Why we should keep the drinking age at 21
Why We Should Keep the Drinking Age at Twenty-one Imagine winning the State Basketball Championship. You get back to your house with a few friends and feel a party is in order, so you start drinking a few beers after your parents go to bed. Someone suggests that you drive somewhere to get rid of the empty cans. "Yes, that's not a bad idea", so you all pile into the car and take off. A few hours later, your parents receive a telephone call to come down to the station. There has been a terrible accident, and they must identify the body. This is the one phone call all parents dread. This true story is detailed in the Germantown, Tennessee high school newspaper. Stories like this compel me to believe that the legal drinking age should be kept at twenty-one. Almost every state set a legal drinking age of twenty-one, the legal voting age at the time, after prohibition was repealed. Between 1970 and 1975, twenty-nine states lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, twenty-nine states also lowered their drinking age to eighteen or nineteen. During the late seventies, studies showed that traffic cra
Also drunk driving among youth in Europe is lower, but only because the legal driving age in most European countries is higher. The last point to consider is that when the drinking age was lowered to eighteen or nineteen an increase in traffic accidents occurred. Between one-third and two-thirds of adolescent suicide victims have a measurable blood alcohol level. The rate of alcohol-related diseases such as cirrhosis to the liver is the same, if not higher, as in the United States. New York 1995Toomey, Rosenfield, and Wager. " American Journal of Public Health (1999). Alcohol Health and & Research World, 4-28-00 p213(5)Wagenaar,Alexander, et al. Many would argue that when the drinking age were set at twenty-one, there is an unavoidably huge increase in alcohol use when youths, turning twenty-one, "make up for lost time. Once this was announced publicly, many groups created a movement to increase the minimal drinking age, and sixteen states responded. article, page 2)My opinion is further supported by the Correlation between underage drinking and alcohol abuse. On the other hand, those countries have their share of alcohol problems. It stands to reason to conclude that if the drinking age were lowered to eighteen, even younger children would be using alcohol.
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