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Keeping The Drinking Age Persuasive Essay

559 Words3 Pages

Today, the legal drinking age is a low 18 years of age. Tomorrow it will be the same, and tomorrow 13 more lives will be lost unless we take action. A whopping 5,000 young innocent lives under the age of 21 are lost each year and 599,000 lives are injured, and the number is increasing. So, each day that we sit by doing nothing, more lives are lost and you never know, you or your friends could be the next victim to alcohol. David J. Hanson, who for 40 years has studied alcohol states, “when you give them that responsibility of drinking, they will drink to an excess.” And there is only one solution to bring the number of live lost to a low, and that solution is to change the legal drinking age to 21!

Among the 5000 young teens that die each year, 1900 of those deaths are due to car accidents, 300 due to suicide, 1600 from homicides and hundreds more from other alcohol related incidents like drowning, …show more content…

The law stated that the US states had to obey this law, if not, they would lose 10 percent of their federal highway funding.
Since 1982, there has been a 62% decrease in alcohol fatalities among young teens and in 2007, there were 8,000 less alcohol related fatalities than 1982. These studies are significant and prove that raising the drinking age has actually improved the health and well-being of young teens!

The main reason the drinking age should be changed is because of the various affects it can have on precious lives. Drinking before the age of 21 has various effects such as taking part in violent behaviours, attempting suicide, engage in sex that is unprotected and may not know what they are getting into, and also give you alcohol problems in your later life. An Australian study also found physical changes in the brain, which effected your skill in problem solving and cognitive functioning which are vital for your life. More and more young lives are becoming victims to alcohol and majorly influencing young

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However, “90% of drunk driving deaths in the United States were found in the over 21 age group” (Gruenewald). For this reason, drunk driving is not directly correlated with the drinking age. In addition, the percent of drunk driving deaths in the United States has reduced at a slower rate than European countries where they have their legal drinking age at eighteen. This suggest that if lowering the drinking age was a success in Europe, it may also be effective here in the United States to diminish the amount of drunk driving deaths. This is because people that become injured due to alcohol or alcohol poisoning are afraid to report their injuries to the hospital or authorities out of fear of illegal consequences for underage drinking.

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A young man, turning 18 tomorrow, ponders all of the benefits he is going to obtain in a day by gaining a year in age. What he does not realize however, is he will not have complete freedom because he is still considered too young. As 18 is the legal age of becoming an adult within the United States, he is allowed to work full time, purchase tobacco products as well as engage in sexual conduct with anyone else above the age of 18, yet he is still denied the right to enter bars or possess any alcoholic beverage in his system. Ever since 1984, the legal age in which one may consume an alcoholic beverage has been 21 despite the numerous bills and legislations that have been attempted to be enacted. The debate for a lower drinking age however, spans all the way back to the prohibition era in which alcohol was banned entirely.

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While the legal drinking age is 21, that does not stop underage drinking in the United States. On July 17, 1984, President Reagan signed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. This was a law that required states to raise the drinking age to 21 or face a 10 percent cut to their federal highway funding. All of the states fulfilled the requirement and accepted the higher drinking age(Tietjen). One of the biggest that contributes to underage drinking is mainly because it is “off limits.”

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Yes, it is true that driving after consuming alcohol unnecessarily kills thousands of people a year; but it’s our own fault for driving intoxicated (Main). Many people discourage the change of the drinking age because not only are another 5,000 people killed a year thanks to alcohol, it is also a major factor in violence, rapes, and assaults (Main). However, consider this, if violence such as this comes from drunken anger, wouldn’t the best answer be to discourage drinking to the point of intoxication rather than postpone education and awareness? In a survey, over three quarters of adults questioned believe that lowering the drinking age would be harmful to youth by making alcohol more accessible at a younger age (Main). On the contrary, it would only promote early exposure and experience.

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Alcohol abuse and alcoholism seems like an issue that keeps getting increasingly worse each year in the United States. According to USA Today and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both say that approximately 6 people die from alcohol poisoning, caused from binge drinking, each day, which amounts to roughly 2,200 people each year. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism says that “In 2013 an estimated 697,000 adolescents ages 12–17 (2.8 percent of this age group) had an [alcohol use disorder]” (“Alcohol Facts”). Something has to stop and something has to change from preventing this more because 6 people dying each day from binge drinking alone is a lot, not to mention that 12-17 year olds are having alcohol problems at such a young age. Lowering the drinking age will enforce this act even more, promoting more drinking in fact.

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With all this evidence in mind, we can conclude the danger of underage drinking. Some possible solutions are having more parents’ involvement in their children's lives to influence their decision on alcohol, increase alcohol prices, give huge fines to people allowing underage drinking, or creating anti-alcohol advertising to help children to realize that drinking is not cool at all. Nevertheless, the best solution is parent involvement, because the other solutions will take awhile to accomplish, but parents can talk to their children in any moment about the danger of under age drinking. These parents “are more likely going to influence their children's decisions well into adolescence and beyond”, about whether and how to drink, “decisions that can have lifelong consequences”

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In the article The Problem of Underage Drinking and What Parents Can Do Heidi Stevens says that most of the deaths are because of consumption of alcohol “excessive drinking is responsible for more than 4,300 deaths among underage youth each year” (Stevens 4). Drinking has lead to many problems,

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