Across the world, the average legal drinking age is between the ages of 18 and 19, but not in America. As of 1984, the legal drinking age in the United States was raised to 21 in response to the Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), making 21 the lucky number across college campuses and young adults. On 21st birthdays, the newly-turned 21 year old usually goes bar-hopping, and wakes up with a nasty hangover. They may have binge drank, they may not have, but the point is that they likely didn't feel the need to binge drink. This is one of the main differences between legally drinking and illegally, underage drinking, and that's a problem.
In France, the legal drinking age is 16 for wine and beer, and there is a toleration for younger adults to drink wine with their families. As a result, the French teens are taught how to drink with their parents as they grow, and can learn and understand better drinking habits. Law-abiding American parents can't teach their young adults how to drink responsibly, because of the age restrictions. Assuming these parents don't teach their children how to behave with alcohol, the teens are on their own. When these young adults find their way onto a college campus, they are taught how to get drunk really fast, by binge drinking. Many are caught off guard and cannot handle themselves, and the situation gets dangerous.
You may be thinking, "This would happen whether college students are drinking legally or not," but that might not be entirely true. Barrett Seaman, of Time Magazine, states,
"Another part of my eureka moment was when I visited McGill University. As you know, McGill is in Montreal, where the drinking age is 18, but they also have, in any given year, 2,000 Americans enrolled as undergraduates. I wanted to see how the Americans there behaved as compared to their compatriots in American schools. And I was really struck by the relative civility I found up at McGill. It just wasn’t a big deal. They could go down to the bars in Montreal and drink or go to the clubs or they could have a case of beer delivered to their dorm rooms. It was an open culture."
Imagine if the United States and the American students could drink legally at the age of 18, and how calm and "civil" college campuses could become, like Seaman noted at McGill. With a more stable process of being assimilated into drinking responsibly, less binge drinking would occur on campuses, leading to less dangerous situations. Alcohol poisoning and sexual assault have become more and more prevalent throughout college campuses as a result of binge drinking, and drunk driving has always been an issue in the U.S. But if the drinking age was lowered, and young adults were raised to responsibly drink as they became of age, then the need to binge drink would decrease, and these dangerous situations could decline in number of incidents.
