Why The Drinking Age Should Be Lowerd To 18

When you turn 18 you are old enough to fight and die for your country, vote, purchase cigarettes and get married. But at your wedding you wouldn't even be able to participate in your own champagne toast. Some adults like to say that you aren't mature enough or physically able to handle drinking until you are 21.When you are 18 you are judged mature enough to vote, hold public office, serve on juries, serve in the military possibly die for your country, fly airplanes, sign contracts and so on. Why is drinking a beer an act of greater responsibility and maturity than flying an airplane or serving your country at war? The truth is that its not. Your body and mind improve all through out life. A 21 year old is different from an 18 year old, just as a 41 year old is different from a 38 year old. Youth Prohibition activists ignore the fact that maturity is a gradual but uneven process that continues throughout life and is not complete on one's twenty-first birthday. Moreover, they ignore the proven medical fact that the moderate consumption of alcohol is associated with better health and greater longevity than either abstaining or abusing alcohol. The simplest way to prove this argument is for you to look in your medicine cabinet or go to the drug store. Every single over the counter medication defines an adult dose for ages 12 and up. Not 21, but 12. If the FDA can determine that a 12 year old is developed enough to have an equal dose of Tylenol, Sudafed, Dramamine, or Zantac 75, then an 18 year old is developed enough to have a glass of wine with dinner. Alcohol, a substance which is considered extremely harmful to young adults, really isn't that bad and it even has its benefits. In Arthur L. Klatsky's Drink to your Health, he describes the benefits of alcoholic consumption, as it is in some ways, beneficial to the human circulatory system. Beer in fact has been found to contain ingredients in which are highly beneficial for the strengthening of the human bone structure. In an article in Health & Medicine Week, it shows how minor alcoholic consumption can help to prevent heart disease, among other diseases. This, along with many other studies taken has already proven the fact that the consumption of alcohol can be beneficial. Why then, does our government prevent its youth from enjoying some of the benefits of alcoholic beverages? After all, it is well known that young adults suffer from unusually high levels of stress. If nothing else, they should have the right to relieve themselves from the many stressful situations they suffer from. Alcohol can potentially cause problems for all people. This is a fact and it doesn't matter if your 21 or not. If a person wished to ban alcohol for the entire population equally, there really would be no reason to stand in their way. Wanting or believing that the drinking age should be lowered doesn't mean that you are "pro-alcohol", rather it makes you "pro-youth" because the main thing is that you find it hypocritical that adults point their finger at youth while holding a beer in the other hand. It is time we recognize, and discuss the truth about alcohol rather than creating a young scapegoat for society to blame their alcohol troubles on. Through education, gradual entry, and a relaxing of strict no-use policy towards youth will make drinking safer for people of all ages. One of the most misguided facts out there was that raising the drinking age saved about 20,000 lives though drinking and driving fatalities. This is an over used statistic that is circulated and usually not stated completely by the Youth Prohibitionist movement. The truth is as researchers Peter Asch and David Levy put it, the "minimum legal drinking age is not a significannot

-or even a perceptible-factor in the fatality experience of all drivers or of young drivers." In an in-depth and unrefined study Asch and Levy prove that raising the drinking age merely transferred lost lives from the 18-20 bracket to the 21-24 age group. The problem with the 20,000 lives saved statistic is that it looks only at deaths for people aged 18-20. This is like rating the safety of a car by looking only at the seat belt and ignoring the fact that the car frequently tips over while driving. Raising the drinking age may have reduced deaths 18-20 but resulted in more deaths among people 21-24. In the United States, the decision was made in 1987 to raise the drinking age to 21. While there is clear evidence of a reduction in road traffic deaths among young people since the change of the drinking age, there is no hard results that show that the new drinking age was solely responsible for that reduction. The decrease in road traffic deaths can be partially attributed to things such as stricter traffic laws, changes in the economy and attitude of the general population, and the enforcement of seatbelt laws. Based on statistics gathered by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, from the years 1987 through 1996 when alcohol-related traffic deaths for people under 21 reduced by 43%, the alcohol-related deaths to the general population also decreased by 28%.One major difference between alcoholic consumption laws in the United States, and Europe, is that many countries in Europe allow their youth to buy and consume alcoholic beverages at a relatively low age. A statistical analysis taken from the German government shows that the percentage of German population

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