The reason most American college students wake up on Sunday morning with a raging hangover is because they spent the previous night drinking their weight in liquor.

The evening before that probably involved the same pattern of drunken lunacy and the subsequent dancing on tables and vomiting.

Take a quick look overseas to, say, Europe, and you’ll notice the youth there are probably not getting so wild. Why is this, you ask? It all has to do with how their societal standards differ from ours.

In Europe, a majority of the cities have no drinking age whatsoever. They each have a legal alcohol purchasing age, but other than that, everyone is allowed to sip away.

Due to Europe’s relaxed state-of-mind regarding liquor, folks over there do not feel the need to rebel and act ignorant with their freedoms.

By comparison, attitudes about the restriction of underage drinking in the U.S. are varied, to say the least.

This is proving to be detrimental to our mental and physical health as a society. In the United States, youths who engage in risky drinking behavior are 12 times more likely than any other group to injure themselves when alcohol is involved.

In contrast, many other countries are more open with what is acceptable. For example, most Europeans have not lived in a world where the thought of a 16 year old drinking raised eyebrows.

Culture is influenced strongly by the rules, too. In other
countries, most young adults are exposed to alcohol at the onset of their youth because it is the norm.

They have had that experience from a very young age. On the American side, it is a genuine thrill to get away with anything because we know drinking before the legal limit of 21 is socially considered “wrong.”

The whole issue leads to censorship and banning and how the general smarts of America, in the lawmakers’ eyes, is pretty low. We are thought to be ignorant, unable to have lowered drinking ages. It does not help us to be blind; it only causes unnecessary acting out, and quite frankly, it is insulting to our intelligence.

Young adults would be dying a lot less from alcohol poisoning if they did not feel they needed to chug in excess because they can get away with it.

If we were more lax and understanding as a community, teenagers’ livers would thank us, and there would be no need for young adults to waste time trying to defy the law.