IndexContentsConclusionWorks CitedContext The legal drinking age limit has been the subject of debate over the years, centered on determining the right age for a responsible drinking behavior, considering the high rates of addiction. All 50 US states now have their minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) set at 21, a higher standard than that of most developed countries, which is 18, with a few exceptions such as Japan and Korea South. However, the drinking age has not always been 21. It has undergone many revisions over the years, influenced by political events, legislation and social groups such as religious institutions. When the 26th Amendment was passed, lowering the legal voting age from 21 to 18, 30 states raised the debate over people's responsibility which saw states amend the MLDA to 18, 19 or 20. The new changes in the MLDA, however, were questioned after reports of car accidents in the 1970s increased, eventually leading Congress to pass the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 which affected the MLDA to 21 . Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Changes to the MLDA have not proven to be an effective strategy in curbing harmful alcohol-related behaviors, prompting a recommendation to revise the MLDA to a lower limit. The increased MLDA limit has pushed teenagers to drink in dangerous environments without the help of mature adults. The growing argument in favor of lowering the MLDA to 18 argues that this would decrease illegal drinking, prevent alcohol dependence and allow the collection of accurate data on alcohol consumption from young people who purchase drinks legitimately. Lowering the legal drinking age prevents young adults from drinking illegally. The legal drinking age of 21 causes young adults to produce fake IDs to drink illegally. Young people today are prohibited from drinking without supervision, which leads to the development of uncontrolled behavior. Lowering the MLDA is necessary to enable early alcohol counseling by adults. Since the law establishes that 18 is the legal age to define an adult, the gap between the legal age and the legal drinking age constitutes a temptation for adolescents to falsify their identity and adopt dangerous drinking patterns . Turning 18 in the United States means you now have the right and responsibility to vote, smoke, serve on juries, sign contracts, get married, be prosecuted as an adult, and join the military, which increases the desire to be considered an adult completely responsible. Once an individual is declared an adult based on his age, he should be allowed to do everything that adults are allowed to do because he has the ability to handle the consequences. If an individual declared an adult based on his age is granted all other rights except the right to drink, it becomes tempting why individuals are not allowed to drink even though they can smoke and marry. The drinking ban is an aspect that does not recognize their ability to be responsible, that pushes adolescents over 18 to drink because they are curious about their ability to behave as responsible adults, promotes a general lack of respect and is incongruous with other areas of US law where 18 is the legal age. With the three-year gap between adulthood and legal alcohol consumption, teens often turn to the easy but illegal way toobtain alcohol: false IDs. Nearly two-thirds of respondents in a study conducted by researchers at the Center on Young Adult Health and Development at the University of Maryland School of Public Health used fake IDs to purchase alcohol from a sample of 1,015 college students. This high percentage indicates that the current law is ineffective in stopping underage drinking since at least half of the college student population is underage. Since occasional drinking opportunities are limited as they illegally pass themselves off as older people, young users of false documents will use such opportunities to binge on alcohol. Consuming an excessive amount of alcohol in a relatively short period of time will turn into dangerous drinking behavior. Kingkade notes that research by Amelia M. Arria, an associate professor of behavioral and community health at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, highlights the relationship between fake IDs and frequent alcohol use. “In our sample, we found a clear path from more frequent use of false documents to more frequent consumption, which led to a higher risk of developing alcohol dependence. Such cases of falsified documents to access alcohol consumption imply that parents who guide their children to drink responsibly are not involved. This leads to the growth of alcohol-related problems such as addiction and reckless driving while intoxicated. If the legal drinking age were lowered, then adolescents would be less likely to engage in illegal and dangerous drinking behaviors as they reach the legal drinking age much earlier. Lowering the MLDA is, therefore, a solution to ensure that experimental youth have healthy drinking behavior thanks to the guidance offered beforehand before they start consuming alcohol surreptitiously without supervision. Lowering the drinking age prevents alcohol addiction. The fight against alcoholism addiction relies on an individual's ability to control their alcohol consumption behaviors, which can only be achieved by allowing familiarity with SHAO 4 alcohol consumption under supervision. The ability to limit alcohol consumption is based on knowledge and direct contact with alcoholic beverages, essential for developing a healthier relationship between adolescents and drinking. Heath, a professor of anthropology at Brown, explains a cultural difference between the United States and European countries such as France and Italy, where children are given small amounts of wine by their parents during family meals. “In this way, parents educate their children about alcohol and strip alcohol consumption of its taboo appeal, which can cause wayward teenagers to sneak into basements and woods to binge on alcohol away from adult supervision,” Heath said. Heath also advocates introducing alcohol early in life saying “Alcohol has no mystique. It's not a big deal. Where, however, it is forbidden until the age of 21, there is a bit of a 'forbidden fruit' syndrome." By lowering the drinking age, alcohol would not seem like an unattainable or unknown concept. Letting the idea sink in slowly seems to be a much better approach than putting a veil on the alcohol. Early education, rather than keeping alcohol completely banned before age 21, could do a better job of curbing binge drinking or other alcohol-related problems by allowing for familiarization of aspects of alcohol use such as avoiding addiction at a young age age. Conflicting perspectives and accurate data collection Strategic planning of alcohol-related campaigns to address casessuch as addiction, alcohol consumption behavior and trends require reliable statistics; however, statistics on illicit alcohol use are affected by the lack of data on hidden alcohol use by young people. This can be corrected by lowering the MLDA to acquire relatively accurate data including youth statistics. Discrepancies in studies involving different research groups have raised major conflicts in the debate over the correct MLDA. Because young people are driven by the desire to be considered adults, most young people between the ages of 16 and 21 are tempted to drink and experiment with alcoholic beverages in secret before the official legal age. This leads to a lack of data on alcohol consumption which has raised conflicting perspectives on studies on the impact of alcohol on health, accidents and health. From a health perspective, reducing MLDA offers early familiarity with alcohol and informed decision making, which negates the claim that early familiarity with alcohol leads to brain damage. The National Institute of Mental Health has found that the brain may not be fully developed at age 18, not even by age 25. Underdevelopment indicates that the brain is vulnerable. To prove their point, many experiments have been conducted to show and prove the relationship between alcohol consumption at an early age and brain damage. In one of the studies by Crews, director of the UNC Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research on animals, a continuous pattern of binge eating in adolescence affects memory, alters sensitivity to motor damage and damages cortical regions frontal-anterior functions that are important in the development of self-regulation, judgment, reasoning, problem solving and impulse control. With these and many other research findings, it is not surprising that an overwhelming majority of the population supports the current law: they fear that alcohol can damage the brain, even if its credibility is questioned. It is only through lowering the MLDA that data can be collected to resolve the debate on the impact of the MLDA limit on health and accidents caused by alcohol consumption by collecting data from all groups of respondents, including young people. On causing accidents, studies show that although lowering the MLDA reduces traffic accidents and deaths, greater success in preventing accidents is found when a lower MLDA conflicts with the accuracy of the data collected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that alcohol is responsible for more than 4,300 deaths among underage youth each year. Along the same lines, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimated that MLDA 21 reduced the number of fatal traffic crashes among 18- to 20-year-olds by 13 percent and saved approximately 27,052 lives from 1975 to 2008. These numbers lead people to think that MLDA 21 does a great job of reducing the number of alcohol-related minor deaths. All of this contributes to why the United States has set its MLDA at an above-average age with immense public support. However, it is important that traffic accidents and deaths are more common among new legal drinkers, regardless of the MLDA. From 2009 to 2011, drivers between the ages of 21 and 24 had the highest percentage of fatal crashes with blood alcohol concentration (BAC) levels of 0.08 – 35% or higher. mortality rate is that since 1982, two years before MLDA 21, there has been a decline in deaths from drunk driving in all age groups and therefore cannot. 2016