The minimum legal drinking age affects everyone in America, but it especially affects youth, and it has an immense influence their drinking habits. As a college freshman, this is an important issue that I deal with the effects of often (specifically, every weekend).
Although we all know the destructive and impairing affects of alcohol on any age group, there are actually many reasons that support a lower minimum legal drinking age. A few years ago over 100 colleges and universities made a massive push towards the government to lower the minimum drinking age. But why would any college or university actually encourage their under 21-year-old students to drink? Having alcohol so out of reach from kids underage, yet still so glamorized in media, creates an obsession-like vision towards alcohol for the youth. This means that people under the minimum legal drinking age often cultivate a strange obsession with alcohol. It’s the basic concept of wanting what you can’t have.
This popular attitude among the youth leads to a bigger problem surrounding alcohol- the binge drink mindset. Because being underage and consuming alcohol is illegal, for underage drinkers alcohol becomes a trophy of sorts. Teenagers showing off bottles and cans to prove that they are rule breakers, and therefore cool, has become a usual and almost expected scene. And because these kids are so forcefully ostracized from alcohol, when they do find a way to rebel through booze, they have no supervision and no idea how to safely consume it. This leads to destructive and abusive habits surrounding alcohol that kids think are okay simply because they don’t know any better.
Some data to back up this idea includes; with a drinking age of 21 on average people binge drink the most from ages 18 to 21, while with a drinking age of 18 binge drinking is much less abundant and starts declining before the age of 20. Another statistic that supports a lower minimum legal drinking age is that with a legal age of 21 compared to that of 18, young adults consume alcohol for 1.5 days per month more, and .4 days more spent binge drinking.
Although there are clear pros and cons to changing the current American minimum legal drinking age, as a college student, I witness first-hand the binge drinking mindset that consumes youth and college culture so heavily.
