsibly at a younger age, would help to reduce the allure of alcohol to those forbidden by law to possess it" (Jones). There is a significantly higher amount of under-age drinkers than there are legal of-age drinkers, and most underage drinkers are binge drinkers, which damages a teenager's developing brain. Drinking is more appealing to teenagers because their brains seek risk without considering consequences. One article on CNN suggests that a possible change could be to make the drinking age eighteen and raise the driving age to twenty-one, which could possibly lower the amount of alcohol-related car accidents which is a very large issue in our country (Christensen). While I do not agree that raising the driving age would be an efficient solution to this problem, I do believe that lowering the drinking age would help. Some people believe that the higher drinking age is encouraging underage students to dangerously binge drink. All they want to do is find other ways to get alcohol, in which they are successful. Many kids even find ways to binge drink before college.   In a survey for college students looking for factors that makes an individual more likely to binge drink, "prior binging in high school was crucial, suggesting that for many students, binge drinking begins before college. The strongest predictors of college binge drinking were residence in a fraternity or sorority, adoption of a party-centered life-style, and engagement in other risky behaviors" (Wechsler, Dowdall, Davenport, and Castillo).  Over one hundred college presidents have all come to consensus that the twenty-one-year-old drinking age just is not working, especially for college students. They see and deal with these types of issues first-hand, so they definitely know what they are talking about. Even writing underage tickets to minors does not help. I can personally attest to this claim because I myself have gotten an underage drinking ticket, and just like the many other people I know of that have also gotten a ticket, I still drink. It did not change what I do at all, many of my friends have also gotten them and we all continue to drink, and our parents know about it and are also fine with it. If anything it just makes teenagers be even more sneaky about it to authorities, which is dangerous. Former president of Middlebury College in Vermont, John McCardell, argues that lowering the age will make kids safer. He states that "This law has been an abysmal failure. It hasn't reduced or eliminated drinking. It has simply driven it underground, behind closed doors, into the most risky and least manageable of settings" (CBS News). 

"McCardell started a nonprofit group called Choose Responsibly, dedicated to spread awareness of the dangers of excessive and reckless alcohol consumption by young adults. The main goal of Choose Responsibly is to lower the drinking age back down to eighteen, while providing better and more education about alcohol use. McCardell has been joined by Barrett Seaman, a veteran Time magazine correspondent and editor and the author of Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess (Wiley, 2005). In the book, Seaman has traveled onto twelve different college campuses, doing research by observing what college students do, seeing first-hand the high levels of binge drinking being done (Seaman). Together, McCardell and Seaman argue that the current law has driven underage boozing underground and into dangerous territory. According to the Annual Review of Public Health, as referenced on CR's website, alcohol annually contributes to some 1,700 deaths, 599,000 injuries, and 97,000 cases of sexual assault among college students." (Daniloff). They propose that if they lower the drinking age to where all college students can legally drink, the colleges can have more control over it and educate students more effectively. Teenagers, especially students in college, are going to drink regardless and there is no stopping that. Making it legal would provide a safe environment for teenagers to drink in without having to hide it from any type of authority in case of danger. Ruth Engs, a public health professor at Indiana University, believes the same thing. After doing research for over thirty years concerning college age youth and the history of drinking in the United States and other cultures, she concludes that:

The legal drinking age should be lowered to about 18 or 19 and young adults allowed to drink in controlled environments such as restaurants, taverns, pubs and official school and university functions. In these situations responsible drinking could be taught through role modeling and educational programs. Mature and sensible drinking behavior would be expected. (Engs 2)

I am sure that a lot of adults would assume that it is just college students that "just want to catch a buzz" are the only people who are for the drinking age being lowered, but this proves otherwise. I have found articles, books, journal entries, scholarly papers, videos, and more of qualified adults who also believe it should be done. The research is there, the law is clearly ineffective, and a change needs to be made.

Because the raise in the legal age was done to lower the amount of alcohol-related car accidents, a common belief amongst many is that the raise in the drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one in 1984 decreased college-age student's binge drinking and was also the cause of a plummet in the amount of drunk driving crashes, but that is not completely accurate. The same professor previously mentioned from the Public Health Department at Indiana University, Ruth Engs, did a study to see if this was actually accurate. A highly reliable questionnaire was administered to 56 colleges every year from 1982 through 1988. The results showed that increasing the minimum purchasing age does decrease the percent of students who drink once a year or more. However, there was not a change in the percent of students that were heavy drinkers, which would be the ones that would probably get into trouble while drinking, proving that kids who want to drink alcohol are going to find ways to do it regardless of the law. (Engs)

There were eighteen problems related to drinking, and for thirteen of them, there were no changes over the time periods. In fact, the percent of students who indicated these problems appears remarkably stable between both the time periods prior to (1983-1985), and the one immediately prior to (1985-1987) after the change in purchase law. This means that there would be no change in drinking problems prior to and after the change in the drinking age laws for these items. The only people the law seemed to have affected were those students who rarely drank, and if they did drink were unlikely to be heavy drinkers or get into problems related to drinking anyways. There was a decrease in the percent of students who indicated they have "drank while driving", "driven after drinking", "driven after they knew they had drunk too much" from 1982 to 1985 and from 1985 to 1987. Examination of the three drinking and driving related variables, which did change between 1985 and 1987, it was found that this change was also found in the 1983-1985 time period. This means it may not be appropriate to link the 1985-1987 changes with these three items with the change in drinking age laws; these 1985-1987 changes are probably just continuing from earlier changes. Overall with the drinking related problems, there were changes in a few items, these changes were already beginning to occur prior to any change in the drinking age laws on the national level, so the increase in the drinking age is not to blame. (Engs)

The United States is only one of four developed countries in the world with a drinking age of over eighteen. The other three are South Korea with an age of nineteen, Iceland with an age of twenty, and Japan also with the legal age at twenty. So every other country has a legal minimum drinking age that is lower than ours, and it seems to be working out just fine for them, so why should ours be so different? In 1999, the New Zealand government lowered their drinking age from twenty to eighteen. Many scholars have been studying the results of this change to see how a change like that would affect the United States, because New Zealand has very similar alcohol consumption habits that we do. It was concluded that:

Our main findings are that lowering the legal drinking age did not appear to have led to, on average, an increase in alcohol consumption or binge drinking among 15-17 or 18-19 year-olds. Consistent with our findings for alcohol consumption, we find no evidence for an increase in alcohol-related vehicular accidents at the time of the law change for any teenagers. Overall, our results support the argument that the legal drinking age can be lowered without leading to large increases in detrimental outcomes for youth. (Boes and Stillman, 3)

So if a country very similar to the United States lowered their drinking age and everything turned out completely fine, there is no reason for us to not do the same. I feel that in the long run, it would benefit us more than hurt our country, we need to catch up with the modern times and stop criminalizing alcohol.

If used correctly and safely, everyone can enjoy alcohol without it being detrimental to our society, because it has been proved that just about every other country can handle it. If we want to progress as a country, then lowering the drinking age is just something that needs to be done. So, essentially, throughout all of my research over the semester, I have come to the conclusion that the raise of the legal minimum drinking age did not do anything at all. I do see how and why some Americans believe it is a good thing, but if you actually look into it, it is a pointless, counter-productive law that should be overturned for the betterment of this country.

