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Legal Drinking Age To 18 Essay

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Introduction This issue analysis will address whether the legal age of alcohol consumption should be raised to 21 years old. Arguments for this include, drink driving accidents and how alcohol ruins your brain from developing. Arguments against this include 18 year old responsibilities and prohibiting drinking. For- A third of Australia's car accidents caused by drink drivers. 33% of drink drivers who are involved in accidents are are aged from 17 to 24 years old. Drivers aged 16 to 20 are 17 times more likely to cause a car crash when they have a blood concentration of 0.08%. This can show that less experienced drivers have higher rates of causing a crash especially when intoxicated with alcohol. Not only are you risking your own life, you are risking many other lives around you when drink driving. As you would know the legal age for alcohol consumption is 18 years old. There many reasons for people to disagree with the age being so slow but the main problem is that the brain is still developing and it can create irreversible effects. The brain is affected in two major parts. The two parts are the hippocampus and the prefrontal lobe. These two parts of your brain are responsible for memory, language, impulse control, learning and judgement. This means that when you are consuming alcohol when …show more content…

The thing is that only a small amount of irresponsible drinkers at the age of 18 is very low, as many 18 year olds are responsible enough for how much they drink. There is no point of taking away the privilege of drinking at the age of 18 as only a small portion of 18 year olds heavily drink and or irresponsibly drink. Taking away this privilege of being able to drink at the age of 18 shows that we doubt their

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The author of this essay, Michael Clay Smith, believes that the age limit for drinking should be lowered back to 18, similar to before creation of the new drinking age limit in the 1980’s. Michael feels like this is a “Second Prohibition” (1). I believe that the drinking age should be lower, and Smith does a good job at giving reasons why. For the better of society, Smith believes the legal drinking age should lowered, and the age limit is unfair to teenagers who are already adults, causes dangerous drinking, and ruins promising teenager lives. Smith has many ideas to support why the legal drinking limit should be dropped to 18.

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The drinking age should not be changed to 18 due to a lack of maturity, the statistics and consequences of underage drinking while driving, and the effect alcohol has on the adolescent body. Being 18 means that you are only about halfway through being fully developed.(2) Tony Cox, host from NPR News, says, “That critical parts of the brain involved in decision-making are not fully developed until years later at age 25 or so. ”(3) Based on this information, teenagers decision making skills would lean toward seeing the positive side of drinking instead of the negative consequences. The drinking age should be 25, because at this age, people won’t fall under influence from their peers like it occurs with teens.(2)

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And this is where it leads back to the part about how the human brain is still growing, and the college students shouldn't be drinking while they're still attending school. Most of the learning humans do is, while the brain is still growing, but if alcohol is slowing that down then people don't learn as

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I disagree with this idea because 18 years old is too young and it will result in an increased high school dropout rate. Most high school seniors turn 18 before they graduate and if the drinking age was lowered, it would give seniors an easy opportunity to provide alcohol for their younger peers. For example, Andrew Plunk, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Eastern Virginia Medical School states, "The minimum legal drinking age changes how easy it is for a young person to get alcohol. In places where it was lowered to 18, it's likely that more high school students were able to get alcohol from their friends." A recent study shows that lowering the drinking age to 18 will actually increase high school dropout rates.

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This review highlights neurobiological evidence indicating the vulnerabilities of the emerging adult brain to the effects of alcohol (p. 189). If congress decides to change the legal drinking down 18, they really to think long and hard about science. Science has proved the brain needs a healthy environment to mature and develop

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This is significant to look at when understanding why the use of alcohol should not be in youth communities. This lack of development can affect; your ability to pay attention, complex planning, decision making, impulse control, logical thinking, organized thinking, personality development, risk management, and short and long-term memory (2 Mental Health Daily). As you can see that list is exceedingly long. The number of day-to-day abilities that you need in your brain in order to function can be affected. This alone shows how important taking precautions about drinking should be and also why the age restriction if anything, shouldn't be lowered but

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