Drinking Age Pros And Cons

There is a large debate throughout the country about what the legal drinking age for each state should be. Currently, every state in the United States has a legal drinking age of 21. This has not always been the case. Between 1970-1976, it was made legal for states to choose their own legal drinking age. 30 states lowered their drinking ages ranging from 18-21 but this law was ultimately overruled and the legal nationwide age became 21 with the enactment of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984(18 interesting pro, 2015). Based off of this alone, it is evident that there are pros and cons as to if the age should be younger or kept at 21. There are many people throughout the country that feel like the age of 21 is too high to be the

In the study “Minimum-Age Drinking Laws and Youth Suicide, 1970-1990”, the objective was to determine whether there was an association between the legal drinking age and suicide rates among youths aged 18 to 20 years of age. To answer this question, the study used a cross-sectional time-series on youth suicide and the minimum drinking age. 48 states were reviewed. Poisson regression was the method used to estimate the association between the suicide rates and drinking age. It is important to note that the states were looked at during the times of 1970-1990 because states were able to choose their legal drinking age as long as it was at least 18 years old. They looked at the youth suicide rates of states with a MLDA of 18-20 and compared it to the youth suicide rates in states with a MLDA of 21 years old. After looking at the results of the time series of the different states, the results showed a large association between the legal drinking age and youth suicide. Between 1970 and 1990, states with a legal drinking age of 18-20 experienced an 8% higher rate of youth suicide than the states with a legal drinking age of 21. Based off of these results, it was concluded that lowering the minimum drinking age would increase the youth suicide rate, with their estimate of 125 more per year. (Birkmayer, 1999). With this study, another con to lowering the drinking age is now

In the article “Alcohol and the Adolescent Brain-Human Studies”, it was argued that heavy drinking has been proven to affect the neuropsychological performance of young people and has impaired the growth of certain areas in the brain. It has also been shown that adolescents who drink alcohol are at a higher risk for brain malfunctioning and blood flow in the brain to be hindered. In the article, Tapert argues 2 main points. The first being that the brain continues to develop until early adulthood and even physically healthy youth can be effected long term if heavy amounts of alcohol are consumed. Animal tests were done where young animals were exposed to alcohol and this interfered with the animal’s normal brain functioning later on in life. This is consistent with the thought that it will interfere with human’s normal brain functioning in the long run. Going off of this thought, her second point is brought up as young adulthood is a critical period of decisions regarding education, occupation, etc. and an impairment to cognitive functioning could largely effect a future decision. (Tapert,