[33girl]

I can't believe I have to explain this.

Enlisting - which is a MUCH BIGGER DEAL than being allowed to have a drink IMO - is allowed at 18. Therefore it's stupid to disallow someone from drinking. It's also stupid to not allow an 18 year old to rent a hotel room or rent a car (2 things which happen regularly). If we are going to say 18 = adult, it should equal adult for everything, not just things that are politically correct.

The drinking age is not "set by the surgeon general" at 21 - if that was the case it would change from SG to SG, and it would be a federal law, which it's not. The states which had a lower drinking age changed it due to political pressure from extremist groups like MADD and due to the Federal Highway Funding Act, which withheld funds from states who didn't have a 21 drinking age. Maybe there's something somewhere that says 21 is the "magic age" at which your liver is fully developed, if so link please.

I've TAKEN the ASVAB. I apparently did so well on it that recruiters kept calling me and calling me, even though I can't think of anyone less suited for military service than me and anyone who wanted to go into it less. So much for the infallibility of that test.

When surgeons study to be surgeons, they don't just read books on it. They practice on corpses and later, on real humans, with a more skilled surgeon watching in case anything goes wrong. We don't expect them to read books and nothing else for 8 years and then do their first open heart surgery. Would you go to a surgeon like that? I wouldn't. We expect that of teenagers with the drinking laws, though. They're not allowed to have a drop of alcohol, they're not allowed to be around it, but when they're 21 they're supposed to magically know how it works, what their limit is, etc. If every single person who drinks underage stopped, it wouldn't stop binge drinking or people dying or barfing or anything like that. It would just make it happen at 21. Then we'd say 21 year olds are too immature to handle it, so it needs to be 23. And round and round, till the drinking age is 75 or so.