Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Drinking at the Age of 18
On many people's blogs there has been a lot of discussion about the drinking age of 21 in the U.S. Americans should be aloud to drink at the age of 18. How can we be adults and not aloud to drink? The common complaint is that Americans can go fight in war and not have a drink. While a big worry about allowing 18 year olds to drink is that unlike a lot of other cultures, the American culture tends to abuse alcohol more. If you look at the Europeans, alcohol is so common and introduced at such a young age that it is not a big a deal to drink. Children drink wine with meals. When alcohol is not allowed and resisted from young adults, there is a higher tendency to want to try it. A good law that some states have, such as Texas, is that kids are aloud to drink with their parents. This is a good way to introduce alcohol to kids. It teaches them to learn how to drink responsibly. If a parent never lets their kid take a sip of alcohol and then sends them off to college, the kid will go crazy. So, it would make our culture more responsible to start drinking at younger ages.
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2 comments:
The reason the drinking age is 21 is because research found that when the drinking age was lowered from 21 to 18 the number of car related teen deaths involving alcohol increased. There was a clear association between the Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) and the quantity of fatal teen auto crashes. In the 1970's, during the Vietnam War, when the minimum age required to go to war was reduced from 21 to 18 many states lowered their MLDA. The National Highway Institute for Safety and many other institutes researched the effects. Within 5 years of lowering the MLDA most states raised it back to the original age. If you would like to see the hard data on this I have already researched it and posted it to my blog "21 means 21" (see Feb 26 2008 on fogblogsmog.blogspot.com). I agree with you that teen drinking is a problem in this country but lowering it is not the solution.
I did not realize that before the Vietnam war, soldiers had to be 21 to enlist. I think we need to go back to that idea. The military exploits too many young men at too young an age, when they don't have their options worked out.
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