The United States has the highest legal drinking age in the world. Yet, a study by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation found that the nearly 3,500 alcohol related deaths every year are caused by youths under the age of 21. PIRE also found that underage drinking is responsible for roughly $52.8 billion a year in damages. These hefty figures, coupled with the binge drinking epidemic on college campuses has many college and university presidents rallying together to try and pass legislation to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18.

The rationale behind the presidents' thought process seems pretty logical; those students who are unable to legally drink are going to alternate means to consume alcohol, and ultimately making reckless decisions. Furthermore, campus administrators cannot educate underclassmen about responsible drinking due to the fact that they would be undermining the law.

The potential bill, titled the Amethyst Initiative, is facing stiff opposition from such groups as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC says that since the legal drinking age has been raised to 21 nationwide, traffic fatalities have continuously gone down, a statistic that MADD uses as their mantra in the fight against this proposition. The supreme court has also passed a bill in which any state that lowers their respective drinking age back down to 18 will get penalized 10 percent of their allotment of federal money toward their transportation department.

UT President John Petersen has not sponsored the bill; in fact the only two college presidents on the bill from the state of Tennessee are Sewanee President Joel Cunningham and Rhodes College President Bill Troutt. Many prestigious universities around the country have hopped on board the initiative though, including Duke, Dartmouth, Middlebury College, and Syracuse.

Personally, I think lowering the drinking age is something that should be seriously considered by school officials and politicains alike. The cold reality when it comes to underage drinking is that there is a certain allure to it for teens that have grown up in a sheltered environment, something along the lines of the "forbidden fruit" complex. Students who grew up in an environment with parents who have the mind-set that their children will never drink because they said so, and think that their children will make educated, responsible decisions when they leave home are severely misguide. When a young adult is finally freed from the world of strict rules and has not been adequately educated in responsible decision making, the potential is there for a very rude, unpleasant awakening when he or she starts experimenting in college.

Those who take a hard-lined stance on this issue fail to realize the ease at which alcohol is accessible to underage drinkers. By doing nothing but warning students about the dangers of drinking, and by only giving vague, rare, examples, critics leave the door wide-open for young adults to genuinely desire to see what all of the hype concerning alcohol is about. If parents and school officials acknowledged this curiosity as part of the growing-up process, and gave concrete, educated examples of making good decisions while still allowing teens to enjoy the prime of their youth; young adults would surely think about the decisions they were making in potentially dangerous situations.

Personally, I think lowering the drinking age is something that should be seriously considered by school officials and politicians alike. The excess revenue from more alcohol sales and less resources being used to police underage drinking in restaurants, bars and nightclubs could go toward practical awareness education so that each new generation of young, lively adults could make sound, calculated decisions when they enter the real world.