College presidents seek debate on drinking age

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Agreed with the statement if they are old enough to go to war then they are old enough to drink.. Anything else is just stupifying..

It used to be 18 in the US but a federal law raised it to 21 in 1984 to yry to raise the crash rates as lots of 18 year olds would get drunk, cram into a car and crash into a car and kill people, but that still happens all the time so raising it did not improve things much.

Not quite accurate... there is no federal mandatory drinking age. What the federal government did was to amend a highway bill, denying federal highway funds to any state that did not raise the drinking age to 21...

as far as it's effectiveness, it's always tricky to use statistics to determine whether a law has the desired effect... highway death stats are lower now than they were then, but many researchers attribute this decline to the rise in fuel prices leading many people, especially young people, to drive fewer miles.

I guess I'm one of the few Americans that actually waited until their 21st birthday to start trying out different alcoholic beverages. Because I was not in a rush, I didn't see anything interesting about it when I tried it, and I didn't see why it should matter to anyone if they have to wait until they are 16, 18, 21, whatever to be drinking.

In any case, we may have a big problem with drinking and driving, despite the high drinking age. But statistically it has been an improvement over the time when the drinking age was 18. So, yeah, fat chance that it is going to change anytime soon.

i knew about that but that practically is a law if you're gonna lose money by not raising the age to 21

At first I didn't care, but after reading the position of the college presidents in the article and remembering my experiences less than a year ago I think that I would like to see the drinking age lowered to 18.

"If you treat students like children, they're going to act like children," he said.

That quote right there really did it for me, because it is true. I was less than 2 months away from turing 21 when I received a $600 drinking ticket for possession of alcohol and distributing to minors on the day of the most dangerous campus wide party of the year. The police officers treated me like I was 3. For the next few months I basically drank myself stupid in defiance of them.

However, I believe that I was providing the people who came to my party with a very safe drinking environment. Most of the injuries and fatalities happen from drunk driving, and we took the keys from everyone who showed up. I don't think a single person over drank and threw up at our party. I remember as a freshman we had no where to go, so we snuck in hard alcohol into the dorms and drank that straight. Almost everyone vomited and one of us had to go to the hospital to get his stomach pumped. My brother was a freshman at the time of this party, and I invited him over and drank with him and his friends. Not a single one of them threw up. In retrospect of this I am giving my full support to the college presidents, even though the restrictions my own college put on us after this party bust were humiliating and completely unjust, so maybe they should follow their own example first.

Like all these age limits, drinking age is pretty much arbitrary, and frankly makes no difference at all. 16, 53, 209.. drunk people are still a pain in the ass, and people who are responsible and mature and act like adults tend to cope better than the immature and irresponsible. Generally speaking, where I work. the younger drinkers, and those who are underage but permitted access for gigs etc (14+) are much better behaved than the older generations of drinkers. They cause less trouble and have a reasonable fear/respect for authority. That may not apply elsewhere, but in my experience it holds true. (After all, its hard to act like a twat when you are scared of the staff.)