Ignorance of alcohol takes thousands of teen lives each year. The current laws aren’t preventing deaths, and something needs to be done. Is 21 a good age? Does the government need to raise taxes to discourage teens from drinking, or should we look to our friends “across the pond” for answers to our decrepit drinking culture? A recent study conducted by the US Surgeon General concluded that 11 million Americans drink underage and 7.2 million of them “binge drink,” or drink 5 or more alcoholic drinks in one sitting (Pifer). That statistic alone should scare people into wanting to do something.
In 1984 the Mothers Against Drunk Driving organization pressured congress to persuade “states into hiking the minimum drinking age to 21 by passing a law that tied compliance to the distribution of federal-aid highway funds”(Seaman). Many people stand strong to the belief that this is the best thing that has happened to mold popular American culture. According to Carroll’s article, "Most Americans,” a survey carried out in 2007 by the Gallup Poll News Service conducted a poll of 1,001 telephone-interviewed Americans to see if they opposed or supported lowering the legal drinking age to 18. The results showed that only 22 percent of those interviewed supported lowering the drinking age, 77 percent were against lowering, and 1 percent was neutral to the issue. It seems like a lot of people feel like the current laws don’t need to be changed.
These supporters base their position on statistics that show less lives are being taken by alcohol related driving accidents. There are two major problems to these statistics. The first is that no one knows where these statistics came from or if they are true. If they are true, then this brings up the next problem; these statistics show that this decrease in alcohol-related driving deaths started to occur in the 80’s. This doesn’t seem too much like a problem with the statistics until someone thinks about when the major advances in automobile safety came about, like shoulder seatbelts and airbags, and how it happens to be right around the same time. This is no coincidence there is facts that seatbelt save lives by retaining a human in a seat, there are facts that airbags help cushion impacts, but there are no true facts that a higher drinking age is saving lives in automobile crashes.
This idea of hiking up the drinking age to save the lives of many young Americans is very simple and good, theoretically. 15-17 year olds are less likely to get drunk if 18 year olds aren’t able to buy the alcohol. It is a good theory, but it seems like more and more kids are getting drunk in they’re early teens. Many kids binge drink every weekend in America. Binge drinking happens because people want to drink as much as they can before an authority catches them. In an article titled “communities can impact alcohol use" in Nation’s Health, the writer suggests raising taxes to discourage young underage drinkers from buying alcohol. This is a great way of keeping the drinking age up while still doing something about underage drinking, which usually leads to bingeing, an bingeing is the real problem with underage drinking. The raising of the taxes is a good idea, but it would never work because people who could legally drink would buy a lot less. People buying less means companies would be making far less money, and alcohol companies are very powerful and wouldn’t let that happen.
So what is the answer to binge drinking? It seems the only real way to break this culture of teen binging is to take some advice from the Europeans. European nations have let their children drink from very young ages and none of the people are hurting their brain development, like the people against the lowering of the drinking age says drinking does to young minds.
This argument is one of the main weapons used by the supporters of lowering the drinking age. Binge drinking is happening more and more in American youth and it is putting kids into the hospital at an alarming rate. According to the federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 85 percent of 20 year olds admitted to drinking, and two out of five of them said they had binged (Johnson). Something needs to be done, and lowering the drinking age might be the way to change this mentality of “we need to drink as much as possible to go out because we can’t drink there” attitude, at least in 18 year olds.
“Won’t college kids all over the country just go ‘crazy’ if this law is passed?” That is the question in everyone’s mind when people say that it is a good idea to lower the drinking age to 18. College and universities through out America would be a little less sober in the beginning but the general idea is that if you have made it to college, you’re smart enough to be making good decisions.
The problem with lowering the drinking age all at once is many people are not educated on alcohol until it is too late and they have driven drunk or have been in possession underage. With education classes we can get more responsible teens out there. Once they have taken this class they can earn a permit to buy and consume alcohol. This is what John McCardell has imagined to change they way American drinking culture has been for almost 25 years.
McCardell is the former president of Middlebury College and founder of the nonprofit group Choose Responsibility. In this semi-middle position, McCardell believes that decriminalizing drinking for teens 18 and older will “bring alcohol consumption out from hiding to where parents and adults can monitor it and teach responsibility without conflict,” says McCardell (Baldauf). He wants to set up an education program, similar to drivers ed, to educate young adults on alcohol and it’s affects. After completing this “drinker’s ed” class a teenager of the age of 18 will be able to purchase a “permit to drink.” This permit would have rules that the kid would have to follow or, as if you get caught speeding with a drivers permit, you will lose all privileges. But instead of waiting a year or two to get privileges back, a person will have to wait until they turned 21. This is a revolutionary idea that has the support of many Americans, including Kenyon College President S. Georgia Nugent, who lost a student due to alcohol poisoning, and a former Time magazine editor and higher ed reporter Barrett Seaman (Balko).
Another compromise position is taken by Professor Ruth C. Engs of Indiana University. Engs believes that allowing 18 or 19 year olds and up to drink in “controlled environments such as restaurants, taverns, pubs and official school and university functions” would stop teens from drinking in private in excess (Engs). This idea takes away all the reason for “pregaming”, or drinking before you go out and drink more, and would undoubtedly lower hospital visits due to alcohol poisoning.
College students need to stop being treated immaturely when it come to alcohol. If you treat someone like they are immature you should expect an immature response. “Why is an 18-year-old mature enough to marry, to sign a contract, to vote and to fight and die for his country, but not mature enough to decide whether or not to have a beer?” (Balko). Whatever the solution might be, it needs to be done soon before many more students are sent to the hospital or, even worse die.
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