Raising The Drinking Age Research Paper

1031 Words5 Pages

Brubacher, Jeffrey Reynold, Herbert Chan, Ming Fang, Doug Brown, and Roy Purssell. "Police Documentation of Alcohol Involvement in Hospitalized Injured Drivers." Traffic Injury Prevention 14.5 (2013): 453-60. Web. 25 Oct. 2015. This documentation is beneficial to our source because it shows the severity of the consequences of drinking irresponsibly. It provides numerous police data that gives information on aspects affiliated with police indication of involvement with alcohol of injured drivers. With this information, we can depict the seriousness of drinking. The source also provides numerous statistics that will definitely get people’s attention, such as, “Police recognize and document alcohol involvement in 72 percent of injured drivers …show more content…

It is filled with numerous similar opinions and historical reasoning of why the drinking age should be returned to the age of 18. Gabrielle Glaser, who is the author of Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink – And How They Can Regain Control, states that teaching individuals how to drink responsibly before they turn 21 would help public health drastically. By doing this, it would hopefully prevent dangerous binge drinking done by high school and college students. Glaser makes a very good point in her article when saying “Raising the drinking age to 21 hasn’t reduced drinking – it’s merely driven it underground, to the riskiest of settings.” This statement is very true; college and high school students are secretly drinking every weekend at sketchy house parties or somewhere in the country. The article compares America’s drinking problem to the time of the prohibition, where drinking as much as possible before getting caught by the feds was the goal. Glaser goes on by suggesting that why can’t 18-year-olds “regulate their own appetites” but can vote, marry, and fight for our country? Teenagers need to learn how to drink just like how they learn how to drive a …show more content…

It also provides numerous facts and opinions that agree with our argument of lowering the drinking age to 18. Such comments like “Allowing 18- to 20-year-olds to drink alcohol in regulated environments with supervision would decrease unsafe drinking activity”, really follows the point we are trying to make. This source also shares a comparison between other countries that have a lower drinking age of 18. For example, the source states, “there are fewer drunk driving traffic accidents and fatalities in many countries with MLDA of 18.” This site also provides multiple graphs and pie charts showing the public support of this opinion, the levels of alcohol usage between ages of 12 to 20, and also a proportion of 83 countries’ minimum legal drinking age ranging from 14 to