I went to Iowa City last week and I had way too good of a time. It has always really hurt my inner pride that the Iowa City road trip holds an almost religious place in my list of must-do activities for a college student in Ames.

The unplanned hop-in-the-car-with-nothing-but-a-pocket-full-of-cash, wearing-the-same-clothes-for-three-days type of trip. The kind of affair where you have no idea where you’re going to be sleeping, but you figure it probably will have something to do with the last place you’re standing.

There’s no reason why Iowa City, home of the hated Hawkers, should be a city of such great opportunity for excitement. Sure, the former state capital is by all regards Iowa’s liberal hot spot, and the reversed ratio of women to men that we experience here at Iowa State makes traveling to Iowa City even more important to those of us who are womanless, but that doesn’t explain why Ames can’t have the night life that its sister city to the east has.

The simple answer is underage bars. Almost every bar in Iowa City allows underage patrons in to its establishment, as long as they are of college age.

When you boil it down, that’s why the Iowa City road trip is such a tremendous college experience. It allows Iowa Staters who have never had a taste of the meat market to just stroll into town and suddenly pretend they’ve instantly aged two to three years thanks to a ferocious time warp on Interstate 80.

During every Sunday afternoon two hour journey home from Iowa City, I wonder to myself, “Why not Ames?”

And due to recent technological improvements, I now truly wonder, perhaps even aloud, “Why not Ames?”

In Thursday’s edition of the Daily a story ran about a new ID scanning device called CardCom. This machine would allow bars and liquor stores to scan Iowa Driver’s Licenses to make sure they are authentic and have not been reported lost or stolen.

This isn’t a cure-all for the problem of underage drinkers in bars, but certainly it would help cut down on fake ID usage.

So here’s my plan. Put these CardCom devices at the front door of every Campustown bar and then fling the doors wide open. Allow drinking establishments to admit any college age customer.

This would be a sharp about face from the current Ames ordinance, which strictly limits bars from letting the under-21 crowd into their businesses.

At first, this might seem like a step in the wrong direction for the city and the university. They are trying very hard to make it obvious to the community that they care deeply about the ills of alcohol. This is made clear by our newly dry Veishea, the stiffer alcohol policies to be enacted in the dorms next year, and even possibly at our new ice arena, which might not sell beer at ISU hockey games.

If you didn’t know better, you might think that alcohol was just recently invented.

The truth is, though, allowing minors into Ames bars would be a whole-hearted step in the right direction.

Not only would it make the approximately half of the ISU student body that is underage very pleased, it would make alcohol enforcement on minors much easier.

Tell me, where would it be more efficient to keep tabs on minors who are consuming alcohol: in dorm rooms, apartments and houses spread all across the city, or in the handful of Campustown bars? They would be full of minors every weekend if the city ordinance was changed.

It might not look like it would be a better way to solve the alcohol problem, but neither is the happy-crappy that university administrators like to shove down the public’s throats.

When you send students to talk to other students under the guise of “peer interaction,” people aren’t more likely to listen, they’re more likely to call their so-called peers dorks.

If the majority of underage drinking at ISU were done in bars, it would flat out save lives.

Think back to all of the stories you’ve read about college students who drink themselves to death. They die in dorm rooms, frat houses and off-campus parties. They don’t keel over in bars, because at bars there is some control. There are trained bartenders who have possession of the alcohol and who know that bonging a bottle of vodka is not a good way to live all the way to sunrise.

College students won’t stop drinking, that is a fact. Alcohol is so intertwined with the university experience that trying to separate it would be like trying to extract the devil out of Jerry Falwell. The fact that some college students are underage is unfortunate.

It may seem counterproductive, but letting minors in the bars would be the simplest and easiest way to keep tabs on them. Perhaps the city and the university could see that if they weren’t blinded by the hypocrisy of this alcohol-free public relations scheme.

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David Roepke is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Aurora. He is head news editor of the Daily.