The Truth About the Minimum Legal Drinking Age Alcohol is consumed everywhere in the world. It is undoubtedly a huge part of American and global culture. People all over the world use alcohol for a number of different reasons – celebration, peer pressure, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and so on. However, in the United States, alcohol consumption and the law have had conflicts quite a few times in the past. An ongoing controversy in the United States is the topic of the minimum legal drinking age being lowered to 18 or staying at 21. In fact, only four other countries in the world have a legalized drinking age over 18; the minimum legal drinking age of 21 in the United States is one of the highest in the world. We ended up with a national minimum legal drinking age of 21 because of …show more content…
President Reagan established the Presidential Commission Against Drunk Driving (PCDD), which established 39 recommendations to curb what was perceived to be a drunk driving epidemic. With the goal of reducing alcohol-related traffic accidents, all states were told to set the minimum drinking age to 21. If the states did not enact to the minimum drinking age of 21, they would lose up to 10% of their federal highway funding. Since then, 21 is the age to buy and drink alcohol in the United States. Thus, underage drinking has always been a major issue here, yet why is it still not under control? Teenagers have been purchasing alcohol with fake ID cards, getting into bars and clubs, and drinking liquor illegally for years. Lowering the minimum legal drinking age to 18 would be a helpful and effective step in stopping binge drinking and encouraging the enjoyable act of consuming alcohol, reducing traffic accidents, and allowing those in the 18-to-20 year old age