Lowering The Drinking Age To 18 Essay

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Smoking, marriage, and voting are all rights that you receive at the age of 18. You must sign up for the draft, or you can make the decision to go ahead and join the military. However, even at the age the government decided that you were responsible enough to vote for the man or woman that would run your country, they believe that you are still too young to make certain age-related decisions. What is being referred to is withholding the right for any person to consume alcohol before the age of 21. The Minimum Legal Drinking Age should be lowered to 18 because you legally become an adult at that age and should have the right to make your own decision about whether or not you will choose to drink alcohol. By lowering the legal drinking age to 18, people of that age and so on would be allowed to drink …show more content…

Thirty-five percent of all drunk-driving accidents occurred with a driver between the ages of 21 and 24. If the percentage of car wrecks caused by drunk drivers between the ages of 18 and 20 were to increase, the decrease in accidents between drivers ages 21 to 24 would offset that number. This means that lowering the minimum drinking age would not cause an increase in the percentage of alcohol-related car accidents. Some European countries have a minimum legal drinking age of 18. Even after the US raised the drinking age in 1984, the percentage of wrecks in the US decreased less than the percentage of wrecks in those European countries in the 1980s. Though there has been a decline in drunk driving accidents since 1982 across all age groups, 1982 was two years before the legal age was raised to 21. This means that it cannot be proven that raising the legal age to 21 prevented any accidents from happening or decreased any

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