Lower the Drinking Age????

In the blog, Change the Legal Drinking Age, legal drinking age is yet again brought up to be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. To argue this, the point is brought up that by the time an American citizen turns eighteen they can do basically everything except drink, calling the government a hypocrite. I am on the fence with this one. I get that it’s a little silly that we have soldiers under the age of twenty-one that can go fight for our freedom, but they can’t come home and have a beer. I personally have a problem with eighteen being old enough to do much more than drive and feel the legal classification of being an adult should in fact be raised from eighteen to twenty or twenty-one. Having the drinking age at twenty-one does not make the government a hypocrite, it just means that they realize that eighteen is not a mature enough age to handle alcohol responsibly.

Another argument is that lowering the drinking age to eighteen will cause binge drinking and other underage drinking problems to decrease. According to the blog, “at the age of eighteen you would begin to learn how to be responsible about drinking instead of learning how to sneak alcohol into your dorm room and behind the police’s back.” Lowering the drinking age is not going to magically make eighteen year olds responsible. One reason binge drinking is a problem in colleges is that students have little to no parental or any other type of guidance to tell them no. This article from the Science Daily website states there is no study that shows lowering the legal drinking age would improve binge drinking or the overall health of the public. It seems that the main problem with binge drinking and other underage drinking issues is with colleges. I think if these students could show more responsibility and not drink and party all the time, maybe more people would be willing to consider fighting for lowering the drinking age.