Drinking Age In America

Drinking Age in America

Imagine you are at home waiting for your family to get back from the movie theaters. They are taking a long time and you are trying to figure out what is taking them so long. Then you get hit with a phone call that will change your life forever. You get a phone call from the police that your family has been in a car accident and died. The reason for the accident was a teenager was driving home from a party and had a few drinks and swerved and hit them. This is something that happens in our country way too often already. If the US were to lower the drinking age to eighteen years old, then that driver might actually be under the legal limit. This is a nightmare situation, where if the US lowers the drinking age this will happen more frequently. There has been an issue that spans the entire world and every country handles it differently. The question is, what should the legal drinking age be? In America, one must be twenty-one years old to drink drink alcohol, but some other countries there is no legal drinking age and others have sixteen or eighteen. There is a lot of reasons why America thinks that the legal drinking age should be twenty-one, but one of the biggest reasons is because at sixteen or eighteen years old teens brains are not fully developed and able to make decisions that an older person can make. Teenagers are not responsible enough to be trusted with drinking and making the decision on when to stop drinking and when they have had enough alcohol because physically their brain is not developed enough to make that decision.

Teenagers brains are not as developed as a young adult’s brain and cannot process information and make responsible decisions with alcohol. The rational part of a human’s brain does not develop until adulthood. The prefrontal cortex is the last thing in the brain to fully develop, so teenager’s brains are not as developed and cannot function at the same rate as an adult’s can. With this, teens cannot make rational decisions which is a huge part of consuming alcohol. If teens cannot process how much they have drank, they cannot be rational when deciding if they should continue drinking or if they should stop drinking.

With the drinking age at twenty-one it does not stop teens from drinking. Even though the law says you must be twenty-one to consume alcohol, most teens are drinking. Being illegal, teens try to sneak alcohol and end up binge drinking when a parent is gone or when they think that they can get away with drinking and not get caught. This is extremely unhealthy because teens are not getting a proper education to drinking, but instead just throwing down alcohol without being taught how it is going to effect their bodies. According to CBS News, “The results revealed that 78 percent of U.S. teens had drank alcohol” (CBS News). 78 Percent of teenagers are drinking alcohol even though it is illegal for them to, so if the US were to raise the drinking age, then teens would not have to go through illegal and dangerous routes to get alcohol. Teens ways of getting alcohol is not good with the drinking age at twenty-one. Teens are currently stealing alcohol from stores, stealing from their parents or other adults, asking strangers to buy them alcohol, and using fake IDs. All of these are not good ideas for kids because they are all illegal. Asking a stranger in front of a liquor store may be the worst. It is extremely dangerous to give money to somebody that you have never seen before and ask them to buy you an illegal substance. Using a fake ID is also a bad idea for a teen in the US. It seems so innocent, just buying a fake ID to buy a couple of beers, seems harmless. If you get caught with that fake ID, you can get in some serious trouble with fraud and using a fake identity which can result in a felony. In America kids are getting felonies just because they are trying to buy a couple of beers something that in almost any other country in the world someone their age can do without any consequences.

Most countries in the world the drinking age is eighteen or younger. One would think with the drinking age being fewer teens are binge drinking at higher rates. That is incorrect, in the US where it is illegal for eighteen year olds to have alcohol, they are over drinking at higher rates. Hannah Loewentheil says, “Comparing patterns of alcohol consumption between the United States and the majority of European countries, for example, reveals an interesting trend. In the U.S., the nation with one of the highest binge drinking rates worldwide, people tend to abuse alcohol. In Europe, by contrast, more people enjoy drinking alcohol without binge drinking because leisurely drinking is an important part of social interaction” (Loewentheil). As Loewentheil says, the US is binge drinking at higher rates because in Europe they are drinking as a social interaction. Teens in Europe are being taught how to drink at a younger age, so they are more educated and have been drinking, so they know how it is going to affect their body better than young people in the US. In the US teens are having to hide drinking so they are not getting taught how to properly consume alcohol in a more leisurely way, instead they just binge drink to try and hide that they are drinking. If the US lowers the drinking age then teens in the US would stop binge drinking at such a high rate.

Even though an eighteen year old person in the US cannot legally buy a bottle of beer, they can do many other things. An eighteen year old can drive, vote, join the military, and is legally known as an adult. The entire system seems so backwards, an eighteen year old can go risk their life fighting for the freedom of our country, but he or she cannot buy a drink. Also, an eighteen year old and even younger now, can commit a crime and be tried as an adult and get put away for life. It is crazy to think that our country holds thinks that eighteen year olds are responsible enough to get married and know exactly what they want to do with the rest of their life, but does not think they are responsible enough to consume alcohol. Not only are eighteen year olds able to get tried as an adult and can face consequences for their actions, they can be the ones that are deciding the fate of other people being a part of a jury. There is so many things that you can do as an eighteen year old in America that requires far more maturity than drinking alcohol, but the other things are legal whereas drinking is illegal.

There are definitely pros and cons to both sides of the argument. Keeping the drinking age the way it is at 21, makes some sense because it is the way it is currently and one could argue that is the safest way from keeping teenagers from being able to drink too much. The drinking age the way it is, is there for a reason and because the way the brain develops, it is not fully developed by the time you are eighteen. With that being said, it makes the most sense to change the legal drinking age in the United States of America to eighteen for multiple reasons. First, kids are drinking even with the legal age being 21, so they are going through dangerous channels to get that alcohol. Another reason the drinking age should be lowered is because in other countries where the drinking age is eighteen, those countries have lower rates of binge drinking among teenagers. My final reason on why it makes sense to lower the drinking age from twenty-one to eighteen is because eighteen year olds are already given many responsibilities in this country, so they should be given the ability to drink alcohol. All in all, while I understand both sides’ arguments, it makes more sense to have the legal drinking age in America at eighteen years old instead of twenty-one years old.

Works Cited

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