Return The Drinking Age To 18 Glaser Analysis

From the Article “Return the Drinking Age to 18, and Enforce It” by Gabrielle Glaser, the author argues that the drinking age should be returned to eighteen, and enforced heavily. In the article, she argues that the current system which only allows people who are twenty-one and older to purchase and drink alcohol is forcing high school and college kids to partake in risky binge drinking behavior. Also, she compares today’s drinking attitude of underage kids to the attitude of people in the prohibition era. In the prohibition era, there were speakeasies. The goal at these places was to drink as much and as soon as possible, because no one ever knew when the police would show up. Today's law, likewise, encourages young people to dodge the system. In the article, studies have been shown that alcohol-related deaths have tripled since the United States changed the drinking age to twenty-one …show more content…
Drunk driving deaths have actually steadily decreased in the past thirty years (CDC “Teen Drinking and Driving”). As many people argue that lowering the drinking age is fatal, lowering the drinking age could have the potential to save lives (CDC). Lowering the age would reduce the amount of people that become injured due to alcohol or die by alcohol poisoning because people fail to report their condition to the police or the EMT’s out of fear of legal consequences for underage drinking. Currently, in many states there are laws protecting those people who report alcohol poisoning; nevertheless, not many people are aware of these laws. Most people don’t report alcohol poisoning because they don’t want the word to come around to their parents. Lowering the drinking age would encourage those people in all age ranges to seek medical attention for potentially fatal alcoholic injuries without the fear of potential consequences for doing