Drinking age from 21 to 18

Introduction

Underage drinking is a hidden problem of modern society that affects young people and adults alike. It is a problem which in the past few years has been slowly forgotten. Today?s society concentrates its attention on fighting against tobacco and drugs, the fight against the most popular drug, alcohol, has been minimized. Many people forget that alcohol is a privilege and not a right. Many studies have proven that the minimum drinking age of 21 prevents young people from alcohol-related incidents and protects them from damaging their brain prematurely. Lowering the minimum drinking age in the United States will increase the rate of alcohol-related injuries and deaths among young people.

Discussion

It is often argued by teens that the drinking age is too high. They believe that if they are eligible to vote, they may be sent to war, and possibly die for their country at the age of eighteen; then they should be able to consume alcohol. What some of these teens don't know is that the drinking age was eighteen at one time in some states. However, the United States government saw problems with youth drinking and they decided to raise the legal drinking age to twenty-one. As an additional incentive to enforce the age significance, the government proposed to stop all federal funding of highways to the states whose drinking age was less than twenty-one,.

During the 1960's and 70's many states lowered the legal drinking age from twenty-one to eighteen. In many of these states, documents showed a considerable increase in highway deaths of teens between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. When the legal age was converted back to twenty-one, the states observed the number of alcohol related highway fatalities of the age group effected by the change and discovered that there was approximately a thirteen percent decrease in teenage fatalities. This clearly shows that there would be more traffic fatalities if the drinking age were to be lowered to eighteen.

Many eighteen year olds are not mature enough to handle drinking alcohol in a responsible manner. Drinking alcohol at early age may lead to side effects. The brain development of a teenager is not completed until adulthood, which usually is over at ages of 21-22. In many 18 year olds, the part of the brain responsible for memory, called hippocampus, is still maturing. In the article ?Young Brains on Alcohol,? scientists compared brain structures of two age groups: teenagers ages 12-16 and adults ages 23-30. The report concluded that the frontal cortex, which is responsible for processing complex information, differs among two groups of people. The report explains how the teenage brain is still undergoing the process of development. The article also points out that teenagers, who excessively consume alcohol could experience memory loss and may have smaller hippocampal memory areas of the brain than non-drinkers. At adolescent stage of a human development, the brain cells are still dividing and areas of the brain continue to expand until adulthood, when development processes ...