Pros And Cons Of Lowering The Drinking Age

However these safe drinking environments were not always obsolete among teenagers. Over 30 years ago, the drinking age was 18 years old before President Ronald Reagan signed the Federal Uniform Drinking Age Act of 1984, “which mandated that all states adopt 21 as the legal drinking age over the next five years” (Cary, par. 3). Mary Kate Cary, contributing editor for U.S. News & World Report, takes a stance on the subject of lowering the drinking age in her article “Time to Lower the Drinking Age”. In her article, Cary reminisces about the olden times when “there was no need for “pregaming”- binge drinking in private apartments or dorms before heading out in public. And unlike today, college kids didn’t tend to use fake IDs… I remember university

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, binge drinking is defined as “a pattern of drinking that brings blood alcohol concentration (BAC) levels to 0.08 g/dL. This typically occurs after 4 drinks for women and 5 drinks for men—in about 2 hours.” This method of alcohol consumption can lead to serious health and safety issues, which include car crashes, sexual assaults, injuries, drunk-driving arrests, and over time, liver and brain damage (College Drinking, par. 3-4). Unfortunately, binge drinking is at the heart of many of America’s problems when teenagers and young adults begin to drink impulsively. Nevertheless, now that the definition of a “safe drinking environment” and “binge drinking” has been established, one must understand why our society needs to be knowledgeable of the exigency of the

This issue needs to be addressed immediately before more lives are lost and more mistakes are made; especially since alcohol is the third-leading cause of preventable deaths in the Unites States (Alcohol Facts and Statistics, par. 7). The Center for Disease Control and Prevention, or the CDC, found that since the rise of the drinking age 30 years prior, 12 to 20 year olds used 11% of all alcohol consumed in the United States, and more than 90% of that alcohol is consumed during binge drinking (Cary, par. 6). Furthermore, the significance of a changed education system about the safety of drugs including alcohol is supported by the fact that in 2010, the CDC established that drug overdoses claim more lives than vehicle crashes annually (Cary, par. 6). Moreover, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reported that annually, “1,825 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 die from alcohol-related unintentional injuries” (College Drinking, par. 4). For the same age group, 696,000 are assaulted by another student who has been drinking and 97,000 students report experiencing alcohol-related sexual assault or date rape each year (College Drinking, par. 5-6). Honing in on the escalation of the sexual assault and rape aspect of the situation,