Menu
Time to reconsider the drinking age
There are only six countries in the world that set the minimum age for the legal consumption of alcohol at 21. We all know we're one of those countries but the others might surprise you. They are Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Oman, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Some pretty strange bedfellows; much like the third-world countries along with the United States that still employ the death penalty.
On the other hand, there are over 100 countries, including almost all of our western allies, that set the legal drinking age at 18. Fifteen countries set it at 16 and 19 countries have no legal minimum age at all.
It has always been a conflict in terms to me that a young man or woman can join the military at 18, go through the rigors of a vigorous basic training program, learn how to assemble and disassemble the weapon they're assigned as well as receiving extensive training in firing that weapon and then are sent to outposts all over the world to use that weapon if required in the defense of our country. Many of the soldiers killed and injured in the quasi-wars we've had over the past few years have been under 21 years old, but they couldn't legally buy an alcoholic beverage.
They can kill and be killed but in our infinite wisdom, we've decided they aren't mature enough to handle alcohol. Now obviously some aren't, but the same can be said about men and women much older than they are that don't have the maturity to handle it either. We've developed artificial age constructs to denote a maturity level, even when the experts realize that there's no age where a person magically transforms themselves from an immature child to a mature adult. I know 18-year olds that are more mature than a lot of 40-year olds and I'll bet you do too.
In addition to the military conundrum, we see the same thing happening on college campuses throughout the United States. Going off to college is a right of passage for young people that signifies to them a transition from childhood to adulthood. They've lived with their parents for 18 years and now they're on their own. They desperately want to be adults and will have the opportunity to make several choices that weren't allowed them when they lived with their parents and one of those choices is to consume alcoholic beverages.
I pledged a fraternity during rush week before I started my freshman year at the University of Arkansas. The members got the new pledges together in our fraternity house the first day we were there, collected our student I.D.'s and took them to a senior drafting major who was also a fraternity brother and he changed the date of birth on all our I.D.'s to make us 21. Fraternities and sororities are known for social parties and drinking and I found out later that practically all of them did the same thing.
So the legal age of drinking creates tens of thousands of criminals each year because few college students are going to attend four years of college without being able to consume an alcoholic beverage. We see the same thing happening at our small college in McCook.
The adults point to the fact that automobile accidents are the leading cause of death for teenagers and use that as a reason for teenagers not to have access to alcohol because that would push the death rate even higher.
Well, of course automobile accidents are the leading cause of death for teenagers because what else are they going to die from?
Insurance rates for young people are significantly lower than rates for older people because older people die from a variety of physical maladies that typically don't apply to young people. So it's a statistic that isn't valuable because it doesn't tell us anything.
I'm not making the case that drinking is good for you because it isn't if one overindulges, just like a lot of things that are perfectly legal at any age are bad for you if you get too much of what is perceived to be a good thing.
We need to take hypocrisy out of the law and allow anyone 18 and over to legally drink because those that want to are drinking anyway and the only thing the law insures is that we make their behavior criminal.