Living in a college environment, it is impossible to avoid the issue of drinking. Every Friday and Saturday night, all I have to do is look out of the windows of Atherton Hall onto College Avenue to see the massive number of drunken college students. Many of these drunken college students are under legal drinking age, but nothing is done about them. I remember the first weekend that I was at college. My friends and I went for a walk downtown and we walked past the fraternity houses downtown and saw people throwing quite a party, which was my first view of a real college party. We all could hear the party from a block or two away, and there were tons of people out on a balcony with beers in their hands screaming and dancing. The weirdest part was that my friends and I walked past a pair of cops who obviously saw the party going on and heard the noise, but they just seemed to ignore the fact that the party was even going on. If it’s illegal for people younger than 21 to drink, and there were definitely people under the age of 21 at the party, and the amount of noise coming from the house was definitely worth of a noise complaint, shouldn’t the police do something to stop such parties from occurring?
This is one of the major contradictions with society today. At colleges it’s assumed that most students will drink even when it is illegal to for over half of the students, and most people in power do nothing to stop it. However, in non-college areas, the drinking laws are strictly enforced. In my hometown, most of the parties that were thrown by my fellow classmates were busted and all of the kids received underage violations. There is such a contradiction on how different areas of the country handle the situation of underage drinking, which creates a problem in society. Most people my age just take it as their right to drink at college, even though it’s illegal, and know that they won’t get in trouble for doing so unless they commit some other crime while drunk. The country needs to give a consistent message on the topic in all areas of the country.
I have also seen the issue of alcohol in teens from another viewpoint. I have spent a lot of time in England due to the fact that both of my parents immigrated from England and all of my extend family is still over there, so we travel to England every year to visit family. Over in England, the drinking culture is a lot different than that here in America. In England, the legal age to buy alcohol in a store, pub, etc. is 18 years old. However, the country is much more relaxed about drinking in general. The law doesn’t care who drinks inside someone’s house under parental supervision or if underage people have some of their parents’ drinks in public places, such as restaurants. I remember one of my mom’s friends offering me a sip of his beer when I was 12. I was shocked because back home I had always been told not to drink until I was 21, but that is just considered normal in England and Europe. Another example of this different culture can be seen from my experience at Christmas sophomore year of high school. For Christmas, my entire dad’s side of the family was staying in a large youth hostel together, and we had a full-stocked bar for the whole time that we were there. Throughout the whole holiday I was offered drinks by all members of my family and my parents told me that I could drink if I wanted to because we were in England and the culture was different, so drinking at 15 under their supervision was acceptable. Now some people might think that this European drinking culture causes issues with people starting to drink at an earlier age; in fact it doesn’t. Most people manage to get their crazy drinking out of their system while they are still young and in the safety of their own homes or learn how to drink responsibly. As a result, they are not as crazy when they go off to university and can legally drink. British universities don’t have all of the crazy parties that we have here in the U.S. Yes college students still drink in Europe, but when they do it is typically more responsibly than the crazy parties that are constantly seen on campuses like Penn State. By changing the drinking age, maybe we can cut out all of the wild drinking at colleges.
Furthermore, it is not just England or Europe that has a lower drinking age in the world. In fact, studies show that the average minimum drinking age across the world 15.9 years, and the most frequent minimum age is 18 years. The U.S. has the highest minimum drinking age where drinking is legal, along with six other countries. The study also showed that on average, people have their first drink when they are 12, and about 80% of people drink regularly by the time that they are 15 years old(http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/LegalDrinkingAge.html). This just goes to show that people, regardless of the legal age, tend to start drinking as an early teen. Keeping a higher drinking age doesn’t actually help keep young kids from drinking. This ineffectiveness of the minimum drinking age can be seen in the statistics on expenditures of alcohol in the country. As it turns out “underage drinking accounts for 17.5% ($22.5 billion) of consumer spending for alcohol in the U.S.” (http://drinkingage.procon.org/), which is a very significant portion of consumption considering it is illegal for this group of people to buy or drink alcohol. The law is not doing a good job at stopping young people from retaining alcohol, so is it really changing all that much if it became legal for these people to get the alcohol that they can already get anyways?
The majority of underage drinkers are those people who are 18-21, typically college students who have easy access to alcohol. When people turn 18, they become an adult by law, and this new status is accompanied with several new and important rights. As adults, 18 year olds can vote in national elections to determine the political landscape in the country, serve on juries as part of the country’s judicial branch, smoke cigarettes, be prosecuted as an adult, and even risk their lives for our country by serving in the military (http://drinkingage.procon.org/). All of these rights are pretty significant and are given to 18 year olds because they are supposed to be responsible enough to handle these rights. If someone is responsible enough to vote for the next president or to die fighting for this country, shouldn’t they be responsible enough to drink alcohol? Furthermore, smoking can have just as many health effects as drinking alcohol can and it is addictive, yet people can smoke at 18, but can’t drink until 18. The fact that an 18 year old is deemed responsible enough to handle all of these new rights but isn’t responsible enough to handle drinking is a little strange. If the right laws and societal changes are put into place, a legal drinking age of 18 could work without the youth of this country drinking like crazy.
The whole reason that the country has a minimum drinking age of 21 stems back to 1984, when the U.S. government passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which required states to raise their minimum purchase and possession ages to 21. If a state failed to do so, it would see a large reduction in federal highway funds, which was valuable money to the states. All 50 states have been in compliance with the act since it was passed in 1984. (http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/YouthIssues/1092767630.html). Essentially, the states were blackmailed into increasing their minimum drinking ages to 21 years old in order to keep their precious federal highway funds. This fact in itself is ridiculous and the federal government shouldn’t bully the states into doing something. As a result, as a solution to the drinking age issue, the government should revoke this law so that the states can lower their individual drinking ages to 18 while still retaining their federal highway funds.
The government also should allow minors over a certain age to be allowed to drink inside their homes under parent supervision. Now this law should definitely have some restrictions. For example, the limit of beverages should be set to 1 or 2 to make sure that people don’t abuse this right, and if something happens where a minor is above this limit in their own house, the parents should be held responsible too and punished accordingly. This law would help minors learn more about alcohol and how to drink responsibility. You don’t have to get drunk when you drink; you can actually have just a drink or two to socialize with friends. Too many times, the first experience that minors have with alcohol is in college, where dozens of people go crazy and drink excessive amounts at these parties, or other unsupervised environments. This is not a good example for how to drink, but people learn that this is the way to drink since it’s the only experience that they have had drinking alcohol. I have seen first-hand how some of my friends from high school who had never had any experience with alcohol before high school have gone crazy with the amounts of alcohol that they drink. They don’t know their limits and feel it’s necessary to pre-game by taking three or four shots before going to a party when they are going to drink even more, which is not a responsible drinking habit. By allowing minors to drink in their own houses under the supervision of their parents, hopefully the youth of America will learn how to drink responsibly, which will stop more of them from going crazy with the amounts of alcohol that they drink when they go off to college.
In addition to drinking under adult supervision, there are a few other important concepts that should be included in the new policy towards drinking. There should be a limit on how much alcohol a person ages 18-21 can buy at a time. Distributors should check ID’s and then only allow them to buy a minimal amount of alcohol so that they can slowly get introduced to alcohol. Furthermore, these stores should limit the number of purchases 18-21 year olds can make in a month or another time frame to try and prevent these people from throwing wild parties. Another important aspect of this policy would be to ensure that despite the law now permitting 18 year olds to buy and possess alcohol, colleges should have dry campuses. People should go to college to learn and study, not to drink. Dorms and buildings on campus should therefore be places to work and study in a productive environment. By allowing alcohol on campuses, students will drink in their rooms, and these socials tend to be very noisy and disrupt the other students around. Therefore, to keep college dorms as a good place to study, campuses should remain or switch to being dry campuses, and punish students found possessing or consuming alcohol in their rooms. Although Penn State is technically a dry campus, there is no enforcement of this policy and tons of college students drink in their dorm rooms and have bottles of alcohol in their room. This new change would require colleges like Penn State to be stricter in enforcing this dry campus to keep the campus actually dry.
The current drinking age isn’t effective at stopping people from drinking and actually harms people by pushing them to drink in unsupervised environments. If we lower the minimum drinking age, let parents supervise minors drinking, and try to slowly acclimate the youth of America with alcohol, they will learn how to drink responsibly. With this new attitude towards drinking, we can cut down on the number of medical issues caused by alcohol with underage drinkers and curb the crazy parties that occur, especially at colleges.
Other Potential Sources:
http://reason.com/archives/2008/09/02/lower-the-drinking-age
