Crack

The drinking age has been something that has changed a lot throughout the United States history. There’s been a debate for years whether the drinking age should stay at age 21 or be lowered to 18 or even lower. Medical research shows that when your 21 your brain is fully matured, thus that being the reason the legal drinking age is 21. With that fact, though, there does seem some injustice to it, some rights that we as Americans feel we should have at age 18. The legal drinking age should be lowered to 18 because at age 18 you are legally an adult, the U.S. is one of the only countries with that drinking age, and people under 21 are going to drink thus causing more and more underage drinking. When you turn 18 you can do just about anything but have an alcoholic beverage. One can join the military at age 18 and fight in a war. Now being in a war seems to be a lot more dangerous than having an alcoholic drink with couple of friends but that’s the law. One would think that if you’re old enough to choose whether or not you want to go to war you’d be able to able to make the conscious decision to drink in moderation. Voting is another right a person has at age 18. If one can choose who they want to run our country or our state then again they should be able to enjoy a drink and realize what the consequences are for drinking too much. Another reason for why the drinking age should be lowered to 18 is because the U.S. is one of the only countries to have the drinking age of 21. There are around 196 countries and only 10 of them have a drinking age higher than 18. That’s almost 5% of all the countries, that’s a very small portion. In Europe the drinking age is 18 or lower. Yes, Europe does drink a lot more than America but for some reason they have a lot less fatal accidents than we do. The most accepted explanation for this is that since the American drinking age is so high more and more people who are under the age want to rebel causing dangerous behavior unlike where in Europe it is perfectly legal thus making it so common that they are used to it and know what the consequences are. The final reason for why the drinking age should be lowered to 18 is because people under the age of 21 are going to drink therefore causing more and more underage drinking which is illegal. Some colleges in America would actually prefer for the legal drinking age to be lowered to 18. They feel that the higher drinking age is making the alcoholic drinking problem even worse and that if lowered would cut down the alcohol related deaths. More than 100 college presidents, including the heads of Dartmouth, Virginia Tech and Duke, signed a declaration stating that the 21-year-old drinking age is not working. They argue the current drinking law pushes drinking underground, where alcohol abuse, in the form of binge drinking games, is rampant. Maybe if they were allowed to go into bars they'd be socialized to drink moderately. For these reasons is why the legal alcohol drinking age should be lowered to 18. It would reduce so many problems people are faced with because of the legal drinking age such as underage drinking. If the drinking age was lowered the U.S. would seem to be on track with rest of the world as well. With a higher drinking age comes more alcohol related deaths, so for these reasons I feel the alcohol drinking age should be lowered to 18.