Is The United States Too Strict On Drinking Age?

Is the United States too Strict on Drinking Age?

"How Bingeing Became the New College Sport," is an essay written by Barry Seaman that appeared in the August issue of Time Magazine. Seaman begins the essay by talking about the rituals of campus life and sometimes consequences of students drinking too much. Seaman also writes about the drinking age being set too high, how it got that way, and proposes what would happen if the United States lowered the legal drinking age?

Seaman's purpose in the essay is to get the reader thinking about what if the drinking age was reduced from 21. He thinks that the college epidemic of drinking too much may be reduced drastically. Seaman's audience is students, college and university officials, and the parents. The main idea that he is trying to get across is that if students under 21 could drink in public legally, they would be better supervised and not binge themselves by consuming too much alcohol.

Seaman starts the essay off by acknowledging the rituals of campus life. These rituals include everything from registering for class to a newer college tradition dubbed "Ð''pregaming.'" "Ð''Pregaming'" is now a common practice among students under 21 who cannot buy or consume alcohol legally in public. Pregaming is when a student will drink hard liquor before a game or activity for the evening and then go out to socialize. The big problem behind this is students will sit in their dorms in the early hours of the night unsupervised and drink way too much. Sometimes to the point where a student has to be hospitalized.

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After the introduction to "Ð''pregaming,'" Seaman gives some examples of how bad this activity can be. He writes about his experience reporting for his book Binge, saying that he witnessed the hospitalization of several students for acute alcohol poisoning. Among those students was a girl who had taken 22 shots of vodka while sitting in a dorm with her friends. Seaman continues by saying that these hospitalizations are common across the nation, and by Thanksgiving break nearly 70 students at Harvard were admitted into the university's health center. Seaman also reported that 300 students die of alcohol poisoning each year. Whenever situations like these occur college presidents usually react by declaring the campus dry and/or shutting down fraternity houses, but Seaman doesn't seem to think that tighter enforcement of the legal drinking age is the solution to the problem.

"It used to be that 21 was the age that legally defined adulthood." wrote Seaman, explaining the way the laws have changed in the past, especially the revolution of the late 60's that brought sweeping changes: the voting age was lowered to 18; privacy laws were put into effect; and the drinking age which varied from state to state was reduced to 18. Seaman gives the reason why the legal drinking age was bumped up to 21. A large portion of it was due to the intense lobbying by Mother Against Drunk Driving, Congress in 1984 "blackmailed" states into raising the minimum drinking age to 21 by passing a law that linked compliance to the distribution of federal-aid highway funds, which will average $690 million per state this year. Seaman continues by stating that there is no doubt that the law, which achieved compliance to every state in 1988, saves lives, but it also has the unintended consequence of creating a covert culture around alcohol as the young adult's forbidden fruit.

Since the first Western universities in the 14th century, drinking has been an aspect of

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