Pros And Cons Of Lowering The Drinking Age

The bodies of the two girls slammed forward against the dashboard as the car was rammed into the tree, spinning out of control. The girl sitting at the wheel would miraculously live; the girl in the passenger seat beside her would not. Jessica Rasdall killed her best friend Laura Gorman in the middle of the night on February 25, 2006. Jessica and Laura were freshmen in college and decided to go to the club after their shift at Hooters. A man working at the club brought the girls over to the bar and asked the bartender to order shots for them, reassuring the two girls that there was no problem with them drinking. The girls enjoyed the night drinking and dancing, not knowing what was coming next. Struggling to walk to their car, the women …show more content…
This thinking disregards the fact that alcohol is an extremely dangerous substance, which adults often do not use responsibly. If adults cannot use alcohol responsibly, why would we want to give it to even younger people? With this in mind, alcohol is not something to encourage the use of at an even younger age. Yet another common rebuttal of supporters of lowering the drinking age is that alcohol education can reduce the negative effects of underage drinking; they believe that education can solve all problems. Explain then why our current alcohol education programs have had little to no effect on our current generation. According to an article published in the Scientific American, extremely popular drug and alcohol education D.A.R.E. does not have an effect on youth substance abuse. Twenty controlled studies by statisticians Wei Pan and Haiyan Bai show that teens enrolled in D.A.R.E. were just as likely to use alcohol as teens who had no alcohol education programming. Classroom alcohol education doesn’t save the thousands of lives lost to alcohol in the real …show more content…
Tamika Zapolski, a professor of psychology, states, “...lowering the drinking age may lead to a lowered perception of risk. When the perception of risk from a particular substance decreases, prevalence rates tend to increase.” This means that lowering the drinking age will cause younger people to have more availability to drinks, while also sending the message that drinking is not dangerous. If you were a kid and your mom told you that now instead of eating one piece of candy, you could eat three, you get the message that eating more candy is okay. Lowering the drinking age has the same effect. Teens receive the message that drinking at a younger age is acceptable, which is the opposite of what we want to portray. Furthermore, alcohol is often ignored for its potential as a gateway drug, similar to marijuana. Lowering the drinking age sends a variety of bad messages to teens regarding alcohol and drug