Lowering the Drinking Age
A Debate to Lower the Legal Drinking Age Alcohol abuse among students is one problem that all colleges and universities in the United States have to face. They can not seem to stop it; college students like to drink. The problem with this love for drinking is simple; most college students are not old enough to legally drink yet, so they do not understand how to drink in moderation. This results in binge drinking and they end up causing extreme harm to their young bodies. Although the Minimum Legal Drinking Age Act of 1984 (MLDA) raised the legal drinking age in the United States to twenty-one years of age in hopes that a higher legal drinking age would help to prevent alcohol-related deaths and injuries among youths, nevertheless it has failed to achieve its goal. Repealing the MLDA, and lowering the legal drinking age to eighteen years of age, along with proper substance abuse education, would be an effective way of hindering binge drinking on college campus'. One of the many things that college students are famous for is their binge drinking. Experts define binge drinking as having five or more drinks in one sitting. A recent survey conducted at the University of Virginia reported that over seventy-five pe
Santa Cruz, who has devoted his entire life to studying drug and alcohol policies, said it best when he said "when no boundaries are placed on the use of alcohol, it becomes part of the normal way of life and there is no final destination to reach. Comparisons of drinking before and after the passage of raised minimum drinking age legislation have generally revealed little impact on behavior. A similar study was conducted among college students in the State University System of Florida to examine their behavior before and after an increase in the drinking age from nineteen to twenty-one. " If a lower drinking age works in other countries around the world, then why wouldn't it work here in the land of the free?An effective solution to extreme alcohol abuse among college age students is a realistic drinking age combined with education about drinking. Thus, the increase in purchase age appears to have been not only ineffective but actually counter-productive. It is impossible for college administrators to try to teach their students safe drinking without encouraging the seventy-five percent of the student body whom is under-age to drink. Ruth Engs, a Professor of Applied Health Sciences at Indiana University, believes that "reactance motivation has been stimulated among college students, leading more of them to drink. If this is true then telling college students that they are not allowed to drink, only makes them want to drink even more. The education has to come from somewhere, either from school or from parents. For example, a study in New York that examined college students' drinking behavior before and after an increase in the minimum legal drinking age found the law to have no impact on under-age students' consumption rates, intoxication levels, drinking attitudes or drinking problems. But why would a law designed to reduce drinking among young adults, actually increase it? One answer is referred to as the "forbidden fruit" mentality. Part of the solution is to educate young people on how to drink responsibly. The data from 3,375 students at fifty-six colleges across the county revealed that, after the legislation, significantly more under-age students drank compared to those of legal age. Most other countries in the world have different alcohol laws than the United States, ranging from lower legal drinking ages to having no drinking age at all.
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