Underage Drinking In Portugal

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Drinking has been a big problem for society whether it is for older individuals or the high school kids with fake ids. The drinking age was once 18 year of age and has been raised to 21 in the 1980s when teen traffic deaths had a hard spike. The plan was to raise the drinking age so teenagers with driver’s license would learn to drive responsibly before learning to drink responsibly. Although statics has shown a lowering of traffic deaths, it does not solely prove that banning alcohol was the main reason for that decrease. As time went on, seat belts and cars itself has also been improved thus also proving why traffic deaths has decreased. But raising the drinking age did one thing for sure, "it hasn’t reduced drinking -- its merely driven …show more content…
In order to figure out the best way, we should model another country with a serious substance abuse in the past, Portugal. In the article “In Portugal, Drug Use Is Treated As A Medical Issue, Not A Crime” by Lauren Frayer, they found that in the late 1900’s as high as 1% of Portugal’s population had a heroin addiction. In the following years, Portugal took a big risky step, decriminalizing all drugs and then “treated as a health issue, not a crime” (Frayer, 2018). This was risky at first but it later proved to superbly effective. It gave all drug users a chance to get back on their feet and a chance to right their wrong. It punished all those who sold drugs. This can be a very effective model for the US to follow for our underage drinking epidemic. We can treat underage drinking not as a crime by lowering the drinking age back to 18 but as phase that teenagers go through in the height yet extremely stressful of their educational careers. We can give them support and counseling and teach them on how to drink responsibly instead of harassing them or banning alcohol on college campuses. Another way to enforce this is for school administration to plan organized events where students can drink in a safe environment rather than the students throwing an illegal party where the students are at risk of getting arrested. Going back to Patrick and Terry-McElrath’s study, they found that college students who lives with parents’ drink significantly less than those who do not (Patrick & Terry-McElrath, 2016). This may indicate that the stronger the bond between the teenager and the parents may have a psychological effect on underage substance abuse further proving that we should treat underage drinking as a mental health problem rather than a crime that might wreck a young students
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