The Legal Drinking Age
...and Drug Education that, compared with those of legal age, a significantly higher percentage of students under age 21 were heavy drinkers (Smith, B8). 18-year-olds are treated as adults in most other cases. They are able to drive cars, fly planes, get married, vote for the President, pay taxes, take out loans, and risk their lives in the armed forces. In parts of the Western world, moderate drinking by teenagers and even children under their parents’ supervision is a given. Though the per capita consumption of alcohol in France, Spain, and Portugal is higher than in the United States, the rate of alcoholism and alcohol abuse is lower. A glass of wine at dinner is normal practice. Kids learn to regard moderate drinking as an enjoyable family activity rather than as something they have to sneak away to do. Banning drinking by young people makes it a badge of adulthood, a tantalizing forbidden fruit (Whelan, 14). The drinking age of 21 has had harmful effects on campus life. A first point: it has soured relations between students and police. As usual, when police officers must enforce an unpopular law, acrimony grows between those who do the enforcing and those who are the targets of the enforcement. Such bad feeling has negative effects of its own: It undermines students’ rapport with police officers at a time when crime rates are high, and it has the potential to create in students a life-long animosity toward police in general, not a healthy attitude in a democracy (Smith, B8). A second point: the drinking age of 21 has driven student partying to less public, and thus more dangerous, venues. To avoid being caught drinking illegally, students frequently party off campus. With less oversight from adults, heavy drinking, brawling, and sexual misconduct are more likely to occur (Smith, B8). The opposition argues that the law has served its purpose: to reduce the number of teenage driving accidents. Not all of these accidents are...