At 18 years old you are considered an adult. You can vote for the president, lease a house and risk your life for our country, but we are not allowed to have a drink?

You are given all of these new responsibilities, like living by yourself away at college, but you are not allowed to go to the bar. Then, if you decide to try and drink at 18, you are facing the constant anxiety and fear that the police may catch you under the influence.

Other countries seem to succeed without a minimum legal drinking age because they have educated and allowed children to experiment with alcohol from an early age. This is not a new topic for America.

The Huffington Post wrote in an article about eliminating the drinking age, “As a group, the American people decided we were unable to raise our children with the understanding that wine, beer and cocktails are foods, and so we asked our government to treat them as drugs. We erected a barrier between childhood and adulthood that kids could see over but were told they could not cross.”

Personally, I feel that if the U.S. did not have a drinking age, or at least lowered the law to 18 years old, teens and young adults would not feel quite the need to binge drink. This is because it would become custom to not abuse alcohol, but to casually have a drink.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reported, “By age 15, half of teens have had at least one drink. By age 18, more than 70 percent of teens have had at least one drink.”

It is inevitable that college students will drink alcohol whether they are “of age” or not. In my opinion, we would be much better off without a minimum drinking age and would be more educated with how we drink.

If we were raised without the implication that alcohol and drugs truly compare, we might drink more responsibly.

Knowing when “enough is enough,” along with all of the other choices we as adults make, we should be able to choose if we can have a drink.

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