It’s unfair. Nonsensical. Hypocritical. Wrong. According to most college students, that is. It’s the drinking age.
“If you can die for your country, then you should be able to drink a beer,” says Taylor Jones, a junior at Elon University. This is a common response from people in favor of pushing back the drinking age.
Many students also reference other countries as an example of why our drinking age is flawed. In most European countries, the drinking age is 16 but binge drinking far less frequent.
The debate generally revolves around whether the age should be brought back to 18. The current drinking age of 21 was enforced in 1984 with the National Minimum Drinking Age Act.
Students may not know that prior to 1984, the United States had not always permitted drinking at age 18. After Prohibition, nearly all states set the drinking age to 21, but in the 1970s, most states lowered the minimum legal drinking age.
The consequences were significant: a surge in motor vehicle crashes among teens and alcohol-related injuries and deaths. After 1984, these factors decreased and thousands of lives were saved.
Proponents of lowering the legal drinking age claim that the policy does not work because of the high number of underage drinkers that exist. But studies show that those who do drink underage drink less frequently than before the legislation passed.
Maybe outlawing alcohol altogether is the solution? Oh wait. Prohibition did not stop people from drinking and gave way to organized crime.
Maybe the legal drinking age should be pushed back again? (A utopia for many Elon students…) But if the drinking age were changed today, the first person killed as a result would likely be today. Someone’s son. Someone’s daughter. A brother or sister. Gone too soon.
The U.S. drinking age is sensible and should remain. It’s difficult for me, a college student, to admit this. But the evidence against lowering the drinking age is staggering, and the arguments in favor of it, weak.
Countries in Europe may have it right, but the comparisons are irrelevant. I find it hard to believe that changing the legal drinking age in the United States would instantly create a European-style drinking culture.
And maybe all of those who join the military should be able to drink.
For some reason, I don’t think there would be an increase of volunteers going to Iraq.
