Drinking Age

With a couple recent birthdays in my family I began to think about the drinking age for alcohol.  One of my nephews turned 21 recently and my own birthday happened within the last month.  My thought process began with his downplaying of his milestone birthday.  He attends a college that is dry and he probably was not even going to go to a bar or restaurant to have a beer or a drink.  It is a big contrast to my own 21st birthday, where my fraternity brothers’ whole point was to get me drunk.  Needless to say they did succeed in that aspect. These are two very different ways to look at the milestone 21st birthday.  I am not saying which is better or even more correct, that is up to your own discretion.
In a review of the drinking age around the globe a person quickly finds that the United States is in the minority with the 21 year old drinking age.  The vast majority of countries are around 18 years old.  Is this a good thing?  Our voted in leaders of our country believe so.  I am not convinced.  The United States (US) is one of the leading countries for alcoholics, binge drinkers and general alcohol abuse.  Countries that have much younger drinking ages have a lesser degree of all of these instances. 
So this leads one to believe that by delaying the drinking age to 21 we in the US are actually harming our young adults.  Since we delay the important day of drinking to such a late age we actually make it overly important.  I believe if we would look at going back to 18 we would be doing our young adults a favor.  Especially since at 18 our young adults can join the armed services, vote and smoke.  My biggest concern is the denying of the young adults that have decided to protect our country the right to drink.  I believe that if they are old enough to die for our country they are old enough to drink.
Our 21 year old drinking age really does not do what it is meant to do, which is prevent under- age drinking.  The overwhelming majority of adults have drunk before their 21st birthday.  I am not saying that every adult had a binge drinking event before turning 21, but a good amount of us have.  Especially those of us that have gone away to college, the rule of "out of sight out of mind" applied to many of us.  Meaning we are away from home, we were more likely to give into peer pressure.
As I have learned currently, many teenagers do not even wait to go away to college to drink.  The rate of high school and tragically even junior high school age kids is on the increase.  Which I believe is due to the high drinking age we have.  In countries with lower ages they wean their youth onto alcohol slowly and with reverence.  They downplay the importance of drinking alcohol and make it a common occurrence to their youth.
I am not saying that the countries that have lower drinking ages are perfect. They do have problems with youth drinking under age and binge drinking, but they have lower occurrences than the US does.  Needless to say there is no perfect way to introduce our youth to drinking alcohol.  Even those of us that think we are being progressive and introducing our sons or daughters to properly drinking alcohol can be wrong. 

There are always those of us that are predisposed to abusing alcohol no matter what age. There is no perfect age to set forth for a drinking age, but I believe that a younger age than we have currently is a good thing.
So needless to say the debate continues and will be decided about the people we elect to represent us in our government.  Unfortunately I do not see a change coming any time soon.

QC Beerguy