Lowering The Drinking Age Essay

Shots Fired

The ratification of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in which the sale, manufacture and transportation of intoxicating liquids was made illegal was a period in American history known as Prohibition. Prohibition was not the first and certainly isn’t going to be the last time alcohol consumption and the government collides. Today, many Americans are posing the question- should the minimum legal drinking age be lowered to eighteen or should it stay at the age of twenty-one?

In 1984, the national minimum drinking age in the United States became twenty-one years old. Since then, the trend of binge drinking has come along in American colleges. Henry Wechsler and Toben Nelson, writers of the article Will Increasing Alcohol Availability By Lowering the Minimum Legal Drinking Age Decrease Drinking and Related Consequences Among Youths maintains that, “College students are more likely to engage in heavy drinking than their peers who do not attend college, with 2 in 5 students nationally engaging in binge drinking on at least 1 occasion in the past 2 weeks” (987). Binge drinking is defined as the consumption of five of more drinks in a row

The idea of being rebellious is appealing to most teenagers. They feel a rush of adrenaline knowing that they are doing something against the law. By introducing alcohol earlier to teens I believe they won’t feel the need to drink when they go to college because they have already experienced it. Have you ever heard of the saying “you always want what you can’t have”? This is what is happening with underage drinking. Drinking becomes a taboo thing teenagers just do to rebel against their parents and the authorities. Thus, instead of experimenting with alcohol in an unsafe environment, they would be able to experiment with alcohol under the supervision of their own home, in restaurants and