drinking age

There's apparently some stuff in the news about lowering the drinking age in the U.S. back to 18 - or not. Heated opinions abound. Binge drinking and irresponsibility also abound, among our 18 year old AND 21 year old youth. How best to control that beast?

Well, my experiences in London and Paris where the legal age was not much talked about or enforced showed me that binge drinking and irresponsibility are more a matter of personality, culture, and life circumstances than they are of age.

THE MAIN POINT I WANT TO MAKE IS... we need to send consistent messages about responsibility to young people. If we believe that at 18 they have the maturity to fight in a war, vote, enter into a legal contract, or be prosecuted as an adult in court, then we need to agree that they have the maturity to drink alcohol. If they're not mature and responsible enough to drink at 18, then we need to RAISE the age for fighting, voting, legal contracts, and prosecution as an adult. I don't want someone who's too immature to drink beer protecting my country and electing my President!

What if the requirement for legal drinking was not attaining a certain age, but something like having a high school diploma? That would keep legal drinking out of the high schools, which would help a little bit. And everyone at college would be on equal footing, all treated as adults, and there wouldn't be so much illicit intrigue about seniors buying booze for freshmen or whatever. And college administrators could address responsible drinking issues more openly and fully instead of not even being able to talk about it with students under 21.

Getting drunk has become a sort of (often repeated) rite of passage in America. What if we could find better rites of passage, that were still just as fun?? Whatever we do, the prevalence of binge drinking and drunk driving indicate that our country is not doing a good enough job of teaching responsible behavior and "consequences" to people before they become "adults". Unfortunately, our culture says too many things in a polarized way: it sounds like if you don't abstain completely, then you might as well go ahead and over-indulge because you're already written off and treated as such. No one seems to see the virtue in moderation and responsible decision-making, which are where the true skills of self-control lie.