Last winter, I found myself in my car with a pretty girl. We had set out from her place with the headlights pointed away from town.

We made our way into a neighboring town. I questioned her again. “Left or straight?” I was behind the wheel, but she was behind the decisions.

She chose and we rolled through the green light. I glanced left and spotted a neon sign proclaiming “Wahoo Lickers” in glaring letters. Laughter, perhaps inappropriately, burst from my throat.

I know what this place sells, but I wonder if the owners see the possibility for vulgar misinterpretation. To me, the wahoo could be any one of several parts of the human body, none of which I would want my customers to expect me to lick.

Why would someone needing only a sign reading “booze” go so far out on a limb to test their idea of a good joke? Perhaps by the time I’m 21, I will have matured enough that this sign won’t strike me as odd. Maybe store names like this are what keep our legal drinking age where it is.

I haven’t seen a bottle shop with such an interesting name in Australia. That’s not the only difference, though. It’s also perfectly legal for me to buy alcohol here.

I’m actually several years above the Australian age limit of 18 and I often don’t get checked at all. This is a definite change of pace for me.

One day, I’m a criminal if I drink a beer, and the next, I’m just helping the Australian economy with my imported dollars.

No country in the world has a drinking age higher than the United States. Heaps of them are younger. Some are as low as fourteen, while other countries have no limit at all.

I will admit that it should be legislated and it shouldn’t be legal for anyone as young as 16 years old to buy booze, but 21 seems a little too high. With our modern education system as it is, the average high school graduate is seventeen or eighteen.

For college-bound students, there is a two- or three-year wait between entering college, usually moving out of the house and being old enough to purchase alcohol. I know quite a few people who were married and even had a kid before they could buy champagne for a toast.

Another interesting point is that at age 18, males are legally entitled to submit a draft card. There is no draft right now, but anyone 18 or older can sign up for the armed forces. If you’re too young to drink, aren’t you too young to go to war?

Last week, I had one Australian kindly explain to me that the laws were in place for a good reason. He said, “It’s the same reason Americans have so many gun murders every year. An American is just more out of control, and slower to mature, than an Aussie or a Brit.” So, for those of you doubting the law, there is reassurance.

Recently, there have also been some drastic legal changes concerning marijuana in Australia. Certain Australian states are working on what they call the decriminalization of the drug. They feel it is important to clarify that it is not legalization.

Decriminalization means that possession of a small — what they call personal — amount of marijuana is a civil offense, punishable merely by a monetary fine. Possession of more than that, as well as trafficking, is still treated with a criminal sanction. In some places, it’s even legal to grow two cannabis plants in your home or garden.

The idea is to reduce the amount of time law enforcement spends on the private user. It is also in response to a fear of sending private users to jail and making them hardened criminals.

Certain states have also tried decriminalization, usually with varied success. Several states recriminalize after trying the new legislation.

Is it human nature to hunt down the very thing we’re not allowed to have? If curiosity killed the cat, didn’t it also intoxicate the youth? Did the law stop you from drinking before your time?

If a law is not stopping the majority of people from doing the illegal act, should it remain in effect? Then again, human nature being as it is, a lower drinking age might just lower the age of the illegal experimenters — perhaps a more dangerous problem than freshmen not being able to drink at college.