Alcohol abuse among students is one problem that all colleges and universities in the United States have to face. They can not seem to stop it; college students like to drink. The problem with this love for drinking is simple; most college students are not old enough to legally drink yet, so they do not understand how to drink in moderation. This results in binge drinking and they end up causing extreme harm to their young bodies. Although the Minimum Legal Drinking Age Act of 1984 (MLDA) raised the legal drinking age in the United States to twenty-one years of age in hopes that a higher legal drinking age would help to prevent alcohol-related deaths and injuries among youths, nevertheless it has failed to achieve its goal. Repealing the MLDA, and lowering the legal drinking age to eighteen years of age, along with proper substance abuse education, would be an effective way of hindering binge drinking on college campus'.

One of the many things that college students are famous for is their binge drinking. Experts define binge drinking as having five or more drinks in one sitting. A recent survey conducted at the University of Virginia reported that over seventy-five pe

students' intentions regarding their behavior after the passage of the MLDA law revealed that only six percent intended to stop drinking, seventy percent planned to change their drinking location, twenty-one percent expected to use a false or borrowed identification to buy alcohol and twenty-two percent intended to try other drugs.

But why would a law designed to reduce drinking among young adults, actually increase it? One answer is referred to as the "forbidden fruit" mentality. What it basically says is that when you tell a person, especially a young person, that they can not have something, they end up wanting it even more. If this is true then telling college students that they are not allowed to drink, only makes them want to drink even more.

People become responsible by being properly taught, given responsibility, and then held accountable for their actions. We don't tell young people to "just say no" to driving, fail to teach them to drive, and then on their 18th birthday give them drivers licenses and turn them loose on the road. But this is the logic we follow for alcohol use. Lowering the legal drinking age to eighteen years of age in combination with education would help to solve a tough issue that all colleges have to find a solution for. Perhaps Professor Craig Reinerman of U.C. Santa Cruz, who has devoted his entire life to studying drug and alcohol policies, said it best when he said "when no boundaries are placed on the use of alcohol, it becomes part of the normal way of life and there is no final destination to reach."

rcent of all underage students drink, and of that, twenty-five percent

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