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Ever since the drinking age has been raised from 18 to 21, there has always been groups and support for the drinking age to be 18 again. There have been arguments for it and now even some college presidents are pushing for it. I feel that the drinking age should actually be raised to 23 to help eliminate a lot of the alcohol at college campuses and give people more time to develop a maturity and some wisdom on how to consume alcohol. Even though it would hurt or concern people of age before this regulation change it would greatly aid those in college. In my opinion, each state should strengthen regulations on the age of drinking from the age of 21 to age 23.
One of the reasons for increasing the drinking age is that it would help eliminate a great amount of drinking on college campuses. Generally on a college campus, the ages of most of the students range from 18-22 with probably less than five percent being outside those ages. Experiencing a small amount of college life and parties myself, even though there are some “of age” students drinking and buying alcohol, most do not drink socially, they are drinking to get completely drunk. According to a study from the Medical College of Georgia, 90% of college student do not know how to drink responsibly and about 60 to 70% knowingly drink to get drunk. Also, since there are numerous parties happening at college, there is a great chance for binge drinking and also getting alcohol poisoning because of the intent of just getting drunk. Another reason that the raise in the minimum drinking age would benefit at the college level is if there was less alcohol there would be less pressure from others do drink and maybe inhibit someone to start bad habits or trigger a dependency on alcohol. An interesting study done by the Boston University School of Public Health showed some frightening statistics. Showing changes from 1998 to 2001, there was an increase in alcohol-related unintentional injury deaths from 1600 to 1700. Since the study was done over seven years ago, we can only assume that if the study were done today, unfortunately, the numbers would probably have increased. Also the study showed that there was about a five percent increase in the number of students reporting driving under the influence of alcohol. Overall, the effect of a college campus on students and drinking is one reason that I feel states should increase the drinking age to 23.