Analysis Of How Bingeing Became The New College Sport By Barrett Seaman

The article “Why the Drinking Age Should be Lowered: An Option based upon Research” is about twenty years of research based underage drinking done by Ruth Engs. It talks about the way things were in the past compared to how things are now. The research done for this article shows that binge drinking is mostly found in the age below 21 due to the lack of being taught responsible drinking habits. In this article there are many statistics dealing with drinking at a college level over a long span of

Drinking on college campuses has become a huge problem. For example, in the 10th century only old people used to drink, but now students drink more than their parents. Students see their parents drinking, so they may think that drinking has no effect on health that anyone can drink so why can’t the students drink? Therefore, college students have been drinking alcohol since the 14th century. Barrett Seaman’s article “How Bingeing Became the New College Sport,” appearing in TIME magazine on August 29, 2005, explains how binge drinking is affecting college students. It also suggests that lowering the drinking age might help solve the problem of binge drinking. This article has much information on how and where students get drunk.

“According to the CDC, about 90% of all teen alcohol consumption occurs in the form of Binge Drinking, which experts say peaks at the age of nineteen.” (qtd by Listfield). Binge Drinking is the consumption of excessive amounts of alcohol in a short period of time. The author, Emily Listfield, defines that the standard alcohol consumption over a two hour period is considered to be four beers for women and five beers for men. This has become a great distraction for college students nationwide and a major dilemma on college campuses. Nearly two hundred thousand students visit emergency rooms each year due to the abuse of alcohol, and more than one thousand seven hundred students die. In the article “ The Underage Drinking Epidemic”, Listfield identifies the problems that underage drinking can cause, the dangers that could happen, and four solutions on what parents can do to keep their kids from binge drinking.

It has been a rising issue within the past century to have the drinking age set at 21, but many people are more in favor of having the age set at 18. For instance, “’Raising the drinking age to 21 was passed with the very best of intentions, but it’s had the very worst of outcomes,’ stated by David J. Hanson, an alcohol policy expert” (Johnson). Many people believe that having the drinking age set at 21 was a smart idea, but it has caused many more deaths and injuries over the years. Most of these fatalities are cause from people who are underage and choose to consume alcohol. Again, “Libertarian groups and some conservative economic foundations, seeing the age limits as having been extorted by Washington, have long championed lowering the drinking age” (Johnson). These groups see that keeping the drinking age set at 21 is dangerous as it causes more problems to the Untied States. If the drinking age was lowered, or set at 18, there would not be such unforgiving outcomes, like deaths and lifelong injuries, which are usually caused from people who are under the age of 21 drinking alcohol. Although there are numerous groups that are fighting to keep the age

The legal drinking age in the United States will always be a point of contention. No one can settle upon a drinking age that everyone is in agreement with; should it be 18 or 21? Ages 18 and 21 are the most popular options, yet neither one has 100% of the vote. With the current legal drinking age in America standing at 21, meaning that people under the age of 21 cannot purchase or consume alcoholic food or beverages, there is the question of whether or not to lower it to 18 or 19 years old. This paper will argue that the drinking age should be lowered, and examine its impact on State University.

It’s no doubt that alcohol has a major sway on today’s society across the board both culturally and globally. When we take a look into past history, we can see how alcohol has been the fundamental measures to religious, professional, and social concerns. It seems that no matter how far our history books go back, the United States has had a question about the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Through the years of Prohibition halting the sale, shipping, and ingestion of alcohol and the constitutional acts delegating who is accurately fit to drink. Today’s controversy is a lot less infringing on personal rights. It’s regarding whether the legal drinking age should be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. This has been a huge controversy geared exclusively towards college students due to the fact that alcohol consumption at universities is the definitive part of campus life even though the greater part of students are not legally permitted to drink. It is apparent that through the regularity and risks of binge drinking across universities and the high percentage of DUI and alcohol related fatal crashes, that something needs to shift in this country. Lowering the drinking age to eighteen would be an expedient and positive step in reducing binge drinking, nurturing the safe practice of drinking alcohol, and permitting those students of legal drinking age the chance to fully and sensibly make mature adult choices.

The government is conducting an idea to whether lower the minimum legal drinking age in the United States or not. Many Americans forbid the idea of legalizing the drinking age so that it would be profitable to the businesses. Likewise, there have been many advantages and disadvantages of why should the government allow young adults drink under the age of 21. To prevent this issue, many Americans have provided reasoning that will support the idea of keeping the minimum legal drinking age where it is now. The government should maintain the minimum legal drinking age in the United States at the age of 21.

However, their argument is weak, and when taken into consideration, I still firmly believe that the drinking age should not be lowered. Underage drinking can prompt an extensive assortment of issues including health problems, addiction, sexual assault, drunk-driving accidents, and death. Granting all this, the legal drinking age has been lowered and raised again. Underage drinking should not be allowed in this country. The risks are far too great and the pros are way too few.

“80 percent of teen-agers have tried alcohol, and that alcohol was a contributing factor in the top three causes of death among teens: accidents, homicide and suicide” (Underage, CNN.com pg 3). Students may use drinking as a form of socializing, but is it really as good as it seems? The tradition of drinking has developed into a kind of “culture” fixed in every level of the college student environment. Customs handed down through generations of college drinkers reinforce students' expectation that alcohol is a necessary ingredient for social success. These perceptions of drinking are the going to ruin the lives of the students because it will lead to the development alcoholism. College students who drink a lot, while in a college

On February 3, 2017, Tim Piazza, a sophomore here at Penn State, tragically lost his life at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house. This horrific event was a result of irresponsible consumption of alcohol and binge drinking. Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. Around the nation, countless young adults have lost their life due to the thoughtless consumption of alcohol. Unfortunately, the common census between the majority of the average day Americans is that the most effective way to make drinking safer for young adults is enforcing a minimum drinking age of twenty one. This law, as well as the common census, are a direct result from the efforts of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) more than thirty years ago (“Drinking Culture”). MADD’s objective and goal is quite understandable; they want the young adults of today’s world to be safe and not put themselves into dangerous situations with alcohol, but they doing more harm than good. (“The Problem”). Safety is the single objective from each side in this argument, but MADD’s flawed logic and ignorance to reality has formed a belief that results in an unsafe drinking culture, resulting in more deaths, such as the tragic passing of Tim Piazza, unless the drinking age is lowered to eighteen, as well as establishing an open dialogue about drinking itself.

High school is over and it is your first time away form home, what are you going to do? The typical college student wants to party! Of the people that were surveyed over half believed that the legal drinking age should be lowered. [O’Kane 1] The legal age to drink in the United States is now 21 years old; college freshman, sophomores, and some juniors are not of the legal age to drink. This causes a problem on many campuses; several students are experiencing their first time away from parental care in a setting sinonomus with drinking and clubbing. Some feel pressure from family and friends to receive excellent grades while attending school, sometimes the pressure is too much and going out and

The consumption of alcohol as a habitual behavior has long been associated with the American collegiate experience, despite the many known negative consequences a student who partakes in drinking can encounter. Because of the danger drunken students pose to a college’s reputation and the safety of its surrounding areas, much research has been done concerning the collegiate party and drinking scenes. This research mostly studied the demographics of the student body, so strategies developed to curtail the illegal or overconsumption of alcohol could be targeted towards the specific groups that demonstrated the highest likelihood of participating in these acts. When the strategies were implemented, however, there was little decline in the number of college students who chose to party and drink (Vander Ven 2011). This failure did not point toward a flaw in the research data, but instead a lack of research into the benefits a collegiate drinker receives that are rewarding to the point he or she cannot resist. This is the topic of Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard by Thomas Vander Ven.

For countless young adults after high school the next stepping stone is college, however, students are not only learning from the classes they attend, but also from the parties. Consequently, they are being introduced to alcohol and plenty of it; learning how to shotgun a beer or attempt a keg stand is all the rage. Suddenly, people are viewing college binge drinking as a right of passage for even their youngest students. Thus, demands the questioning of lowering the drinking age to counteract college binge drinking. “The reality is that at age 18 in this country, one is a legal adult. Young people view 21 as utterly arbitrary—which it is. And because the explanation given them is so condescending—that they lack maturity and judgment,

Research has supported the observation that young people in America consume alcohol regularly; this prevalence of use increases rapidly during adolescence, as well as a few years afterward (Wagenaar and Wolfson 37). This has come to be a problem among college students. It has been shown through extensive quantitative and qualitative research that those under twenty-one years of age are able to obtain alcohol, which allows them to binge drink. Binge drinking holds many problems for college students: alcohol poisoning, DUIs, traffic accidents, and even fatalities.

One approach that many people who are concerned with the issue take is to lowering the drinking age because current policies don?t work. Most people taking this approach believe that the laws in place today do little or nothing to help or stop underage drinking, and in some ways even make it worse. "At the very least, American youth alcohol policy is ineffective. More disturbing, the drinking age may be counterproductive. It is applied so rigidly in most of the country that it precludes any attempt to teach young people how to handle alcohol responsibly." (Hanson).