Under-age drinking has been a hot topic for decades in this country, but many minors find the threat of arrest unappealing.

Fifteen years ago, legislators changed the national drinking age to 21, due largely to increased car wrecks as a result of people driving under the influence of alcohol.

College students are the main group rebelling against the law and obtaining fake identifications with the intent of buying alcohol.

If a student is charged with owning false identification, the resulting sentence can range from jail time, monetary fines and permanent criminal records.

Still, students across the country purchase and make the IDs, finding the gratification of the social implications to hold more weight than the possible consequences they could face.

“Everyone goes out to bars,” sophomore Marie Tyler said. “You can’t go if you don’t have an ID, and you get left behind. That isn’t a fun feeling.”

The pressure to be social and to consume alcohol is a problem that has been brought to the attention of college administrators for years.

Those who don’t have a fake ID find their social lives greatly diminished.

“I don’t have an ID and am not 21 yet,” senior Jackie Arroyo said. “I have been left behind or not invited out because I didn’t have a fake ID.”

Fake IDs can be used to get into clubs and bars for the social benefits, in addition to buying alcohol. Marie believes that alcohol is overrated.

“I have an ID only because I want to go out with friends, but I think that it’s the drinking age that causes people to drink. People wouldn’t have to treat drinking as a secret thing, it wouldn’t be as big a deal if people of any age could drink”.

A common way of getting around buying a fake ID is to find friends who are of age or have IDs and can purchase the alcohol for them.

“I would go over to friends’ houses, but that got old real fast because eventually everyone would want to go out to bars and I would have to go home,” said Arroyo.

Marie felt that everyone she knew had a fake ID, that it wasn’t necessarily a rebellion against the law, but more of an act to be social with a lot of people.

“I only use my ID maybe twice a week, and even then I don’t drink excessively. I only use it to be social and I’ve never run into any trouble with owning an ID”.

Arroyo also saw benefits of owning an ID.

“You are able to meet more people and have more freedom than if you didn’t have one”.

Many adults may feel like students are being irresponsible and are not ready for the responsibility to handle alcohol until they are 21, but some disagree.

“Why is it that suddenly on your 21st birthday, you are magically able to handle drinking,” asked Marie. “It isn’t like most students haven’t had vast experience with being around alcohol their entire lives. Keeping it from them is only going to make them want to drink more than they would have before”.

The United States is one of the few countries in the world where the age requirement for drinking is 21. In Spain, for example, the legal age is 16. However, the law is not strictly enforced.

A prevalent opinion in the rest of the world is that Americans are backwards in their thinking.

Spaniard Felix Arias expressed his opinion that it is crazy that you would let a person drive before he can drink. He wonders why Americans do not prefer to have a person stumbling home rather than driving home.

Apparently Americans teenagers agree because they continue to make and obtain fake IDs. The most common way of obtaining one is to find a template that will facilitate a valid-looking identification.

However, the Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on internet companies that sell these templates.

An Internet business that bragged about the “high quality” of the templates it sold to help produce false identity documents has been ordered to halt the sales by a U. S. District Court at the request of the Federal Trade Commission.

“The templates and software sold on this site are there to help people break the law,” said Jodie Bernstein, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

One internet company has felt the pressure of the FTC, and now requires people who log onto their site to agree to conditions such as one that requires people to ‘never attempt to make anything that I find info about here.” In addition to attesting to never having been a police officer, www.idtemplates.com issues the following statement.

“Please use good judgment when reading this stuff! It is here for the knowledge, not for the use. So don’t be a moron and end up in jail. Just read the files and books for what they are, information. So if you do decide to do this stuff and end up dead, maimed, jailed, or inconvenienced in any way, WE TOLD YA SO!!”

Although a new federal law aimed at internet fake ID sites has cut the number from 10,000 to 2,000 in this year alone, the industry continues to flourish.

“The growth in ID forgeries has indeed been explosive,” says Dana Turner, a security expert in Dallas. “The FBI doesn’t have the means to even put a dent in it.”