Pros And Cons Of Lowering The Drinking Age

The controversy about the drinking age has been a well argued topic for many years. This argument first started in 1971 when the drinking age was lowered to eighteen in the United States. When death tolls began to rise significantly, many states reverted back to the old drinking age. Shortly after, in 1984, national law made the legal age for alcohol consumption twenty-one again (“Minimum Drinking”). Many people agreed with the reversion of the drinking age, yet there were some who did not. In fact, a survey reported that twenty-two percent of respondents supported lowering the drinking age to eighteen (“By the Numbers”). Lowering the drinking age to eighteen is not a wise decision, for it would severely impact the lives of many nationwide

The current law that says the legal drinking age is twenty-one has done a good job in decreasing death rates. There was a sixty-one percent decrease in alcohol related crashes from 1982 to 1988. Opposers to the drinking law say that by increasing the age to twenty-one only pushed the death rate from eighteen to twenty-year-olds to twenty-one to twenty-four-year-olds (“By the Numbers”). Although they say this, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that more than 23,000 deaths have been prevented because of the drinking law. Scott Falb, a safety specialist with the Iowa Department of Transportation once said, “ One of the biggest advantages of the twenty-one-year-old drinking age is that it’s significantly harder for kids [under 21] to find alcohol and then to drive” (“Minimum Drinking”). Other countries have tried the lower drinking age such as New Zealand, but whenever the age was lowered to eighteen, there was a spike in traffic crashes among fifteen to nineteen year olds (DeJong 3). The lowering of the drinking age would only negatively imapct this nation further, and it would also cause a ‘trickle down’ effect