Drinking Age Moved to 21

The drinking age should be lowered to 18. How can the U.S allow 18 year olds to carry rifle or enlist in the military and not allow them to not buy a bottle of beer? Also having the drinking age up at 21 can promote dangerous illegal drinking at high school parties. When you are 18 you are legally an adult and should be able to expect to be able to do grown up things like drink, you can smoke cigarettes at 18 but not drink a beer. 18 year olds can just go to another country that allows drinking, because most other countries allow it at 18 years old or some countries even younger.

Once people turn 18 it is a change in most aspects of life. They are permitted to vote for the future of the country. They are old enough to go into marriage which can change there life forever. They are allowed to go into the military when they are 18 and risk their lives in a war zone for our country, they can also smoke cigarettes which can have long term health effects on the body. We say that they are mature enough to do all of those things, yet they cannot sit down and drink a beer? It is simply illogical that they can't drink alcohol, either move the age down to 18 or bring everything else up to 21.

When you make the age of drinking 21, there are plenty of kids that will drink underage. When there are high school parties, there will obviously be beer around. The truth is that America's teenagers do not learn to drink responsibly because it is something they have to do in secret. They are not going to go to an adult for help or to help stop them from drinking too much, as they know it is illegal so they rely on their friends or whoever else is at a party. When kids get in drunk driving accidents, it is mostly because they don't want their parents or whoever to get mad at them. Instead of simply calling their mother or father, they go home with a drunk driver and possibly get into a lethal accident, because they do not want to be looked down on or get punished.

The majority of countries around the globe allow the age to consume alcohol to be much lower than the U.S. The U.S is known as the land of the free, but we are one of the most restrictive countries in the world on alcohol. Any suggestions that the right for Americans to carry a gun might be restricted is brutally shot down, but in the case of alcohol, we are one of the countries with the strictest laws.The neighboring countries to the U.S both have drinking ages of 18/19. People could simply drive over to another country or move to another country and drink all the alcohol they want. Plus the death count per hundred thousand in Canada is 1.7 which is lower than the U.S and Canada's drinking age is 19 which means that having a higher drinking age does not make death rates go down.

Although my stance is clearly to move the drinking age down, there are definitely some possible negative effects. One negative effect is that alcohol consumption can possibly interfere with development of the young adult brain's frontal lobes, which is essential for functions such as emotional regulation, planning, and organization. Another negative effect would be that in the 30 years since a minimum age for drinking of 21 was introduced, drunk driving fatalities decreased by a third. Also traffic accidents went down as well.

Again I believe that that drinking age should be lowered to 18. We allow 18 year olds to into military combat, smoke cigarettes but not to drink. Other countries allow people of 18 to drink and some of those countries had less alcohol related deaths per hundred thousand than the U.S showing that making the drinking age higher does not make deaths decrease. Also when you make it illegal to drink kids in their teenage years will want to drink still, and because it is illegal they might decide to get a ride home from a friend instead of a sober parent because they do not want to be punished.

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