Lowering the Drinking Age

Many people can make a convincing argument that the drinking age in the United States should be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen years old. The legal drinking age should not be lowered. There are many good reasons why the legal drinking age should not be lowered, such as our collective safety and our individual health. Allowing young adults to drink at a younger age will result in more fatal traffic accidents, higher crime rates, and in general cause society to degenerate.

Perhaps a look at history will shed some light on the subject. In the early 1970's the drinking age was lowered in most states to eighteen along when the voting age was simultaneously lowered. Fortunately, all fifty states raised the drinking age to twenty-one in the early 1980's. The outcome of raising the legal age was that there was a decrease of more than 53% of fatally injured drivers, who had a positive blood alcohol concentration between 1982 and 2004, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (Q&A: Teenagers—Underage Drinking). If raising the drinking age lowered drunk driving fatalit...