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     Almost every state set a legal drinking age of twenty-one, the legal voting age at the time, after prohibition was repealed.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 crashes had drastically increased after lowering the drinking age. Once this was announced publicly, many groups created a movement to increase the minimal drinking age, and sixteen states responded. The Uniform Drinking Act was passed in 1984. This strongly encouraged the remaining thirteen states to raise their drinking age. If the states would not agree to do so by 1987, the government said that it would cut highway funding (Encyclopedia of Alcohol and Drugs).
             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." However, a study done by Alexander Wagenaar and PM O'Malley found that when the minimum drinking age was twenty-one, there was a lower
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