In the United States, at the age of sixteen, you can consent and drive a car. At the age of eighteen, you can vote, join the military, get married, adopt a child, change your name, quit school, buy a lottery ticket, get piercings and tattoos, buy pornography, work in a bar and serve drinks, be called for jury duty, open a bank account, and own a home. Yet you’ll still have to wait three more years before being able to legally drink or buy alcohol.
The legal drinking age in the United States is one of the highest amongst developed countries. In many places, the minimum age is eighteen, with several exceptions—such as sixteen-year-olds being allowed to drink, but not purchase, alcohol.
Although many argue that the drinking age should be lowered—mainly because of the myriad of debatably more risky activities sixteen to eighteen year olds can legally participate in, and because of the easy access teenagers already have to alcohol—there currently aren’t any signs of this happening. Despite the fact that the majority of people drink before the legal age, studies have shown that raising the minimum drinking age has at least decreased the number of young people drinking in the United States, and consequently also decreased the negative effects. However, underage drinking is still listed as a public health issue by the CDC, linking it to thousands of emergency room visits, death, sexual assault, school performance problems, changes in brain development, and alcoholism later in life.
Still, surveys show that by eighteen, about sixty percent of people in the United States have had at least one drink, and that binge drinking is common amongst youth ages twelve to twenty. A common progressive argument in favor of lowering the drinking age is that because most teenagers will drink, despite the illicitness of it, it should be legalized so that they are encouraged to do so in a safer environment (for example, at home, rather than sneaking out with people they barely know; and they will be more likely to seek help if someone is in danger of alcohol poisoning; additionally, if it is less stigmatized, more conversations can be had about how to drink responsibly). Unsurprisingly, the same approach is taken by many democrats when considering the legality of things like marijuana and abortions, but interestingly, this is also a very similar reason many republicans believe guns shouldn’t be banned (or even restricted) in America—so the idea of legalizing something so that it can be done “more safely” isn’t a bipartisan view.
So, what are your thoughts? Should the drinking age be lowered in the United States, or is it good as is?
I feel as though having the drinking age be twenty-one really does benefit us the way people make out it to seem. All it really does is train kids to hide things better. It is like how they always say stricter parents will have more rebellious children. Telling people they can not do something only makes them want to do it more. It is like when they changed the age to buy nicotine products from eighteen to twenty-one. They thought it was helping stop kids but really it just made them want to do it more. At eighteen the U.S. is willing to let people sign up for the Army and put their lives on the line, but will not let them even have beer. To me it is just a bit ridiculous.
I’ve always been conflicted with this concept. Both sides of lowering the drinking age and not make good points. I feel that as teens everybody has different levels of responsibility and especially taking into account the environment some teens live in with strict parenting, I feel that if the age were lowered, the statistics of teens drinking wouldn’t go up as much. But who knows. But I do think that exposing teens to alcohol under supervision is better than them going out to learn about its effects with other people.