Mark+B.

=**__ The Drinking Age: __**=

"If you are old enough to go to war, you are old enough to have a drink." Many of us have heard this phrase before. In America, at 18, you can go to war, get married, have a drivers license, and vote, but not drink. America has the highest drinking age in the world, 21. In other countries, such as those in Europe, the drinking age can be 18, 16, or someimes a law isn't even in place. Some people say that if the American drinking age was always lower, binge drinking and other dangerous behaviors among teens would be less common. The idea is that kids in Europe are desensitized to alcohol from a young age. This is because alcohol is treated as "just a normal thing" in europe. Others say the teen drinking problem is just as bad in Europe, and that laws now are fine just how they are.

Teenage Drinking in the United States
"Our liquor laws make drinking a rite of passage to adulthood, fostering rather than discourging teen alcohol consumption. We set kids up for an "I'm 21 now, so gimmie my sixpack" mentality" - M.R. Franks, Professor of Family Law.

In the US, the drinking age is 21, the highest in the world​. But teens break this rule all the time, usually by binge drinking, which means drinking large amounts of alcohol at one time. People do die from things like alcohol-related traffic fatalities and other incidents related to alcohol. Things like that will probably never go away though, regardless of where you happen to be. Here, drinking is a privelage for teens. Alcohol is idolised in our culture, here in the United States. "The key is desensitizing kids to alcohol. Making hard and fast laws creates the sense that alcohol is some magic potion" (Colville 1).

Teenage Drinking in Europe
In most European cultures, kids are taught by their parents to drink responsibly. They learn by having a drink at the dinner table with their parents. Their culture encourages moderate, responsible drinking. However, this does not mean that binge drinking, alcoholism, and other behaviors associated with drinking don't exist in Europe. In 2001, the US Department of Justice realeased a comparison report of drinking stats in the US vs Europe. It argues that European teens are not more responsible drinkers. This arcticle, however, seems full of holes. It says, "a greater percentage of young people reported drinking in the past 30 days"(parent-teen.com). While more than half of the American teenagers who drank reported getting drunk, less than a fourth of young Southern European drinkers said they had been intoxicated. The study never went through peer review, the process in which other researchers judge a study's merits before it gets published. The DOJ used outdated survey numbers even though newer ones were available, and its European figures left out several important countries, including France and Germany (Hanson, Walcoff 1).

What Do You Think?
Now lets thnk. Lets say alcohol was legalized for all ages all of a sudden. Every American teenager would instantly run to the liquor store and stockpile as much liquor as they could afford. Everyone would die from alcohol poisoning

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==This site explains the faults in the DOJ's comparinson report: [] []==