If we’re all being honest, most of us have engaged in underage drinking. To my memory, my first drink was when I was 12 on New Year’s Eve; I had a sip of champagne and immediately went out the front door to spit it out. When I was 17, on the night of my brother’s high school graduation party, I sat upstairs in my room, slowly drinking a wine cooler while reading a book about one girl’s story of excessive drinking.

I’m of age, yet I feel the current legal drinking age should be lowered. Not so much because I want to legally liberate the alcohol to all those newly minted adults, but because rationally, it seems ridiculous not to.

Eight is the age of reason, when you know right from wrong in a court of law. At 16 you can legally drive a car and depending on the state, sexual consent is legal between ages 16-18. By 18 you’re an adult and can vote, smoke cigarettes, get married, serve on juries, sign contracts, be prosecuted as an adult, and die for your country in war– all in America. Around the world, the average legal drinking age is 18, with some countries having lower ages and some higher – up to 21.

Why 21, you may ask? Blame England. Dating back centuries in English common law, the concept was that a person becomes a full adult when they reach the age of 21. This was when a person could vote and even become a knight, and as it seemed to make sense, should also be able to drink. By extension, 21 became the age of adulthood in America, as well.

The question then becomes one concerned with logic and equality among legal ages.

Here’s why the drinking age is 21 in the United States: after prohibition ended in 1933, individual states were left to decide the legal drinking age, which was generally put at 21, as that was the decided age of the majority at the time.

During WWII, when men were asked (and forced) to fight and possibly die for their country, President Franklin Roosevelt approved the lowering of the military draft minimum age from 21 to 18, so it was also decided that the voting age should be lowered from 21 to 18 because it wasn’t fair or reasonable to make these men go to war but not give them a voice in how their country operates. For the same reason, legislators lowered the drinking age to 18.

In 1984, under the Reagan administration, the drinking age was raised; but it was done so by passive-aggressive force. States were told that, in an effort to reduce drunk driving, they had to raise their drinking age lest they lose 10 percent of their federal highway funding. They were very literally threatened economically and politically into change.

Incidences of drunk driving deaths did indeed decrease after the legal age was raised, but there are many factors to take into account for the reasons behind these decreases, a few of which are increased use of seat belts, more widespread usage of airbags and other better safety regulations.

Additionally, non-alcohol related driving deaths saw a decrease during this same time period. These overall reductions in the statistics therefore do not correlate adequately to a change in the drinking age.

Since raising the drinking age from 18 to 21, injury and death from alcohol overdose has become a bigger problem than before for parents, teachers, and high school and college administrators. Young people who imbibe tend to drink more heavily, engaging in binge drinking far more often, causing a nation-wide public health problem. This is alarming considering the flawed logic behind the age increase was technically supposed to do the opposite.

In the end, it seems illogical not to lower the legal age, as all logic concerning the various legal ages seems counterintuitive and has, through emerging science – NPR and the BBC have both published studies citing 25 as the scientific age of adulthood – been proven insufficient.