Legal Drinking Age Research Paper

The legal drinking age in the United States should be lowered from twenty-one to sixteen. There are two reasons why the current legal drinking age is ineffective and overall nonsensical and each will be addressed in turn. First, the United States historically discovered that banning alcohol purchase and consumption was ineffective, and the rate at which underage drinking occurs demonstrates that doing so for a certain age group is just as ineffective. The law is not and cannot be properly enforced. Second, a great majority of the world’s countries have drinking ages lower than twenty-one and there are fifteen countries whose drinking age is sixteen. These fifteen countries maintain high levels of success and quality of life according to the
The U.S. is one of a mere seven countries whose drinking age is this high; put another way, the rest of the world has set their drinking age lower than twenty-one. Even in the United States, all other rights are granted to citizens by the time they are eighteen at the absolute oldest. By that time in a citizen’s life they have the right to get behind a wheel of a car, the right to alter the country’s political climate by voting, and even the right to put their lives on the line in the name of their country. Despite this, they still are not allowed to consume alcohol. It is simply illogical and most other countries recognize this. Fifteen countries enjoy a legal drinking age of sixteen. Several of those countries, including Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Austria all rate higher than the United States on the World Happiness Scale. While the exact reasons they rank higher are unknown, each of the aforementioned nations ranks higher in the criterion “freedom to make life choices.” In order to rank higher in that category, and thus overall, lowering the drinking age to sixteen is a viable
They argued that the drinking age should be raised to twenty-one because of the prevalence of drunk driving accidents. After the passing of the national minimum legal drinking age act, the nation did see a decrease in drunk driving accidents. This statistic is often conflated to construe that raising the minimum legal drinking age was responsible for this decrease. Not only does correlation not prove causation in this case, but also the decrease in drunk driving accidents does not correlate to the passing of the national minimum legal drinking age act. In fact, while the act was passed in 1987, national drunk driving rates as well as drinking per capita rates began decreasing as early as 1980. Moreover, several studies have shown that drunk driving accidents are most likely to happen among new drinkers, regardless of what age that is. Finally, if the drinking age were lowered to sixteen this change would take effect while students are still in high school. The U.S. government can utilize this fact to mandate high school students to take a class on responsible alcohol consumption wherein they may teach about the dangers of drinking and driving. Several states have these programs regardless of the raised drinking age, so implementation would prove