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Essay On Lowering The Drinking Age

1584 Words7 Pages

Imagine it’s your eighteenth birthday! Your friends and you are hanging out. You are one of the younger friends. Everyone around you is having a great time eating cake and some are even drinking, but you can’t drink. Even though it’s your eighteenth birthday and you are now legally responsible for all your actions from here on out, you can’t drink until you’re twenty-one. You go from having an amazing time to wishing you were allowed to drink. You make up your mind and grab a drink. After all, you will only drink one and who’s going to snitch on you. You drink and have a good time with your friends. The night ends and nothing goes wrong, but you feel guilty for breaking the law. This scenario could have turned out differently, the birthday …show more content…

Although, according to research mentioned in “Pro/Con: Should the Legal Drinking Age be Lowered to 18?” when the drinking age was raised to twenty-one years of age the teen alcohol-related deaths decreased (a). This caused the lower twenty’s age group’s alcohol-related fatalities to increase(a). In other words, this study demonstrates that the high legal drinking age doesn’t save as many lives as Americans are led to believe. It shows that Americans don’t know how to drink responsibly. If the drinking age was lower, Americans could drink in moderation with guidance from trusted adults. This matters because the Amethyst Initiative’s 130 college presidents say that since drinking underage is illegal, teens drink in private places with no supervision or guidance in drinking safely (b). This causes about forty percent of teens and students to develop bad drinking habits by the time they get to college according to Bret Sokolow, president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management (f). The legal drinking age should be lowered to eighteen because it is the lowest legal adult age. Young adults can take this opportunity to learn how to live and drink

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