Should The Drinking Age Be Raised In The Uk Essay

The UK is known to have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, which can be extremely common in younger people. The debate for raising the legal drinking age to 21 is been a debate going on for years but this has not happened. I think that this should be put in place as Britain needs to control its binge drinking and this is the only possible solution for this. Firstly, raising the drinking age to 21 will undoubtedly save lives. In the UK A&E visitors with alcohol admissions has doubled now at 148,477 a year. Consequently, this has cost the NHS £267 million per year. This is a significant sum of money just spent on alcohol related illnesses. These figures are seriously worrying and something must be done to reduce these rates and a huge number of people are losing their lives due to alcohol related illnesses, this is more prevalent in men with 764 men dying due to alcohol related illnesses. Raising the drinking age would not only reduce the number of alcohol admissions it would also help reduce early incidents of death.

Opponents may argue that raising the drinking age won’t work. In the past, there has been campaigns attempting to cut sales and prevent underage drinking and restrictions on TV when advertising alcohol but none of this has seemed to work or have a positive outcome. The government have come out and said that there are tough measures in place and they are certain no measure is possible that would stop youthful drinking entirely as the current regulations in place are failing to tackle the growing trend of underage drinkers. However, for example America have a legal drinking age of 21 and this has worked effectively. This shows that raising the legal drinking age will help discourage underage