There's a fascinating debate going on around the country over whether or not the legal drinking age should be reduced from 21 to 18. A cadre of college and university presidents have signed a manifesto saying it should be. They cite underage drinking, beer pong, keg parties, and the like as reasons to reduce the legal drinking age.

Uncharacteristically, I side with the college and university presidents on this one. It has been my experience that the age of the drinker has very little to do with the maturity of the drinker. I've seen 18-year-old "kids" drink responsibly at the same time I've seen 40 year old "adults" drink irresponsibly. Age is an artificial number we came up with decades ago to determine the age of majority. While it certainly works some of the time, it by no means works all of the time.

This is the same kind of battle that was waged during the Vietnam war when we were sending thousands of 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds off to fight a war which entailed a significant threat of personal bodily harm or death, and yet these young people not only couldn't drink, they couldn't even vote for the politicians that were sending them to war to begin with.

After the Vietnam war ended, we reduced the voting age from 21 to 18 and that was the right thing to do. I believe lowering the legal drinking age from 21 to 18 is also the right thing to do. The thing we often forget is that "legal" age only means the age someone can purchase or consume an alcoholic beverage without breaking the law. It certainly doesn't mean that young people under the age of 21 don't drink. It just means that we criminalize them when they do.

Many, if not most, young people, see drinking as a "right of passage" into adulthood and they always have. Colleges and universities have been the primary place, historically, where this drinking has first taken place. Theoretically speaking, the only college students who are old enough to drink are non-traditional students and traditional students who are seniors in college. If you begin your college career as a freshman at 18, you don't reach 21 until you're a senior. And yet everyone who has ever attended college knows that drinking begins, for a lot of young people, as soon as they get there.

I pledged a fraternity my freshman year at the University of Arkansas when I was still 17 years old and, if you've had an experience with fraternity and sorority life, much of it revolves around drinking. Whether it should or not is a moral and philosophical question left to those who want to debate those things but the bottom line is that it does. I've read numerous columns and articles recently about the scourge of "binge drinking" that is currently taking place on college campuses. I'm here to tell you that "binge drinking‚" regardless of how it is defined, has been going on for as long as we've had colleges and for as long as we've had alcoholic beverages. This column is not about whether or not this should happen, it's about what DOES happen and what has happened literally forever.

Police departments spend an inordinate amount of time around the country tracking down, ticketing, and sometimes arresting, underage drinkers. As a former police officer, I have always believed this time could be better spent.

There has NEVER been any governmental objection to young people aged 20, 19, 18 and, in many cases, even younger, being trained as soldiers to go to a foreign land and lay their lives on the line in defense of freedom, democracy, and their country.

To tell these brave and courageous young people that they not only CAN do that but they SHOULD do that but, on the other hand, to also tell them they can't walk into a bar and have a beer seems to me to be the height of hypocrisy.