Should the national drinking age be lowered to 18?

by Ted Pichler

Created on: July 08, 2010

A question of importance continues to spring up in cities across America. Should the drinking age be lowered to 18? I don’t think the issue is being taken seriously enough because it's easy to let our preconceived notions about it make our decision for us, but really it is very important. So I ask you this. Are 18 year olds old enough to drink? Let's ponder this issue in-depth.

As an 18 year old you can enlist, fight, and lose your life, in every branch of the American military, but you can't sit back and have a drink with some friends or your family. According to (1) in 2003 about 78% of the 18 to 20 year olds drank in the last 30 days. That is a staggering amount of people to the break the law. With that statistic we see that only about 22% are deterred from drinking before they are 21. I'm sure many of you remember the high school days, when every weekend you would hear of a party being busted. It's clear the law isn't doing very much.

Really we must ask ourselves what makes drinking at 18 so bad. Yes, it could be reasonable to think that 18 year olds are just too young but are 21 year olds really so more mature and responsible than their 18 year old counterparts. Could we be against it because it could easily destroy lives? Studies from (2) show us that alcohol do the most damage during the adolescent years. And (3) define adolescent years from 11-18. That means that an 18 year old is an adult or at least close to one.

Another problem is that because we know that many so many adults (18-20) ignore the law, we can suspect that many receive underage drinking tickets and it's arguable that the high cost of the ticket could hurt them more than a few drinks. A 200 dollar ticket could make a lot of setbacks to adult's future plans. It's a fact that when things are changing around us if we don't adapt we will get nothing but trouble, and I think that it's a major time of change because young people seem to be get older at a younger age and taking on the things that older generations would be tackling at a later time than them.

As an alternative, we should note that drinking laws don't have to be black and white. A number of rules could be implemented to ease young adults into drinking. In fact the years 18 to 20 could be an effective tool to teach young adults to drink safely and responsibly. A new law could easily have a different rule set than the normal drinking age. For instance a law could state that 18 to 20 year olds must be with an adult who has been over 21 for (x) amount of years or that only (x) amounts of young adults can drink together at once.

The consumption of alcohol is a piece of culture almost everyone in the world.  And if we neglect a change in our culture we could have more problems than we started with. I think that we owe it to those who want the change, to start a program and if all goes well integrate a law to say that the consumption of alcohol is legal at age 18.

(1) http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=667917&page=2

(2) http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/no-index/physician-resou rces/9416.shtml

(3) http://news.softpedia.com/news/Adolescence-16628.sht ml

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