OPPapers.com

Drinking Age Lowered To 18

Legal Drinking Age
One of the biggest arguments that you will find going on today is, what the legal drinking age in The United States of America should be. Today in the USA the legal drinking age is twenty-one, but why twenty-one why not eighteen or thirty? Why have a drinking age of twenty-one in this country when there are over two hundred other countries that have lower drinking ages, and none that have higher? Who gets to decide the age at which someone is mature enough to consume alcohol? All these questions and more have been used to both keep the drinking age twenty-one and lower it to eighteen.
Today in America you can not go through high school with out being put in a situation to consume alcohol. Ruth Clifford Engs an applied health sciences professor at Indiana University states that, 88% of high school seniors have tried alcohol, 66% of high school seniors are regular drinkers, and 22% are frequent binge drinkers. (Ruth Clifford Engs) These stats are very frightening. The fact that more than half of high school seniors are drinking illegally on a regular basis and one in four is binge drinking or drinking to get drunk. The biggest reason for these statistics is the age that these students are in their senior year. Now at the age of seventeen and eighteen these students want to be with there friends and socialize with many people. They want to have a good time and feel free. They no longer want to stay at someone's house and watch a movie or play video games under parental supervision. They have grown up and want to go out and party with there friends all night. These students no longer want to be held down by there parents rules and want to be treated as adults. This group thinks that there is an adult world and a kid world. They no longer want to be in the kid world and want to enter the adult world. Katha Pollitt in Why Boys Don't Play with Dolls says "tells adults that the adult world—in which moms and dads still play by man of the old rules...