Legal Drinking Age Argument

Argument: Drinking Age

The deciding factor of legality for drinking should not be age, but rather maturity and ability to handle responsibility. As of today, the legal drinking age in the United States is set at twenty-one years of age. Who is to say that just because an individual is twenty-one means that they are mature enough to consume alcohol in a responsible manner? There are some twenty-one year old people or even older that I consider to be more immature then some fourteen year-old kids. I feel that changing the legal drinking age to eighteen should be seriously thought about. Eighteen-year-old individuals can take on many adult responsibilities; but they do not have the right to consume alcohol. I feel that this is unfair and biased.

Many parents of today's teenagers were legally allowed to drink at the age of eighteen. Today's teenagers face more responsibility and are treated much differently from the way their parents were treated. If twenty-one is considered so mature, then why is eighteen considered an adult? I believe that the age at which the purchase and public consumption of alcohol becomes legal should also be the age at which other adult rights and responsibilities should also be. At the age of eighteen, an individual can vote, serve on a jury, stay out without a curfew, leave home, drive, buy tobacco products, buy a gun, have financial contracts, be sent to prison, join the Army and die for this country. If an eighteen year-old can be held with so many responsibilities, then it seems very unfair to say that they are not old enough to consume alcohol.

Prohibiting the sale of alcohol to people under the age of twenty-one generates side effects like binge drinking and disrespect for the law. Keeping the legal drinking age at twenty-one does not allow an eighteen year-old to take on all the privileges of an adult. Drinking is viewed as a glamorous activity since it is only for an adult of twenty-one years of age and older. This causes those who are underage to find ways around the legal drinking age. This kind of behavior does not encourage responsible drinking habits which the law is trying to do but is not successful.

The argument against changing the legal drinking age has many issues. I understand that younger individuals are neither physically or emotionally ready to consume alcohol; but what gives the right of somebody twenty-one years of age or older to be more physically and emotionally stable than that of an eighteen year old. After the drinking age was raised to 21 there were studies done that show there was a "thirteen-percent decline in the number of single-vehicle night time crashes among eighteen through twenty year-olds." Any life-saving effect that first raised the drinking age was only temporary, occurring largely in the first year or two after switching to the legal drinking age to 21. After those first two years the effect of the