In addition to psychological problems, the secrecy of underage drinking can make it unsafe. Underage drinkers may consume extra alcohol in order to get rid of evidence and avoid detection. They may also drink more since they do not know when they will be able to drink again and do not want to waste a scare resource. The drinking age also leaves inexperienced drinkers without experienced friends and family to keep an eye on them.
This lack of support, combined with inexperience, increases the risk of sexual assault, unprotected sex, and drunk driving. Of course, alcohol can impair judgement and make people more vulnerable. But many of the negative consequences of drinking are less likely to happen to a drinker who is under the supervision of responsible friends or family members — benefits we are unlikely to have when we can only consume alcohol in secret.
People who defend the drinking age like to say that if we simply enforced it more, nearly all of the problems caused by underage drinking would stop. But this is not true. Currently, the drinking age turns 7. The vast majority of these are never caught.
Despite the harsh punishments for underage drinkers, only 1 in 1, instances of underage drinking actually results in an arrest. Even if we arrested ten times as many people as we do now which would be extremely difficult and expensive , it would still not be enough to deter underage drinking. The law is simply unrealistic, and yet people would rather see it routinely disobeyed than see it repealed. A poorly enforced law can cause problems by encouraging people to not take laws seriously, but increased enforcement would only make matters worse.
It would mean arresting even more people some of them certainly innocent , disrupting even more lives, pushing more people into jails, and creating more criminals. The US already has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. Arresting everyone who drinks before they turn 21 would not only contribute to this problem directly by imprisoning otherwise law-abiding people , but would also place many drinkers and servers in adult jails and expose them to other types of criminal behavior.
Jail can have serious long-term consequences even if you are only there for a short amount of time. Once you turn 18, you are legally an adult. With this freedom, comes many responsibilities. You can enter into legal contracts, be tried as an adult and be sent to an adult prison, and raise or adopt children. And of course, they take on one of the most dangerous jobs in world: active military duty.
However, these arguments were not enough to stop the drinking age from rising to 21 in the s. However, serving in the military is statistically far more dangerous than drinking. So are many other adult responsibilities, such as smoking and having sex.
If people under 21 can make such sacrifices for the country, as well as living independently, raising families, and engaging in all sorts of adult activities, then we should not be kept out of certain bars and restaurants and stores as though we were second-class citizens. When you sit down at a bar or restaurant and order a shot of vodka, the server will only ask your age.
And yet all of these risk groups are far more likely to cause alcohol-related problems than people under There is no logical reason to accept questions about our age, but to be offended by more reasonable questions.
The drinking age takes away the freedoms of law-abiding citizens because of the fear that we might make bad decisions with alcohol. This contradiction proves once again that the drinking age is not really about safety. If older people truly prioritized safety, then they would be willing to make their own sacrifices—not impose them on another group of law-abiding people, as they have with the drinking age.
The United States is one of only a handful of countries and the only Westernized one that sets its drinking age to And yet this higher drinking age has not put us ahead of other developed countries in any measurable way. Germany, Russia and China are examples of this. This means that an overwhelming majority of people under 21 drink alcohol anyway.
In addition, setting the minimum legal drinking age to 18 can promote drinking in safer environments. Many times, teenagers will get their drinks from shady sources and consume drinks in unsafe environments. Not to mention the positive effects it would have on revenue for small restaurants and bars, which have been suffering during the ongoing COVID pandemic.
The government will also be able to collect taxes from the sale of those drinks, generating extra funding for essential services. Rapper R. Kelly is found guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking. NYC public school staff deserve Election Day fully off. Thomas Jefferson statue will rightfully be removed from City Hall. Baruch alumni deserve longer access to free career services. Emergency medical service workers are fundamentally underpaid and unvalued.
USG report: Helpful resources for class registration. Congestion pricing in NYC will do more harm than good. No paid family leave in the US is inexcusable. These people are sometimes faced with the difficult decision of whether or not they should take an intoxicated friend to the hospital.
Though it received criticism from Mothers Against Drunk Read…. Additionally, if the drinking age was lowered, the concept of alcohol would be more normalized and kids would be comfortable asking their parents questions regarding alcohol consumption.
This increased knowledge could help kids understand certain dangers that they may not have previously been aware of. These dangers could range anywhere from mixing different types of alcohol to being aware of the different alcohol percentages. On July 17, , Congress passed a law that withheld federal highway funding from every state that continued to allow people under 21 to buy alcohol -- effectively forcing them to raise their drinking ages. By , faced with this strong financial incentive and pressure from MADD, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had complied.
Is alcohol and the teen brain a bad mix? Many studies have since attempted to gauge the law's impact on public health. The NHTSA estimates that raising the national legal drinking age from 18 to 21 has saved more than lives each year.
When the law was raised to 21, alcohol-related deaths for young people decreased; when the drinking age was lowered, deaths increased. A recent study in New Zealand , which lowered its drinking age in from 20 to 18, found that drivers aged 18 or 19 now face a higher risk of being involved in alcohol-related crashes that cause death or injury. The year-old limit may be less effective at curbing binge drinking on college campuses, however.
A University of Indiana study of students at 56 colleges found that in the immediate aftermath of 21 becoming the national drinking age, significantly more underage students drank compared to those of legal age. A stalled movement. There's a movement to lower legal drinking ages in the U. He's a university president. Why should we be expected to enforce a law that's ignored by 70 percent of students before they even come to college?
It's unsupervised," he said.
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