In 1984, The National Minimum Drinking Age Act was passed. This required that States prohibit all people less than 21 years of age from purchasing or publicly possessing alcoholic beverages. This current national system is widely flouted, with disastrous consequences for everyone. Teaching people to drink responsibly before they turn 21 would enormously enhance the public health and make drinking seem less unacceptable. Today, high school and college kids view dangerous binge drinking as a rite of passage. This is not only unsafe, but unhealthy too.
The problem of identifying the optimum minimum drinking age to reduce alcohol abuse is a serious one. It involves issues of freedom, responsibility, parental rights, religion, politics and many other realms of life. The minimum drinking age of 21 in the U.S. appears to be not only ineffective but also actually counterproductive. Although it was passed with the best of intentions, it has had some of the worst of outcomes.
Over the past two decades, several efforts have bubbled up to bring the drinking age back down to 18. The issue caught fire in 2004, when former Middlebury College president John McCardell, alarmed at the intensity of underage drinking, particularly on college campuses, wrote a New York Times piece that called the current drinking age “bad social policy and a terrible law.”
As a teenager in high school, I’ve seen firsthand the effects of this law. High Schoolers go to parties on the weekend and pour cheap alcohol down their throats. This leads to unsafe nights for teens that include vomiting and memory loss. We need to teach kids the importance of drinking responsibly. Lowering the drinking age to 18 can help us teach these teens before they start these poor habits.
“It is astonishing that college students have thus far acquiesced in so egregious an abridgment of the age of majority,” wrote McCardell, now a history professor at Middlebury. “Unfortunately, this acquiescence has taken the form of binge drinking.”
Although our laws acknowledge that at age 18 young adults possess enough maturity and judgment to operate a motor vehicle, serve in the military, perform jury duty or sign a contract, those same laws deny 18-year-old’s the right to purchase, possess or consume alcohol.