I agree 100%, if you can vote, decide someone’s fate in a court of law and die for our country wearing a military uniform, then you should be able to have a beer. You’ve made all the points that back that up, so thhere’s not much point in repeating them.

As far as collegiate binge drinking, I went to college, I was guilty of binge drinking, but I never understood the way kids were drinking around me and how they drink today. I hear it a lot, people set the goal of throwing up or blacking out. Call me old-fashioned, but that was considered a mark of shame among my friends. Whatever the age, 21 or 18, this is the real issue.

Sadly, these attitudes towards drinking are already established with the teens of this country. Lowering the drinking age today would lead to the same college drinking scene and a bigger problem among high school age kids as the 18-year-olds could supply unlimited alcohol for parties.

One idea I saw this week came from Joe Sixpack of the Philadelphia Daily News. (Well, it’s not exactly his idea, but he brought it to my attention.) The idea is to teach moderation as opposed to abstinence when it comes to drinking.  Kids already know that they want to drink, so all of the “don’t drink” advertising will be ignored. I think the approach they’ve taken with the new buzzed/drunk driving campaign has promise if only it stepped away from the extremes.

In the end, I think it’s the responsibility of parents raising children today to teach them that alcohol isn’t something to be set on a pedestal. Getting drunk shouldn’t be the goal, at least not in the presence of kids. Advertising is also to blame as the image of a party in a bottle is ran in 30 second increments every 5 minutes on TV and is plastered on billboards and throughout magazines.

I think the drinking age should be lowered to 18, but we have to brace ourselves for the possibility that it will only get worse before it gets better.

This blog contains the best argument I have read yet. Instead of teaching abstinence in drinking, parents should teach their kids how to use it in moderation. Drinking should be legal in the presence of adults so that teens can learn how to drink alcohol and learn that getting drunk is not the objective. This blog also changed my mind on the issue of what the drinking age should be lowered to. Initially, I thought the drinking age should be lowered to 18, but this article points out that 18 year old seniors in high school could supply unlimited amounts of alcohol to high school parties. Unsupervised binge drinking in high school parties is not the goal here. The drinking age should be lowered to 19 so that freshmen in college can legally drink because we all know everybody drinks in college.

Submitted by administrator on Thu, 07/12/2007 – 08:58

• international

By BILL SCHACKNER
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, July 12, 2007

Sarah Rafson and her college friends picked an off-campus bar on her 19th birthday — and did what in America requires a fake ID or a bartender willing to look the other way.

Legal drinking in Canada starts at 18 or 19, depending on the province. That’s why many U.S. college students, including Rafson, a University of Toronto junior from Pittsburgh, automatically become legal drinking adults when they head north of the border to study, only to become minors again when they return home.

“It feels like walking backward in time.”

Sure, Rafson says, there are drunken college parties in this city. But she swears she sees fewer instances of her peers slamming down drink after drink than she does in the United States. Her own birthday celebration in November, the day she sipped her first legal drop of alcohol, stopped at a couple of drinks, and she says she’s been a light drinker since.

“It’s legal,” she said. “It’s no big deal.”

Conventional wisdom in the United States says making people wait to imbibe legally keeps them safer from alcohol abuse. But John McCardell, 58, president emeritus of Middlebury College in Vermont, has caused a stir of late, claiming that an epidemic of underage and binge drinking is proof the current approach doesn’t work. McCardell says it’s time the United States brings back the 18-year-old drinking age.

Specifically, he proposes a system under which “drinking licenses” would permit consumption at an earlier age after mandatory education about alcohol and its risks. He said the 21-year-old drinking age, the standard across America for almost two decades, hasn’t stopped young people from drinking themselves into the hospital or the grave.

“All you’re doing is driving it off campus or underground. You’re not ending it,” McCardell said. “You’re sending it to much less safe environments.”

There are plenty of people who say what he’s proposing is nothing short of insanity.

Those lining up to object include academic researchers, government officials and advocacy groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, all of whom say the preponderance of scientific evidence shows that raising the drinking age reduces problems.

Federal highway crash data indicates the 21-year-old drinking age has saved nearly 25,000 lives over the past three decades, said Ralph Hingson, a division director with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

He also said the law has helped curb alcohol consumption among high school students.

Hingson said he shares McCardell’s concern about alcohol’s toll. But the solution is not to start young people drinking sooner.

Just look at Europe, he says, where lower minimum ages are common, yet adolescent alcohol abuse is generally worse than in the United States.

“There is no evidence that lowering the age here would help, and I would be concerned that it would make things worse,” he said.

McCardell, though, said he’s not without research that supports his position.

A study published in 2002 by the journal Addiction found that while alcohol use was more pervasive among Canadian students ages 15 to 24, heavy drinking was significantly less prevalent than among their U.S. counterparts.

“It’s hard to look at the Canadian example and say things would be much worse here if we lowered the drinking age,” McCardell said.

In the United States, there is no national drinking age per se, though all 50 states set theirs at 21. About half had lower limits but reconsidered after the Reagan administration in 1984 said any state unwilling to adopt 21 as its drinking age would lose 10 percent of its federal highway funds.

The experience has been different in Canada.

Ontario, the province that includes Toronto, raised its drinking age in 1979 from 18 to 19, and it’s stayed there since, meaning the bars are open to thousands who are a year out of high school.

Both sides of the minimum age debate agree on this: The latest data on student drinking is cause for alarm.

In March, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reported that alcohol misuse in college had worsened, and nearly one in four full-time students nationwide met the medical threshold for substance abuse or dependence.

The percentage of students on campus who abuse alcohol is no greater than in 1993, but the frequency of binge drinking has increased. Binge drinking is generally defined as five or more drinks per sitting for a male, four for a female.

Each year, more than 1,700 alcohol-related deaths occur among those 18 to 24 years old, including motor vehicle crashes and other unintended injuries. Drunkenness is seen as a major contributor to sexual assault and other campus crime as well as academic problems.

The first part of this article sums it all up. Sarah Rafson is quoted saying that because it is legal it is not a big deal. I personally believe that teens and people under the legal age binge drink because it is illegal and they think it is cool to drink. By lowering the legal drinking age, I think that teens would learn how to drink responsibly in a controlled atmosphere. The statistics showed that heavy drinking was much less common in 15 to 24 in Canada than in the United States. Canada has a drinking age of 18 or 19 depending on the province and I think it would not hurt to change the United States to the same rules. The United States cannot get much worse in the field of underage drinking. Any high school kid can get their hands on alcohol and drink it underground if they want to so why not make it legal and let them learn how to do it responsibly.

The proposal, which is the subject of a national petition drive by the National Youth Rights Association, has been studied in a handful of states in recent years, including Florida, Wisconsin, Vermont and Missouri, where supporters are pushing a ballot initiative.

Opponents of the idea point to a reported rise in binge drinking as teenagers increasingly turn to hard liquor as proof that minors should not be allowed to drink, but proponents look at the same data and draw the opposite conclusion.

But Mark Rosenker, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, countered: “Why would we repeal or weaken laws that save lives? It doesn’t make sense.”

Different laws in different states
As it happens, there is no such thing as a “federal legal drinking age.” Many states do not expressly prohibit minors from drinking alcohol, although most of those do set certain conditions, such as its use in a religious ceremony or in the presence of a parent or other guardian.

The phrase refers instead to a patchwork of state laws adopted in the mid-1980s under pressure from Congress, which threatened in 1984 to withhold 10 percent of federal highway funds from states that did not prohibit selling alcohol to those under the age of 21. By 1988, 49 states had complied; after years of court fights, Louisiana joined the crowd in 1995.

// state-by-state DRINKING LAWS All states ban selling alcohol to minors, and nearly all prohibit possession, but many do not expressly bar minors from consuming it. Click on a state to see its restrictions. Alabama Under 21 may not possess or consume alcohol. MSNBC.com research/Alex Johnson. Sources: State codes and constitutions; National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; Alcohol Policy Information System; State University of New York-Potsdam. • Print this

Libertarian groups and some conservative economic foundations, seeing the age limits as having been extorted by Washington, have long championed lowering the drinking age. But in recent years, many academics and non-partisan policy groups have joined their cause for a different reason: The age restriction does not work, they say. Drinking has gone on behind closed doors and underground, where responsible adults cannot keep an eye on it.

“It does not reduce drinking. It has simply put young adults at greater risk,” said John M. McCardell, former president of Middlebury College in Vermont, who this year set up a non-profit organization called Choose Responsibility to push for a lower drinking age.

McCardell offers what he calls a simple challenge:

“The law was changed in 1984, and the law had a very specific purpose, and that was to prohibit drinking among those under the age of 21,” he said. “The only way to measure the success of that law is to ask ourselves whether, 23 years later, those under 21 are not drinking.”

So are they?

The federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that in 2005, the most recent year for which complete figures are available, 85 percent of 20-year-old Americans reported that they had used alcohol. Two out of five said they had binged — that is, consumed five or more drinks at one time — within the previous month.

“The evidence is very clear,” McCardell said. “It has had no effect.”

James C. Fell, a former federal highway safety administrator who is a senior researcher on alcohol policy with the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, acknowledged that “it’s not a perfect law. It doesn’t totally prevent underage drinking.”

The part of the article that I copy and pasted onto the blog talks about how the age requirement of 21 makes drinking more dangerous for teens. Experts were quoted in this article  talking about since teens cannot legally drink, they take their drinking underground where there is no supervision by responsible adults. They also tend to drink more hard alcohol because it is easier to hide and has less containers, but is much more potent and leads to binge drinking. There is also a map that shows the different laws by each state. Some allow for drinking with parent supervision and most allow an exception at religious ceremonies, but some do not allow any drinking under any circumstances under the age of 21. The second part of the article that I did not past onto the blog, talked about how having the drinking age at 21 has saved lives. They try to back it up with facts and statistics, but I do not know how they actually believe they think they can prove something like that.