Drinking age cannot be regulated by laws

f you've walked around campus the day of an LSU football game, you've seen how Louisianians feel about alcohol (for those of you unfamiliar with tailgating etiquette around campus, wait until Saturday). Kegs, coolers and shots are consumed in all directions, as Tiger fans get liquored up before the game. This will be my third season of LSU football as a student, and I'm still not 21.

I turn 21 just 12 days after Mardi Gras next year - but I'm not bitter. Many people think I would be a little more enraged, but it's not as if I can't get alcohol in New Orleans - it's just the principle of the thing. If every bar, liquor store and restaurant all of a sudden decided to enforce the drinking age, I'd be out of luck. But The Big Easy is known as such for many reasons, one of them being the ease with which underage New Orleanians can acquire alcohol. The age law has long since become obsolete.

According to the National Institute of Health, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 is the law concerning underage drinking. While not specifically mandating an age limit, it requires a 10 percent decrease in federal highway funding for states that don't enforce the minimum drinking age of 21, forcing states into submission. Barring certain exceptions, it is illegal for me to purchase alcohol in the United States and most Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran. In the rest of the civilized world, the minimum drinking age varies from 16 to 20.

I can vote for my president, my governor and my mayor, but I can't have a drink. I can be shipped to Iraq to fight for my country (i.e. going to kill people), and I can have a drink in Baghdad, but I can't have a drink in America. I can smoke cigarettes, which have been all but proven to give me and the people around me lung cancer, but I can't have a drink.

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