Friday, August 15, 2008

lowering the drinking age

I have heard some people say that we should lower the drinking age. I believe that We should not reduce the drinking age from 21 to 18 because some young adults would be irresponsible and there for, they would cause an increase in automobile accidence. Do to the immaturity of some people under the age of 21, we will see as we have seen before, some of them do things that are not right. For example, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had a study that found that one out of 14 girls in between the ages of 14 and 19 has an STD. What do STDs have to do with lowering the drinking age if the statistic starts with age 14? First of all, it is important to ask why and how these girls contracted an STD? What would be the first answer? Could they had stopped this from happening? Why they did not do it? If at 18 they were able to consume alcohol, would they do something bad? The answer is yes. From 14 to 18 some kids have not matured enough. Also, at 18 they are getting out of that childhood stage, and some if not most adults, will be struggling to mature which would lead them to still keep on doing the same mistakes that they have been doing. Also, now that they have access to new things such as the internet, they would be doing more mistakes. Why is this? Using the net, they would be able to plan a party where some kids would be able to take alcahol. Meanwhile, their parents would not have a clue of what was going to take place. When kids got out of school, to protest in favor of illegal imigrants rights, on may first of 2006, I heard that some of those kids, had already planned how this thing was going to happen. Another example is that some, if not most kids, start driving at the age of 16, and we no the potential problems that this has caused. There have been 3,490 drivers under the age of 21 that died in 2006 and thousands more were injured. According to the 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, it was estimated that there were 11000000 underage drinkers in the US. Now, imagine those 11000000 young adults and those that will be turning adults in the next few years being able to legally consume alcohol by the age of 18. How many more accidence would have to be added to already the long list? I believe it would be A lot. Giving them a second tool could lead to bad consequences. Since the first tool was driving, If we start providing alcohol, it would be the second tool which will kill more people than when they had only the first one. If we start to legalise drinking at the age of 18, It is going to be a two year difference which is not going to change anything. What I mean by that is these kids who were driving recklessly at the age of 16, now that they would be 18, and now that they would be able to purchous alcahol, who knows what could happen.I should also add that since driving starts at 16, probably drinking should be legalized at 16 as well. The accidence that are caused by 16 year olds is going to rise as soon as these people turn 18. The reason they have not risen now is because children are not able to purchase as much alcohol as they would if they were 18. As I have said before, This could have a lot of bad consequences if it were to happen. One of the consequences, would be that there parents will be devastated. This will happen because their child just killed a person and or got killed because of a teenager driving drunk. Another consequence is that a lot of money maybe thousands of dollars, would have to be paid to the family by the tax payers for the damage that some teenagers will cause. Also, we should not forget that the family of the drunk teenager, Probably will not have enough money to pay the other family or families.
So far, we have been able to reduce the fatal and injury crashes by 38% and 40% respectively, among 16 year old drivers. However, if lowering the drinking age were to happen, the statistics would go up again. At 18 a person has not yet grown sufficiently, but they still want to experience many things.The problem with that in this case, is that according to www.cdc.gov, at all levels of blood alcohol concentration, Young people have a greater risk of getting into an accident.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Everything is very open with a very clear description of the issues.

It was truly informative. Your site is extremely helpful.

Thank you for sharing!