Politicize This: Drinking alcohol is a question of responsibility, not age

Imagine it's the night right before your eighteenth birthday. It's 11:59 - you only have one more minute to endure, and then you will be 18 years old; you'll be an adult; no longer will anyone look down on you as a kid. When the clock strikes midnight, everything has changed. At 18, you are now an adult. You are now your own person, and you're about to embark on a four-year journey toward growth and self-discovery.

Oh, and I almost forgot the best part. You're allowed to drink. Not drink as in open up a bottle of Pepsi without legal consequence - drink as in the law permits 18-year-old individuals to consume alcohol. What?! There is a God.

As the law stands today, what is previously described is a fantastical situation. People (for the most part) know that to engage in any sort of alcoholic consumption legally, turning 21 years old is a necessary prerequisite. Recently, however, an organization composed of chancellors and presidents of colleges and universities nationwide have begun reexamining the effectiveness of a legal drinking age being set at 21. This group, known as the Amethyst Initiative, believes that the drinking age should be reconsidered in light of the problems and issues created by a new generation of college-aged binge drinkers. Although the group proposes no specific lower (or higher) drinking age, one could extrapolate the central argument: lower the legal drinking age to 18, and, for younger drinkers, provide an education that is more efficacious in preventing irresponsible consumption of alcohol.

Can you imagine the hours of incessant debate over this topic? Prodding and arguing and dictating and berating, and all because some people want to pop open a beer three years earlier than other people think they should legally be allowed to. People would turn blue in the face! "Violet, you're turning violet, Violet!"

Ironically enough, the drinking age isn't actually 21 (technically). According to the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, states have to enforce the age of 21 as the minimum for buying and publicly possessing or consuming alcohol. But, with no penalty in place aiding the enforcement of such a law, why would anyone follow it? This is why, subsequently, the Federal Aid Highway Act was passed; if states do not enforce the minimum age of 21, then states fall victim to a 10 percent decrease in the monies allotted to them by the federal government for the construction and repair of highways and roads. So - technically - states could tell the federal government to kiss off, lower the drinking age to 18 and then never receive money for roads.

But that just ain't gonna happen. So, the country is left with the drinking age debate as it stands today: 18 or 21? To lower or not to lower - that is the question.

To be perfectly honest, I don't see many flaws implicit in the argument that calls for lowering the drinking age. Firstly, if we are going to arbitrarily say that 18-year-olds are adults - and we identify drinking as an adult privilege - then we've caught ourselves in an intellectual checkmate. Furthermore, 18-year-olds are allowed to drive, vote and serve in the military, all of which are independently-made, adult decisions (with the occasional exception of driving, depending on your parents' attitudes); can we justify arguing that 18-year-olds have the mental capacity to vote but not the mental wherewithal to drink? According to this logic, something would have to give - either the entire country would have to raise the driving age, the voting age and the minimum enlistment age, or the drinking age would have to be lowered to 18.

But at the same time, the argument is neither that simple nor that easy. Do we really think that lowering the drinking age will bring an end to binge drinking? Or will binge drinking proliferate instead among 14- to 17-year-olds? Anyone who makes the argument: "if you can die for your country at 18, you should be allowed to open a beer," is a little off the mark, too. In the military, you follow orders. If you are ordered not to drink, there's nothing that can be done. And will different educational policies regarding drinking really promote responsibility?

Perhaps. But herein lies the crux of the drinking question.

You could go back and forth all day about this issue. Fundamentally - for me at least - the question of drinking boils down to the question of responsibility, and to think there is some arbitrary age at which an individual achieves universal responsibility is ridiculous. We've all seen the 18-year-olds who don't know when to cut their own drinking, but there are also 30-year-olds who should never touch another beer in their lives. You can be just as dumb about alcohol at the age of 21 as you were when you were 18. I'm not entirely convinced that three years' time makes much of a difference.

So, the central question is responsibility. But complicating this matter of responsibility is how we choose to legislate it. It's near impossible to legislate behavior. Telling me at what age I can drink is as trivial as telling me what time I can brush my teeth in the morning; if people want alcohol, they'll find ways to get it. So why waste time trying to lower the drinking age? And, for that matter, why waste time trying to raise the drinking age? Ultimately, for all I know, I might be able to drink more responsibly than half the people who don't want me to (legally) touch a beer yet.