For most high school and college students, alcohol is a weekend guest. It comes to town on Wednesdays or Thursdays and stays ’til Sunday morning. Although alcohol is considered a “good friend” by many students, it still leaves them in the morning lying in their beds feeling out of sorts. Its absence brings in a sudden need for a cup of coffee and bottle full of Excedrin.

But consuming alcohol is illegal until the age of 21. The truth is, it is a much more exciting friend to you before you reach this milestone.

The government doesn’t know this. Everyone working for the “Committee Who Decides When Americans Can Consume Alcoholic Beverages” is way beyond the age of 21. In fact, they’ve been 65 since 1842, when “alcohol” was invented to cure their whooping cough.

But these government officials have decided that once human beings have been on Earth for 21 years, they are capable of maintaining a relationship with alcohol in a healthy manner outside the realm of cough medicine.

People anticipate the sudden presence of maturity when they are at 20 years, 364 days, 23 hours and 55 minutes. At that age you are officially “really responsible.” At that moment, you are standing in line, already blasted, drooling over the idea of actually buying your own frosty beverage even though your brain is already thinking about tomorrow’s bottle of Excedrin.

At the stroke of midnight, “the responsible you” enters the establishment, the bouncer forgets to i.d. you, and you never approach the bar because hey, it’s your birthday, and everyone else is buying. The important thing is that you are now old enough to be doing this because by the ripe age of 21, you have accumulated enough brain cells that you can afford to kill some.

Unfortunately, if you are not yet ” responsible” and you get caught with alcohol one time, you can kiss your future goodbye and say hello to community service, a hefty fine and a permanent record. It’s too bad, because alcohol is much friendlier than these things. Those government officials think that no one should get a second chance. I mean, hey, these are guys who have never smoked up or had extra-marital affairs. So, you too should follow their example and listen to what they say. God forbid you have the curiosity to have an alcoholic consultation and ruin your chances of getting a job anywhere but at a carwash.

Really, kids under 21 should know better. They are old enough to know these things. We let them drive, so why do they have to know what beer is like?

At age 14, who wants to be a government official? No one. So many kids go out and risk their futures to be in the cool gang and get a little buzz. Five years later, one of these 20-year-olds is serving soup suppers at the local church because he had a beer. He’s just hoping that this summer he won’t have trouble getting back that job at the car wash.

Europe doesn’t have a drinking age, per se. At the age of 12, you can enjoy a bottle of wine with your family without the aftermath of sirens in your driveway, the parents receiving a fine for “providing alcohol to a minor” and you getting your first “minor in possession.”

Here, alcohol consumption is a part of life, not some huge privilege that arrives POW! at the age of 21. That isn’t to say that Europe doesn’t have its problems. But more or less, around age 16 you can safely wander into a European version of Cy’s Liquors and buy a beer.

Yeah, the public transportation is better in Europe, though CyRide is high quality. Europe doesn’t have the drunk bus. And kids don’t start driving until they are 18, and rarely do people have a car. But because drinking is “normal” and lacks the “outlaw” aura it has in the States, it doesn’t seem as though people talk about it or actually get so blasted, even though I know they do.

But maybe it is less of a problem. Maybe they don’t drive drunk or know their limit because they could drink before they could drive. Maybe they drive drunk but do it better because you have to be crazy to drive sober here in the first place.

But I have yet to hear the Swiss shout out the wastedness they are going to achieve. Sure, they go out and enjoy themselves, but the goal is not to stumble out of the bar, puke in a bush on the way home and go to bed sans recollection of any event after 10 p.m. They puke on the sidewalk here and start forgetting things after 2 a.m.

I know people have too much, and not everyone at home is a toasted mess. But it seems that alcohol is a bigger issue in the States, even though on the whole the Americans consume less alcohol than the Europeans. The legal age makes it more attractive and causes problems rather than eliminating them.

Not everyone reaches maturity at 21, sometimes it is before and sometimes its well after. Everyone focuses on this issue as though it is the only problem among adolescents when it is only one of a handful. They say how kids today drink so much more than their parents before them.

But our parents didn’t screw up drinking, and they weren’t put in the newspaper for doing the same things kids are doing today. The authority and consequences have changed more than most adolescents and their natural curiosity.

If we taught people how to deal responsibly with alcohol by actually admitting that it is a fact of life and stopped making it a shining activity for people in certain age categories, maybe we would have fewer problems. But then again, maybe people will never learn to deal with mind-altering substances in a responsible manner.

And besides, what would the Ames cops do on the weekend if they couldn’t sit in their car waiting to give the next person who trips on his shoelace a public intox ticket?

---

Amanda Christi Fier is a senior in French and journalism and mass communication from Davenport.