Arguments Against Lowering The Drinking Age

Also, lowering the drinking age will cause more car accidents and other types of accidents with younger teenagers. Teenagers will get into cars with their friends to go places, and this can end up badly if the driver has been drinking. Some teenagers can not drive so if they get into cars with their 18-year-old friends who can drink, car accidents are bound to happen. Not many 15-16-year-olds are friends with 21+-year-olds, so this is not as big of a problem currently. Drinking and hanging out with friends who are only a couple years older causes even younger teenagers to drink, which is why the drinking age should not be

Robert Voas states teen pregnancy, sexual assaults, and crime rates have increased due to underage drinking. Alcohol consumption at a college age leads to 600,000 physical assaults and 70,000 sexual assaults yearly according to a study (464). Joyce Alcantara claims if the age were lowered back to eighteen then it would put younger teens at risk (468). People tend to have friends around their same age. So, if eighteen year olds were allowed to drink then their friends which are roughly around the age of sixteen or seventeen would likely have an alcoholic drink in their hand as well.

People have said that if the drinking age was lowered it was lower the risk of everything else that is happening with alcohol problems. For example, more than one hundred and thirty people have signed a petition initiated in the 2008 in support of the idea. Since the mid 1930’s, the legal drinking age in the United States has been set at twenty-one. At some point there was no uniform drinking age, with some states choosing eighteen, nineteen and even twenty as the legal age for drinking. Back then, it was safe to drink because everyone knew everyone.

However, “90% of drunk driving deaths in the United States were found in the over 21 age group” (Gruenewald). For this reason, drunk driving is not directly correlated with the drinking age. In addition, the percent of drunk driving deaths in the United States has reduced at a slower rate than European countries where they have their legal drinking age at eighteen. This suggest that if lowering the drinking age was a success in Europe, it may also be effective here in the United States to diminish the amount of drunk driving deaths. This is because people that become injured due to alcohol or alcohol poisoning are afraid to report their injuries to the hospital or authorities out of fear of illegal consequences for underage drinking.

Though people believe it would be good to lower the drinking age, we should look at the death or injury rates where alcohol is the cause, compared to the rates of accidents from people who hadn’t been intoxicated. There has been much data collected over the years showing just how much healthier and safer not only the US is, but many other countries have become since raising the legal drinking age to twenty-one. If nothing else, look at the one third of every twenty-five, thousand people that die every year due to alcohol related crashes where the victim wasn’t even intoxicated. Not only does alcohol have life changing effects on the people drinking it, but also everyone around

Across the country, college students participate in an illegal activity known as underage drinking. The drinking age in America is an ongoing debate of whether it should be kept at 21, or reduced to 18. While some believe lowering the drinking age would make drinking for young kids safer, others presume the opposite. According to Alexis Aguirre, a journalist at the Texas State University Star, “The legal drinking age should be lowered to 18. Once 18, a person is legally considered an adult and should be able to drink.”

Do you know drinking is fatal to only to 19 or a younger age? Should the drinking age be lowered from 19 to a younger age? CONS. We should not drink when you are under the drinking age law. Drinking can be all over the world to many countries.

The drinking age should be lowered, because brains are not fully developed yet, colleges should be able to regulate drinking, and this can solve problems with kids underage drinking. Despite the controversy, the drinking age should decrease for many logical reasons. The drinking age has been a debate between the ages 18 to the age of 21 for a while now. Over the years, studies have showed favors toward the age of 21.

When the Minimum Legal Drinking Age changed to 21 years old in 1976, there was a decrease in fatal car accidents which saved approximately 21,887 lives (Alcohol Policy MD). Many lives were saved because there were less young drinkers and less people driving under the influence of alcohol. If it were possible to save lives, why wouldn’t you want to do that? An argument is made that if teenagers are allowed the responsibility to drive when they are 16 years old why can’t they drink at an earlier age? This is simply because Alcohol can put people in danger.

It increases risks for “addiction”, “memory loss”, “suicide” and “depression”. This is the number 1 Con on procon.org. Lowering the drinking age will increase traffic fatalities more than they already are. In the New York Times Tara Watson say traffic fatalities will become more frequent. So many 22 year olds die due to over alcoholic consumption, so lowering the MLDA would be irresponsible to increase the chance of more fatalities.

The pure thought to get caught by the police or your parents is frightening to teens or underage drinkers and that 's why people use binge drinking. Binge drinking is defined as excessive amounts of alcohol consumed in a short period of time. Teens do this because when your illegally drinking you don 't particularly have a lot of time to drink so you just do it as fast as you can to use the time you have with your friends to get wasted but to be home before curfew. Many accidents and deaths have happened because of binge drinking, and we could lower the chances of binge drinking by lowering the legal drinking age to 18. The effects alcohol takes on the brain is the only “downside” to lowering the drinking age, but if used responsibly it 's not that big of a problem.

I would thinking that the problem wouldn’t be really if you should drink at 18 because you could be immature. Any person can be immature at any age. So therefore I am in favor by lowering the drinking age to 18. I am in favor of lowering the drinking age to 18 because many people say that at the age of 18 you are immature. Immaturity can be at any age, I would say that it all depends in the way children are raised at home and grow up to be responsible to know what life has to bring.

Frat parties, for example, serve booze, often, if not always, without the supervision of a responsible adult (aka an adult over the age of 21). Lowering the drinking age to 18 can be beneficial in that responsible drinking can be taught before the student turns 21. My favorite analogy, by Huffington Post writer, Elizabeth Glass Geltman, says, “We don’t have students teach each other how to drive, why is alcohol different?” In her article on Huffington Post, she talks about her college experience in the 70s and early 80s, where the legal drinking age in the US was 18. She talks about how drinking was legal for most students in her senior year of high school and in college, and that beer was commonly served at dances, proms, graduation events, etc.

Why drinking age should be lowered? If one is considered an adult at age eighteen in most of the country, are they not allowed to purchase and legally consume alcohol? The minimum legal drinking age needs to be lowered, and not just for that reason. The amount of teenagers with drinking problems and alcoholism is far greater than in Europe, where drinking ages are far lower. Also, studies show that the current minimum age drinking laws have been ineffective to a high degree.

One con of lowering the drinking age is that it may interfere with the development of an young individual’s brain. Especially the frontal lobes, emotional regulation, planning, and also organization. When a young adult consumes alcohol it increases the potential of having chronic issues, like greater vulnerability to addiction. It also plays a role in depression, violence, and reduced decision making ability (Ives2008).