As I'm writing this article, I can count the days until my 21st birthday on two hands. I am not a drinker, and I am so not into the bar scene, but the drinking age eventually affects everybody whether you drink or not. It's all about the safety of everyone and the questionable well-being of today's youth when alcohol gets involved. It is believed that people will be more mature when they are finally allowed to drink since they have 21 years to grow up. Therefore, I totally understand the reasoning behind the drinking age being 21 years old. This law clearly has great intentions; however, that's not really how things seem to work out.

In the United States, citizens are well known for binge drinking and a high amount of drunk driving incidents. About 30 people die each day from drunk driving accidents in the U.S. alone. What makes us different from other countries, you ask? Our drinking age is the highest in the world.It is a normal social experience to enjoy a drink or two in other countries, whereas people in the U.S. like to drink until they can't even remember anything the next morning. The U.S. needs to follow suit in order to prevent this behavior. I'm not saying drinking is a good thing, and I don't exactly want it to be normal to drink regularly, but it would be a lot safer for the American people.

Most younger people get a rush from doing things they aren't allowed to do. Therefore, making alcohol legal at a younger age takes a little bit of that rush away when drinking. The people that drink underage are going to do it anyway, so making it legal would just make it less exciting and force them be more responsible about their drinking sooner. Now I'm not saying it's OK, but people would probably be less likely to go crazy about alcohol if they are allowed to do it at an age where they maybe don't even care so much about it. Most of the people that binge drink are under 21 years old, so they try to keep things private and tend to not call for help when issues arise because they are doing illegal activities. A younger drinking age would help decrease, if not eliminate, this problem because it wouldn't matter if they were drinking and people could get the medical help and/or reliable transportation that they would need.

The drinking age is very restricting for people that don't drink, too. You can't go to the Winking Lizard for food past 5 p.m. when you're under 21, which just happened to be one of the places my boyfriend wanted to take me to one time. You can't buy alcohol as a gift, like a special wine for your parents, because you are too young. You can't even make certain recipes that call for alcohol because you have no way of buying it. The small amount of beer or wine in a recipe would just add flavor, and the alcohol would burn off anyway. It's things like that that made me feel so annoyed and restricted. Besides, you are considered an adult at age 18 and able to fight for our country, yet you can't legally drink, buy alcohol, or go into certain places. I was 18 living with my boyfriend, and still am, and I can't do these simple, harmless things because of my age.

I never cared about my 21st birthday because I never drank, but I am extremely excited for it now so I won't be restricted anymore. Not everyone has such harmless intentions like mine when purchasing alcohol, but people are going to find a way to do it anyway. We may as well just make it as safe as possible in order to help prevent binge drinking and drunk driving. The U.S. could get a lot of great ideas from other countries, and changing the drinking age just happens to be one of them.