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Should Drinking Age Be 18 Essay

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Should Drinking Age Be 18 Essay
There is a giant debate on what the legal minimum drinking age should be in the United States. Many people think that it should remain at 21 years old and others believe that it should be lowered to 18. While both have their own various reasons, this has been an important topic in our country for a long time. President Ronald Reagan signed and passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Law in 1984 which obligated states to raise their legal drinking age to 21 or suffer reductions in Federal highway funds. The highway funds and drinking age was linked together by the young lives lost on our highways. Even though this was a satisfactory reason to raise the drinking age there are still more reasons to why it should be 18. Despite what most people …show more content…
In European countries, the consumption of alcohol is more of a normal activity than in the United States. Growing in up in our country today teens want to drink alchohol more because they aren't supposed to have it. They see it as a sign of adulthood or maturity. So in order to gain this sense of adult-hood, they do things such as sneaking into clubs and bars or buying alchohol for their friends with fake ID's. This can lead to many predicaments because these teens have not been raised with any experience with alcohol, and they will not know how to handle it or act responsibly. Research has shown that most teens drink only to become intoxicated. So many of them binge drink; this is the consumption of an excessive amount of alcohol in a short period of time. Binge drinking can lead to numerous problems such as alcohol poisoning which can be deadly and require emergency treatment. This could be avoided if teens knew how to be responsible with drinking and were taught by their parents like other countries instead of being banned from it until the age of 21. Per capita the consumption of alcohol in countries such as France, Spain, and Portugal is higher than the United States, the rate of alcohol abuse and alcoholism is lower. This supports how people are more responsible if they are raised with alcohol as a part of every day life instead of hiding it until they believe that people are old enough to finally discover it

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