18 should be the new 21

This campus is brimming with hippies. Don't let the designer handbags and gaudy Greek rush events fool you. This campus is full of rabble-rousing, free-spirited law breakers willing to face-down the man.

In fact, most of us are part of one of the nation's largest civil-disobedience movements.

We drink alcohol.

We often don't think about it until someone gets caught. Yet, just last semester, Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board agents conducted a surprise raid at MarBar and nailed more underage drinkers than a St. As brother.

The MarBar bust reminds us that anachronistic state and federal drinking laws have turned almost every college student in the country into a criminal.

Purchasing, consuming, transporting or bathing with liquor is illegal in Pennsylvania if you are under 21. You can also be prosecuted for so much as verbally lying about your age.

Each year, the laws get stricter at the behest of well-intentioned but misguided social advocacy groups which believe that keeping the drinking age at 21 is guaranteed to save lives or prevent the moral collapse of the next generation.

These groups are already feasting on a report published this month in the American Journal of Public Health. This study asserts that lowering the drinking age in New Zealand to 18 led to an increase in automobile deaths among 15 to 18 year olds.

As critics have pointed out, drivers are more likely to get into accidents soon after they begin drinking, no matter what the drinking age is.

The age at which people start drinking is not as important as how mature and educated they are about alcohol.

The mandated drinking age of 21 robs us of this maturity.

Current liquor laws throw college social life into the wrong hands: skuzzy bars, the Greek system and anyone else willing to serve liquor to a minor.

By keeping alcohol just out of reach of most college students, drinking becomes something that can be enjoyed, but never on one's own terms.

Binge drinking, drunk driving and all the other ugly highlights of college life result from the fact that the drinking age creates two castes at American colleges: those with drinks and those who want drinks.

For the sake of saving lives and a better college experience, we need to do something about this.

This year is an election year, which means that various politicians will visit Penn to flirt with us.

They will encourage us to take stands on the war in Iraq, Supreme Court nominations, teaching evolution in schools and a variety of other issues.

Afterward, they will go back to the legislatures and fund programs such as the Justice Department's Enforcing the Underage Drinking Laws Program. This program distributes grants from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to fund underage-drinking enforcement.

The federal government allocates $25 million per year to the OJJDP for this program, which is up for renewal in the 2006 budget.

You can bet that the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board will cite the MarBar raid as an example of "Delinquency Prevention" in its next OJJDP grant request.

We are not delinquents, we are not drunks, and we are not babies. We are voters.

The overwhelming majority of college students want a lower drinking age.

The College Democrats and College Republicans should remember that they are college political organizations and formulate unambiguous positions on this matter.

After they come to a decision, our campus political groups should query local and state politicians about their positions on the drinking age.

These politicians -- some of whom will be benefiting from Penn volunteers for their elections -- would be wise to respond.

Whichever group does this first will get a bottle of vodka from me.

Unfortunately, they will have to wait until Spring Fling, as I don't turn 21 until April 24.

Hopefully, they will be in the mood for a drink by then.

Eric Obenzinger is a junior history major from New York. Quaker Shaker appears on Wednesdays.

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