drinking age should be raised to 25 essay

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Should the Legal Drinking Age be Increased to 25

As of right now, the legal drinking age in the United States is 21 and is 18 in some other countries. Should this number be increased? That’s a question that is hotly debated among various populations. There is evidence that supports the proposition, but is it something that anyone will see happening soon? You’ll have to decide what side of the issue you’re on and take a stand to change the age or not.

Why Increase the Age?

According to research, a person doesn’t reach physical maturity until the age of 25. That means that the brain and nervous system aren’t fully developed until that age. Because the body is still growing and changing, the effects of alcohol can be more pronounced and more dangerous than in a fully mature person. Of course, changing the legal drinking age to 25 probably won’t stop all young people from drinking, but it would make them aware of the risk they are taking by doing so.

In addition, research also shows that a higher drinking age saves lives. This is because there are fewer alcohol related traffic accidents resulting in death among young people. According to U.S. News and World Report, when New Zealand lowered its drinking age from 20 to 18, the number of fatalities due to drinking and driving went up dramatically.

Why Not Increase the Age?

Of course, the biggest drawback of raising the drinking age is that it could encourage underage drinking, especially for people who are 21 and are currently allowed to drink legally. Though some experts refute this, college kids are a prime example of populations who acquire alcohol illegally. Should one state raise their drinking age and another not, people would likely cross state lines to drink, which could lead to the risk of drunk driving and other crime.

There are also those who argue that drinking age has nothing to do with responsibility. People can vote, serve in the military, buy a house, get married and change their citizenship at the age of 18 so it seems ludicrous to tell those same people that they can’t legally buy or drink alcohol. Others say that better control of alcohol in the United States would help solve some of the problems that could arise in response to the drinking age.

What’s the Answer

Clearly, there is no good answer for the question of whether the drinking age should be increased to 25. There are strong arguments on both sides of the issue and both arguments make sense in many ways. More research is needed to link drinking age with physical maturity and how it relates to the rate of drunk driving deaths. However, one thing the experts do agree on is that people should be educated about the risks of drinking alcohol as they near the drinking age, whatever that happens to be. By helping young people understand the responsibility that goes with legal drinking and the dangers of abusing alcohol, they are better prepared to make the right choices regarding alcohol, whether legal or not.

There is no way to ensure that people under the legal drinking age are not going to drink, but there are many ways that governments, both state and federal, can help educate its citizens so that the most people possible will make the right choices and use alcohol responsibly, no matter what is finally decided about whether or not the drinking age should be increased to 25. Now it’s up to you to pick a side and help make the changes required to uphold your stance on the issue.

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Raising the Drinking Age to 25: What Are the Pros and Cons?

• Medically Reviewed by David Szarka, MA, LCADC

There’s been an ongoing debate about the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) in the U.S. since the National Minimum Drinking Age Act was passed in 1984. The federal law requires people be 21 years old to buy or possess alcohol . Some people feel that requiring people to be 21 to drink just makes underage drinking more of a problem and doesn’t align with other minimum age restrictions like joining the military or owning a gun. On the other side of the debate, people argue that young adults are less likely to drink responsibly, and that alcohol can damage the still-developing human brain. Some proponents of drinking age limits feel that the U.S. should raise the drinking age even higher — to 25.

Pros of Raising the Drinking Age to 25

Some people believe raising the legal drinking age to 25 is imperative because of considerations like emotional and physical maturity. They also say the minimum drinking age saves lives by reducing the risk of danger to oneself and others. Here are a few reasons why they believe the legal drinking age should be raised to 25:

Protects Brain Development

Much research has shown the damaging effects of alcohol on brain development in teens and young adults. The brain is still undergoing crucial developments until age 25, and some scientists have found evidence that it keeps developing until as late as age 30. Young adult and teen drinking can interfere with brain development, causing long-term consequences like :

• Damage to the hippocampus resulting in issues with memory and learning.
• Damage the prefrontal cortex, which can impair judgement and impulsivity in adulthood.
• Damage to the brain’s white matter, negatively impacting brain cells’ communication with each other.
• Greater risk for conditions like mood disorders, ADHD, PTSD, and other mental health challenges.

Prevents Drunk Driving Fatalities

There is a strong correlation between drunk driving and youth. Data shows that since the drinking age was raised to 21, there has been a significant decrease in alcohol-related car accidents. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that raising the drinking age to 21 saved 31,959 lives between 1975 and 2017. Furthermore, some research has shown that people aged 21-25 are the most likely age group to drive after drinking alcohol.

Decreases Underage Drinking

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), after the drinking age was raised to 21, alcohol consumption in people aged 18 to 20 decreased from 59% to 40% in the six years following the change. Drinking also decreased from 70% to 56% during the same period in people aged 21 to 25.

Lowers Addiction Risk

Some research suggests that around 90% of adults with substance use disorders drank as teens or young adults. Proponents argue that raising the drinking age can help stem the addiction epidemic in the U.S.

Cons of Raising the Drinking Age to 25

People who don’t think the drinking age should be raised and should potentially be lowered feel this way for a number of reasons. Some believe it’s a form of ageism, actually encourages underage drinking, and may put lives at risk because underage drinkers may be worried about reporting emergencies.

Raises the Thrill of Underage Drinking

Having a rebellious streak is part of the teenage years and sometimes continues into young adulthood. Youth are trying to develop their sense of self, and this often means pulling away from parents and questioning other authority figures. It’s a normal part of growing up. The parts of the brain responsible for impulsivity and decision-making are still under construction. This combination can fuel underage drinking. Critics of raising the drinking age argue that this change will just extend that “thrill” of asserting your independence against authority for a longer period given that we know that the brain continues developing well into the 20s.

Discourages People to Get Help in Emergencies

Some people believe lowering the drinking age can prevent medical emergencies and dangerous situations from becoming worse or deadly. They maintain that people who are drinking illegally may not call 911 if a friend is in trouble or an accident has happened because of drinking for fear of getting in trouble with the law or with their families. Many may not know that most states have laws in place that protect them from legal ramifications if they report an emergency.

Doesn’t Align With Other Age Restrictions

The United States is one of a handful of countries with a drinking age of 21. Proponents of keeping the drinking age at 21 or lowering the drinking age even more argue that European countries don’t have the same underage drinking problems as the U.S. They say that because people can drink legally at a younger age, it takes the allure of “breaking the rules” through alcohol consumption and so less youth drink. However, recent data shows that this is simply not the case. Around 50% of European countries have higher intoxication rates among teens and young adults, and also have similar binge drinking patterns.

Proponents of keeping drinking age limits at 21 or lowering the drinking age say that the law is counterintuitive to other minimum age laws. They point to the fact that people can own a gun, join the military, vote, and be convicted of a crime as an adult at age 18, so not allowing people to drink until age 21 is a form of ageism.

The Truth About Alcohol

Whatever side you’re on in the debate about minimum drinking age, the truth is that alcohol can be dangerous and deadly at any age. When alcohol use progresses to alcohol addiction it takes over your life. If you’re worried about your drinking or that of a loved one, reach out to Footprints to Recovery. We provided evidence-based substance abuse treatment that will help you take back your life.

• https://alcoholpolicy.niaaa.nih.gov/the-1984-national-minimum-drinking-age-act
• https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00298/full
• https://www.menshealth.com/health/a26868313/when-does-your-brain-fully-mature/
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7183385/
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24565317/
• https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812753
• https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/report_2688/ShortReport-2688.html
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22525104/
• https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/minimum-legal-drinking-age.htm
• https://www.mdt.mt.gov/visionzero/docs/taskforces/ojjdp_feb01.pdf

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Argumentative Essay- Drinking Age should be increased to 25

The debate about increasing the legal age for drinking is increasingly getting vicious especially in the United States of America. The excessive drinking among young adults especially in college results in negative externalities, and there are legal procedures that can reduce or prevent these problems maybe until a later age when they are mature enough and responsible. Most economies have implemented the requirement of the drinking age as twenty-one instead of the conventional legal age of eighteen or sixteen in some countries (Elements Behavioral Health, 2016). The notion of raised drinking age is greatly gaining traction over the past few years, and the primary purpose is to prevent alcohol-related harm by young people. This paper will support my claim that the drinking age should be raised to twenty-five years because it is the age when the brain and the nervous systems have developed to physical maturity.

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This report is a result of a presentation of the authors that was in favour of the statement that Increasing the Minimal Age of Consumption of Alcohol Decreases the Number of Alcohol-Related Costs in the US. The authors shall therefore suggest, throughout the report, the main arguments in favour of such statement. As the Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA-21) in the US is in place for over than 3 decades, it has been a topic of discussion for both consumers, policy makers and researchers alike. Thus, there is quite a pool of available data and studies that argue both in favour of keeping the MLDA at 21 and of lowering it to (usually) 18 years of age. As there is little evidence available in empirical studies that focused on the impacts on an increase of the MLDA, the authors took the liberty to present an inverted argumentation for this report: the main statistical and empirical data will be drawn from studies that overall incline and / or argue against decreasing the MLDA-21.

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Should the Drinking Age Be Lowered from 21 to a Younger Age?

All 50 US states have set their minimum drinking age to 21 although exceptions do exist on a state-by-state basis for consumption at home, under adult supervision, for medical necessity, and other reasons.

Proponents of lowering the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) from 21 argue that it has not stopped teen drinking, and has instead pushed underage binge drinking into private and less controlled environments, leading to more health and life-endangering behavior by teens.

Opponents of lowering the MLDA argue that teens have not yet reached an age where they can handle alcohol responsibly, and thus are more likely to harm or even kill themselves and others by drinking prior to 21. They contend that traffic fatalities decreased when the MLDA increased. Read more background…

Pro & Con Arguments

Pro 1 18 is the age of legal majority (adulthood) in the United States. Americans enjoy a range of new rights, responsibilities, and freedoms when they turn 18 and become an adult in the eyes of the law. [ 58 ] 18-year-olds may vote in local, state, and federal elections; may serve on juries; and may be charged as an adult if accused of a crime. 18-year-olds are responsible for any legally binding contracts they enter; are liable for negligence; and may be sued. [ 58 ] [ 59 ] [ 60 ] 18-year-olds must register with the Selective Service if male and may be drafted into service at times of war. However, 17-year-olds may enter US military service. [ 60 ] [ 62 ] 18-year-olds may get married without parental consent; buy a house; and enjoy new privacy rights including the shielding of medical, academic, and financial information from parents. [ 60 ] [ 61 ] [ 62 ] However, drinking alcohol remains regulated under a legal age of license. An 18-year-old may legally be responsible children and legally allowed to make life decisions with years of impact, but may not legally drink a beer. [ 58 ] Todd Rutherford, South Carolina State Representative and Democrat House Minority Leader, who filed a bill on Nov. 10, 2021 to lower South Carolina’s MLDA to 18, stated: “This is a personal freedom issue. If you are old enough to fight for our country, if you’re old enough to vote, if you’re old enough to sign on thousands of dollars of students loans for a college education, then you are old enough to have a[n alcoholic] drink.” [ 64 ] Read More

Pro 2 MLDA 21 is ineffective because young adults will consume alcohol regardless, leading to dangerous behaviors. By the time 60% of people are 18, they have had at least one alcoholic drink. 32% of 18-20 year olds admitted to alcohol consumption, according to the 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. [ 65 ] [ 66 ] Prohibiting this age group from drinking in bars, restaurants, and other licensed locations causes them to drink in unsupervised places such as fraternity houses or house parties where they may be more prone to binge drinking and other unsafe behavior. [ 7 ] Rather than criminalizing an act that is legal for other adults, lowering the minimum legal drinking age could allow for more regulatory oversight of drinking by 18- to 20-year-olds, whether by a graduated drinking license (a sort of “drinking learner’s permit”) or simply the enforcement of laws other adults are subject to. [ 64 ] [ 67 ] Read More

Pro 3 MLDA creates a mindset of non-compliance with the law among young adults. Lowering MLDA from 21 to 18 would diminish the thrill of breaking the law to get a drink. Normalizing alcohol consumption as something to be done responsibly and in moderation will make drinking alcohol less of a taboo for young adults entering college and the workforce. [ 14 ] [ 15 ] High non-compliance with MLDA 21 promotes general disrespect and non-compliance with other areas of US law. MLDA 21 encourages young adults to acquire and use false identification documents to procure alcohol. It would be better to have fewer fake IDs in circulation and more respect for the law. [ 17 ] Further, MLDA 21 enforcement is not a priority for many law enforcement agencies. Police are inclined to ignore or under-enforce MLDA 21 because of resource limitations, statutory obstacles, perceptions that punishments are inadequate, and the time and effort required for processing and paperwork. An estimated two of every 1,000 occasions of illegal drinking by youth under 21 results in an arrest. [ 18 ] Combine a lack of consequences with the thrill of breaking the law, and MLDA 21 actually encourages underage drinking and potentially other illegal activities, such as driving while intoxicated and illicit drug use. Lowering the MLDA would make 18- to 20-year-olds subject to the same laws enforced for those 21 and over. Read More

Con 1 Alcohol consumption before age 21 is irresponsible and dangerous. Alcohol consumption can interfere with development of the young adult brain’s frontal lobes (essential for emotional regulation, planning, and organization) which can increase the risk for chronic problems such as vulnerability to addiction, dangerous risk-taking, reduced decision-making ability, memory loss, depression, violence, and suicide. [ 20 ] [ 21 ] [ 22 ] [ 23 ] MLDA 21 reduces traffic accidents and fatalities. 100 of the 102 analyses (98%) in a meta-study of the legal drinking age and traffic accidents found higher legal drinking ages associated with lower rates of traffic accidents. [19] In the 30 years since MLDA 21 was introduced, drunk driving fatalities decreased by a third. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that MLDA 21 has saved 31,417 lives from 1975-2016. Lowering the MLDA would surely increase traffic accidents, injuries, and deaths. [ 50 ] A 2019 study of alchol consumption in India found “a causal channel between alcohol consumption and domestic violence,” in that men who were legally allowed to drink were “substantially more likely to consume alcohol” and “significantly more likely to commit violence against their partners.” Lowering the MLDA is likely to raise domestic abuse rates. [ 71 ] Read More

Con 2 MLDA 21 lowers alcohol consumption and illicit drug use across age groups. MLDA 21 reduces alcohol consumption and the number of underage drinkers. 87% of studies, according to a meta study on MLDA, found higher legal drinking ages associated with lower alcohol consumption. Studies indicate that when the drinking age is 21, those younger than 21 drink less and continue to drink less through their early 20s, and that youth who do not drink until they are 21 tend to drink less as adults. The number of 18-to-20 year-olds who report drinking alcohol in the past month has decreased from 59% in 1985 – one year after Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act – to 39% in 2016. [ 19 ] [ 42 ] [ 49 ] [ 51 ] Many point to lower MLDAs in Europe as proof that the United States should have a lower MLDA. However, a study found “significantly increased alcohol consumption – particularly among boys and those from underprivileged backgrounds – when drinking becomes legal. Raising the minimum legal drinking age in Europe could reduce alcohol poisonings and the early socioeconomic gradient in teenage binge drinking.” [ 68 ] Additionally, lowering the drinking age will invite more use of illicit drugs among 18-21 year olds. The younger a person begins to drink alcohol the more likely it is that they will use other illicit drugs. Lowering MLDA 21 would increase the number of teens who drink and therefore the number of teens who use other drugs. [ 37 ] [ 38 ] [ 39 ] Read More

Con 3 Alcohol consumption should be based on age of license (legality), rather than age of majority (adulthood). Many rights in the United States are conferred on citizens at age 21 or older. A person cannot legally purchase a handgun, gamble in a casino (in most states), or adopt a child until age 21. No one can rent a car (from most companies) at age 25, or run for President until age 35. Drinking should be similarly restricted due to the responsibility required to self and others. [ 24 ] Purchasing and smoking cigarettes and vaping e-cigarettes are similarly regulated. The age of license was raised to 21 on Dec. 20, 2019. Robin Mermelstein, Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explained, “I think that you would be able to see lots of improvements in reduction of tobacco use among teens, all of which is good because the longer you delay any kind of initiation, the less likelihood there is to develop addiction and the less likely it is that use will escalate.” The same goes for alcohol. [ 69 ] [ 70 ] Other things are similarly regulated throughout life. Kids can’t play Tee Ball until they’re four and basketball players can’t play for the NBA until they’re 19. In most states, teens can’t obtain a restricted license until they’re 16. Senior citizens can’t collect social security until age 62. Rarely are these age restrictions arbitrary. [71] [72] [73] [74] [ 71 ] [ 72 ] [ 73 ] [ 74 ] Read More

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Why the drinking age should be lowered

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Why the drinking age should be lowered: an opinion based upon research.

Engs, Ruth C. (1997, 2014). “Why the drinking age should be lowered: An opinion based upon research. Indiana University: Bloomington, IN. Adapted from: IUScholarWorks Repository:  http://hdl.handle.net/2022/17594

The legal drinking age should be lowered to about 18 or 19 and young adults allowed to drink in controlled environments such as restaurants, taverns, pubs and official school and university functions. In these situations responsible drinking could be taught through role modeling and educational programs. Mature and sensible drinking behavior would be expected. This opinion is based upon research that I have been involved in for over thirty years concerning college age youth and the history of drinking in the United States and other cultures.

Although the legal purchase age is 21 years of age, a majority of college students under this age consume alcohol but in an irresponsible manner. This is because drinking by these youth is seen as an enticing "forbidden fruit," a "badge of rebellion against authority" and a symbol of "adulthood." As a nation we have tried prohibition legislation twice in the past for controlling irresponsible drinking problems. This was during National Prohibition in the 1920s and state prohibition during the 1850s. These laws were finally repealed because they were unenforceable and because the backlash towards them caused other social problems. Today we are repeating history and making the same mistakes that occurred in the past. Prohibition did not work then and prohibition for young people under the age of 21 is not working now.

The flaunting of the current laws is readily seen among university students. Those under the age of 21 are more likely to be heavy -- sometimes called "binge" -- drinkers (consuming over 5 drinks at least once a week). For example, 22% of all students under 21 compared to 18% over 21 years of age are heavy drinkers. Among drinkers only, 32% of under-age compared to 24% of legal age are heavy drinkers.

Research from the early 1980s until the present has shown a continuous decrease, and then leveling off, in drinking and driving related variables which has parallel the nation's, and also university students, decrease in per capita consumption. However, these declines started in 1980 before the national 1987 law which mandated states to have 21 year old alcohol purchase laws.

The decrease in drinking and driving problems are the result of many factors and not just the rise in purchase age or the decreased per capita consumption. These include: education concerning drunk driving, designated driver programs, increased seat belt and air bag usage, safer automobiles, lower speed limits, free taxi services from drinking establishments, etc.

While there has been a decrease in per capita consumption and motor vehicle crashes, unfortunately, during this same time period there was an INCREASE in other problems related to heavy and irresponsible drinking among college age youth. Most of these reported behaviors showed little change until AFTER the 21 year old law in 1987. For example from 1982 until 1987 about 46% of students reported "vomiting after drinking." This jumped to over 50% after the law change. Significant increase were also found for other variables: "cutting class after drinking" jumped from 9% to almost 12%; "missing class because of hangover" went from 26% to 28%; "getting lower grade because of drinking" rose from 5% to 7%; and "been in a fight after drinking" increased from 12% to 17%. All of these behaviors are indices of irresponsible drinking. This increase in abusive drinking behavior is due to "underground drinking" outside of adult supervision in student rooms, houses, and apartments where same age individuals congregate. The irresponsible behavior is exhibited because of lack of knowledge of responsible drinking behaviors, reactance motivation (rebellion against the law), or student sub-culture norms.

Beginning in the first decade of the 21st century, distilled spirits [hard liquor] began to be the beverage of choice rather than beer among collegians. Previously beer had been the beverage of choice among students. A 2013 study of nursing students, for example, revealed that they consumed an average of 4.3 shots of liquor compared to 2.6 glasses of beer on a weekly basis.

This change in beverage choice along with irresponsible drinking patterns among young collegians has led to increased incidences of alcohol toxicity - in some cases leading to death from alcohol poisoning. However, the percent of students who consume alcohol or are heavy or binge drinkers has been relatively stable for the past 30 years.

Based upon the fact that our current prohibition laws are not working, the need for alternative approaches from the experience of other, and more ancient cultures, who do not have these problems need to be tried. Groups such as Italians, Greeks, Chinese and Jews, who have few drinking related problems, tend to share some common characteristics. Alcohol is neither seen as a poison or a magic potent, there is little or no social pressure to drink, irresponsible behavior is never tolerated, young people learn at home from their parents and from other adults how to handle alcohol in a responsible manner, there is societal consensus on what constitutes responsible drinking. Because the 21 year old drinking age law is not working, and is counterproductive, it behooves us as a nation to change our current prohibition law and to teach responsible drinking techniques for those who chose to consume alcoholic beverages.

Research articles that support this opinion are found in the Indiana University Repository at: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/17133/browse?type=title

and https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/17130/browse?type=title

Some material here also used in: Engs, Ruth C. "Should the drinking age be lowered to 18 or 19." In Karen Scrivo, "Drinking on Campus," CQ Researcher 8 (March 20,1998):257.

Alcohol Research and Health History resources

(c) Copyright, 1975-2024. Ruth C. Engs, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405

The Legal Drinking Age: 18, 21, or 25?

By Elements Behavioral Health posted on January 22, 2013 in Adolescent Issues

Debates over the age of legal drinking in the U.S. are a common occurrence, especially at times of the year when it comes into the spotlight, like during spring break and around graduation. Many people think our Puritanical ways are responsible for a drinking age that is higher than in European countries and that this leads to more rebellious behavior. The argument is a regular one, but did you know that some people also advocate for a higher drinking age? There are many reasons to be on either side of the debate.

Lower the Drinking Age to 18

Too often, casual proponents of lowering the drinking age give emotional and unsubstantiated reasons for allowing 18 to 20 year olds to drink. Some of the favorite arguments include the fact that many people this age drink anyway, in spite of the law, and that if younger people were allowed to drink they would be less rebellious and secretive and more responsible.

What is certainly true is that many underage people drink , and some drink excessively. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , or CDC, drinking by those under the age of 21 is a serious public health problem. In the U.S., 11 percent of all alcohol consumed is by youths between the ages of 12 and 20, and 90 percent of their drinking is done while bingeing. On average, these young people drink more in one sitting than adults do. A 2009 survey conducted by the CDC found that in the 30 days prior to the study, 42 percent of high school students had consumed some amount of alcohol, 24 percent binged on alcohol, and 28 percent drove with someone who had been drinking.

Many proponents of a lowered drinking age blame the above behaviors on the fact that drinking is a taboo for most young people and, therefore, an act of rebellion. They also cite society’s attitude toward drinking as more of an issue than the drinking age. As Americans, our society treats drinking as a way to relieve stress, as a fun element of society, and rewards the irresponsible behavior that follows from binge drinking .

If the drinking age were to be lowered to 18, young people would perhaps feel less compelled to drink in secret and to binge while doing so. They would be allowed to drink in bars and restaurants where behavior, as well as the amount consumed, can be regulated.

While it may be absolute fact that young people drink and flaunt the age restrictions, evidence that raising the drinking age would negate dangerous behaviors is limited. A lowered drinking age would need to be accompanied by shifts in alcohol education and the manner in which society in general treats alcohol consumption.

Raise the Drinking Age to 25

Those on the other side of the issue are prone to the same sentimental reasons for keeping kids from drinking even longer. The statistics do not lie and they are scary. That young people drink so much may be related to the drinking age, but some believe that the restriction should be raised even higher, to the age of 25. Many proponents of this idea cite the excessive drinking, not of high schoolers, but of college students.

On college campuses, it is rarely a prerequisite to be of drinking age to find and consume alcohol. Parties and fake identification lead to plenty of drinking among the first, second, and third year students who have not yet turned 21. According to the Core Institute, almost 73 percent of college students drink at least sometimes, and the average male freshman in college drinks an average of 7.4 alcoholic beverages per week. Nearly one third of college students have missed a class because of drinking, and one fifth failed an exam for the same reason. Almost 90 percent of sexual assaults on college campuses involve alcohol.

The facts regarding college alcohol use are straightforward. Because there is a mix of underage and of age students on campuses, the alcohol flows rather freely. If the drinking age were to be raised to 25, most students on campus would be underage, and as some hope, it could curtail the excessive drinking and resulting negative consequences.

As with the arguments for lowering the drinking age, these seem reasonable, but untested. Whether the age limit should be lowered, raised, or remain the same, will undoubtedly continue to be debated and the right answer may be difficult to find.

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Sorry, college students, but the drinking age should stay at 21

by German Lopez

It seems like conventional wisdom: The drinking age should be 18. After all, why should you be able to vote or serve your country in the military, but not legally buy a drink?

But there's a very compelling case for keeping the drinking age at 21: It saves lives. That may be hard to believe, given how many people flout the laws and drink anyway, but it's been consistently found to be true in research.

Saving lives from alcohol has serious public health benefits. About 88,000 Americans died on average each year from alcohol-related causes from 2006 to 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . And that estimate doesn't account for the rise in alcohol-related deaths over the past several years, or the alcohol-linked crimes and millions of emergency room visits each year that don't result in deaths.

It's important to note a minimum drinking age of 21 doesn't prevent all drinking among teenagers and 20-year-olds. But it deters some drinking, and that has public health benefits.

The drinking age saves lives

At its heart, the drinking age is supposed to stop people from drinking until they're responsible adults. And the research shows it works — to some extent.

"The evidence is overwhelming [that] raising the age reduces consumption," said Richard Bonnie, a University of Virginia professor of health and law. "Even though consumption remains significant among the younger population and increases as people get older, it's still lower than it would be if you lowered the age to 18."

A 2014 review of the research published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs bore this out: Although many young people disobey the drinking age, the evidence shows that it has depressed drinking and saved lives.

The review found the drinking age saves at least hundreds of young lives annually just as a result of reduced alcohol-age-related traffic fatalities among underage drivers. The review pointed to one study after the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, which raised the legal drinking age from 18 to 21: It found that the number of fatally injured drivers with a positive blood alcohol concentration decreased by 57 percent among ages 16 to 20, compared with a 39 percent decrease for those 21 to 24 and 9 percent for those 25 and older. Other studies had similar positive findings.

Chances are the number of lives saved is higher, potentially in the thousands each year, when accounting for alcohol-related deaths beyond drunk driving, such as liver cirrhosis, other accidents, and violent behavior.

The review also pointed to New Zealand, which reduced its drinking age from 20 to 18 in 1999. The country saw significant increases in drinking among ages 18 to 19, bigger increases among those 16 to 17 years old, and a rise in alcohol-related crashes among 15- to 19-year-olds.

How the drinking age works

Critics of the drinking age commonly argue that it forces youth to drink in secret, which may lead to binge drinking as people stash booze to secretly consume all at once. But the 2014 review of the research found no evidence for this, and instead concluded that the national drinking age law reduced access to alcohol and consumption.

"The basic idea behind these laws is to reduce youth access to these substances," William DeJong, a professor at Boston University School of Health and a co-author of the research review, wrote in an email. "The evidence is clear that, the later a young person takes a first drink, the less likely they are to experience negative alcohol-related consequences as adults."

The law accomplishes this in two big ways. Obviously, it makes it harder to buy alcohol before 21. But it also breaks up social groups in a way that makes alcohol less accessible: If the drinking age were 18, someone who is a freshman or sophomore in high school is much more likely to have access to an 18-year-old senior in high school. But if the drinking age is 21, a freshman or sophomore in high school is not going to have as easy of access to a 21-year-old who's likely working or in college.

The second effect — the breaking up of social groups — also explains why a drinking age beyond 21 might not be very effective. Since 21-year-olds are likely to have access to 25-year-olds through their jobs and college, they could still easily access booze even if the drinking age was raised to, for example, 25. So the negative effects of raising the drinking age to 25 — the economic impact, costs of enforcement, and deterioration of personal freedoms — might not be worth the few lives saved.

These principles apply to other substances, as well. A 2015 report from the Institute of Medicine, which Bonnie of the University of Virginia contributed to, found raising the smoking age to 21 could prevent approximately 223,000 premature deaths among Americans born between 2000 and 2019. Why? Older friends and family "are largely where young people get their tobacco," Bonnie said. "If you raise [the smoking age] to 21, over time we think that's going to have a significant effect on separating these social networks."

So the laws may not be perfect, and they may be disobeyed at times. But the overall evidence is clear: A drinking age of 21 reduces use and saves lives.

Other policies can help reduce alcohol consumption

The drinking age, however, should be just one part of a broader array of policies that help reduce alcohol abuse and deaths.

Many, many studies, for example, have found benefits from a higher alcohol tax. A recent review of the research from David Roodman, senior adviser for the Open Philanthropy Project, made the case:

[H]igher prices do correlate with less drinking and lower incidence of problems such as cirrhosis deaths. And I see little reason to doubt the obvious explanation: higher prices cause less drinking. A rough rule of thumb is that each 1 percent increase in alcohol price reduces drinking by 0.5 percent. Extrapolating from some of the most powerful studies, I estimate an even larger impact on the death rate from alcohol-caused diseases: 1-3 percent within months. By extension, a 10 percent price increase would cut the death rate 9-25 percent. For the US in 2010, this represents 2,000-6,000 averted deaths/year.

This wasn't the first positive finding in favor of raising the alcohol tax, but it was one of the most convincing. Roodman found not just that high-quality research supports a higher alcohol tax, but that the effects seem to grow stronger the higher the tax is.

So for the US, boosting alcohol prices 10 percent could save as many as 6,000 lives each year. To put that in context, paying about 50 cents more for a six-pack of Bud Light could save thousands of lives. And this is a conservative estimate, since it only counts alcohol-related liver cirrhosis deaths — the number of lives saved would be higher if it accounted for deaths due to alcohol-related violence and car crashes.

Aside from raising taxes, a 2014 report from the RAND Drug Policy Research Center suggested state-run shops (like those in Ohio and Virginia) kept prices higher, cut access to youth, and reduced overall levels of use. And a 2013 study from RAND of South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety Program , which briefly jails people whose drinking has repeatedly gotten them in trouble with the law (like a DUI) if they fail a twice-a-day alcohol blood test, attributed a 12 percent reduction in repeat DUI arrests and a 9 percent reduction in domestic violence arrests at the county level to the program.

Like the drinking age, these policies won't eliminate problematic drinking. But coupled with the drinking age, they can help — and potentially save tens of thousands of lives in the process.

Watch: Alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana

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Patel: drinking age needs to be raised to 25.

It’s Sunday morning. I magine that you wake up violently sick to your stomach with no recollection of the night before. Panic, fear   and anxiety set in as your body is convulsing from the inside out. What you don’t know is the long-term effects that drinking has on the body, especially the brain.

A typical hangover is how many college students start their Sunday mornings. About 80% of college students drink and 50% participate in binge drinking.   Then they do it all over again next week. Therefore, due to this irresponsibility and lack of maturity, the drinking age needs to be raised to the age of 25. College is especially not the time to be experimenting with drugs and drinking. 

The legal drinking age is 21 in the United States but can go down to 16 in some countries outside of the United States . However, getting illegal access to alcohol is easier today than ever before with ordering fake IDs online and having connections with older people. These days, many fake IDs are hard to spot and easy to scan as well. 

Alcohol can have detrimental effects on the body, especially on the brain. The frontal lobe of the brain doesn’t fully develop till the age of 25. Alcohol can further delay brain development as well. 

That means that   people under the age tend to have issues making decisions, are impulsive   and have difficulty concentrating. If you combine that with using alcohol, it can lead to irresponsible choices and sometimes even severe consequences with the school and the law. 

Drinking underage can also cause issues with mental health. Studies suggest  an increased risk for anxiety, depression , and low- self-esteem.

Additionally, it can lead to further body issues such as heart , liver problems  and cancer as well.

A big side effect of drinking is weight gain since alcohol slows the metabolism of foods. Obesity can contribute to many additional health problems later on in life.

With the current drinking age, there is an overlap with the age people get their driving licenses. Currently, one of the leading causes of death for adolescents and young adults is car accidents. About 30% of accidents are caused by drunk drivers . With the drinking age being raised, this number could decrease.

Additionally, by increasing the drinking age, colleges would have less of an issue with underage drinking and run-ins with the cops. Students could focus more on school, themselves and their future. While a big part of college culture is drinking, by increasing the drinking age and getting less access to alcohol, there would be less peer pressure on students to conform to social standards. 

This is also a good opportunity for those underage to save money. The average American spends $583 on alcohol a year. Students who are living on their own, paying for school, books and student loans, can save more money rather than spend it on alcohol. 

Overall, starting drinking from an early age can lead to alcoholism .

While it may come as a disappointment for increasing the drinking age, in the end, it will have more benefits than downsides. While drinking can be fun to do every now and then, it needs to be done at an older age of 25 when people are more mature, more financially stable , and fully understand the long-term effects of their actions. Overall, you don’t need to drink to enjoy a night of fun. It’s better to wake up in the morning well-rested   rather than with no memory of the night before.

This story was written by Krisha Patel. She can be reached at [email protected] .

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The Minimum Legal Drinking Age and Public Health

In summer 2008, more than 100 college presidents and other higher education officials signed the Amethyst Initiative, which calls for a reexamination of the minimum legal drinking age in the United States. The current age-21 limit in the United States is higher than in Canada (18 or 19, depending on the province), Mexico (18), and most western European countries (typically 16 or 18). A central argument of the Amethyst Initiative is that the U.S. minimum legal drinking age policy results in more dangerous drinking than would occur if the legal drinking age were lower. A companion organization called Choose Responsibility—led in part by Amethyst Initiative founder John McCardell, former Middlebury College president—explicitly proposes “a series of changes that will allow 18–20 year-olds to purchase, possess and consume alcoholic beverages” (see 〈 http://www.choose responsibility.org/proposal/ 〉).

Fueled in part by the high-profile national media attention garnered by the Amethyst Initiative and Choose Responsibility, activists and policymakers in several states, including Kentucky, Wisconsin, South Carolina, Missouri, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Vermont, have put forth various legislative proposals to lower their state's drinking age from 21 to 18, though no state has adopted a lower minimum legal drinking age yet.

Does the age-21 drinking limit in the United States reduce alcohol consumption by young adults and its harms, or as the signatories of the Amethyst Initiative contend, is it “not working”? Alcohol consumption and its harms are extremely common among young adults. According to results from the 2006–2007 National Health Interview Survey, adults age 18–25 report that on average they drank on 36 days in the previous year and typically consumed 5.1 drinks on the days they drank. If consumed at a single sitting, five drinks meets the clinical definition of “binge” or “heavy episodic” drinking. This consumption contributes to a substantial public health problem: five drinks for a 160-pound man with a limited time between drinks leads to a blood alcohol concentration of about 0.12 percent and results in moderate to severe impairments in coordination, concentration, reflexes, reaction time, depth perception, and peripheral vision. For comparison, the legal limit for driving in the United States is generally 0.08 percent blood alcohol content. Not surprisingly, motor vehicle accidents (the leading cause of death and injury in this age group), homicides, suicides, falls, and other accidents are all strongly associated with alcohol consumption ( Bonnie and O'Connell, 2004 ). Because around 80 percent of deaths among young adults are due to these “external” causes (as opposed to cancer, infectious disease, or other “internal” causes), policies that change the ways in and extent to which young people consume alcohol have the potential to affect the mortality rate of this population substantially.

In this paper, we summarize a large and compelling body of empirical evidence which shows that one of the central claims of the signatories of the Amethyst Initiative is incorrect: setting the minimum legal drinking age at 21 clearly reduces alcohol consumption and its major harms. However, this finding alone is not a sufficient justification for the current minimum legal drinking age, in part because it does not take into account the benefits of alcohol consumption. To put it another way, it is likely that restricting the alcohol consumption of people in their late 20s (or even older) would also reduce alcohol-related harms at least modestly. However, given the much lower rate at which adults in this age group experience alcohol-related harms, their utility from drinking likely outweighs the associated costs. Thus, when considering at what age to set the minimum legal drinking age, we need to determine if the reduction in alcohol-related harms justifies the reduction in consumer surplus that results from preventing people from consuming alcohol.

We begin this paper by examining the case for government intervention targeting the alcohol consumption of young adults. We develop an analytic framework to identify the parameters that are required to compare candidate ages at which to set the minimum legal drinking age. Next, we discuss the challenges inherent in estimating the effects of the minimum legal drinking age and describe what we believe are the two most compelling approaches to address these challenges: a panel fixed-effects approach and a regression discontinuity approach. We present estimates of the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on mortality from these two designs, and we also discuss what is known about the relationship between the minimum legal drinking age and other adverse outcomes such as nonfatal injury and crime. We then document the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on alcohol consumption, which lets us estimate the costs of adverse alcohol-related events on a per-drink basis. Finally we return to the analytic framework and use it to determine what the empirical evidence suggests is the correct age at which to set the minimum legal drinking age.

Economic Economic Considerations for Determining the Optimal Minimum Legal Drinking Age

Alcohol consumption by young adults results in numerous harms including deaths, injuries, commission of crime, criminal victimization, risky sexual behavior, and reduced workforce productivity. A substantial portion of these harms are either directly imposed on other individuals (as is the case with crime) or largely transferred to society as a whole through insurance markets as is the case with injuries ( Phelps, 1988 ). In addition, there is the theoretical possibility (supported by laboratory evidence) that youths may discount future utility too heavily, underestimate the future harm of their current behavior, and/or mispredict how they will feel about their choices in the future ( O'Donoghue and Rabin, 2001 ). If this is the case, even risks that are borne directly by the drinker are not being fully taken into account when an individual is deciding how much alcohol to consume. Given that young adults are imposing costs on others and probably not fully taking into account their own cost of alcohol consumption, there is a case for government intervention targeting their alcohol consumption. The minimum legal drinking age represents one approach to reducing drinking by young adults. 1

Determining the optimal age at which to set the minimum legal drinking age requires estimates of the loss in consumer surplus that results from reducing peoples' alcohol consumption. It also requires estimating the benefits to the drinker and to others from reducing alcohol-related harms. Unfortunately, it is not possible to obtain credible estimates of these key parameters at every point in the age distribution. First, there are no credible estimates of the effects of drinking ages lower than 18 or higher than 21 because the minimum legal drinking age has not been set outside this range in a signififi cant portion of the United States since the 1930s, and the countries with current drinking ages outside this range look very different from the United States. In fact, as we describe in detail in the next section, even estimating the effects on adverse outcomes of a drinking age in the 18 to 21 range is challenging. Second, we lack good ways to estimate the consumer surplus loss that results from restricting drinking, a problem that has characterized the entire literature on optimal alcohol control and taxation (see Gruber, 2001 , for a general discussion).

Thus, rather than try to estimate the optimal age at which to set the minimum legal drinking age, we focus on an analysis that is more feasible and useful from a policy perspective. The drinking age in the United States is currently 21, and there is no push to raise it. If it is lowered, there are many reasons to believe it will most likely be lowered to 18. First, the primary effort by activists for a lower drinking age is to lower the age to 18, either on its own or in conjunction with other alcoholcontrol initiatives such as education programs. In fact, 18 was the most commonly chosen age among the states that adopted lower minimum legal drinking ages in the 1970s. Second, 18 is the age of majority for other important activities such as voting, military service, and serving on juries, thus making it a natural focal point (though notably many states set different minimum ages for a variety of other activities such as driving, consenting to sexual activity, gambling, and purchasing handguns). Finally, many other countries have set their minimum legal drinking age at 18.

Because a change in the drinking age is likely to involve lowering it from 21 to 18, we focus on estimating the effect of lowering the drinking age by this amount on alcohol consumption, costs borne by the drinker, and costs borne by other people. Alcohol consumption can result in harms through many different channels. The effects of age-based drinking restrictions on long-term harms are very hard to estimate so we focus on the major acute harms that result from alcohol consumption including: deaths, nonfatal injuries, and crime. We pay particular attention to the effect of the drinking age on mortality because mortality is well-measured, has been the outcome focused on by much of the previous research on this topic, and is arguably the most costly of alcohol-related harms. To avoid the difficulty of trying to estimate the increase in consumer surplus that results from allowing people to drink, we estimate how much drinking is likely to increase if the drinking age is lowered from 21 to 18 and compare this to the likely increase in harms to the drinker and to other people. This allows us to characterize the harms in terms of dollars per drink. Since we are missing some of the acute harms and all of the long-term harms of alcohol consumption, the estimates we present in this paper are lower bounds of the costs associated with each drink.

Adding how much the drinker paid for the drink to the cost per drink borne by the drinker yields a lower bound on how much a person would have to value the drink for its consumption to be the result of a fully informed and rational choice. The per-drink cost borne by people other than the drinker provides a lower bound on the externality cost. If the externality cost is large or if the total cost of a drink (costs imposed on others plus costs the drinker bears privately plus the the price of the drink itself) is larger than what we believe the value of the drink is to the person consuming it, then this would suggest that the higher drinking age is justified.

The Evaluation Problem in the Context of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age

Determining how the minimum legal drinking age affects alcohol consumption and its adverse consequences is challenging. An extensive public health literature documents the strong correlation between alcohol consumption and adverse events, but estimates from these studies are of limited value for determining whether the minimum legal drinking age should be set at 18, 21, or some other age. Their main limitation is that the correlation between alcohol consumption and adverse events is probably due in part to factors other than alcohol consumption, such as variation across individuals in their tolerance for risk. People with a high tolerance for risk may be more likely both to drink heavily and to put themselves in danger in other ways, such as driving recklessly, even when they are sober. If this is the case, then predictions based on these correlations of how much public policy might reduce the harms of alcohol consumption will be biased upwards. Moreover, estimates of the average relationship between alcohol consumption and harms in the population may not be informative about the effects of the minimum legal drinking age, which probably disproportionately reduces drinking among the most law-abiding members of the population. This suggests that direct estimates of the effect of the drinking age on alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harms are needed if we are to compare the effects of different drinking ages.

Estimating the effects of the minimum legal drinking age requires comparing the alcohol consumption patterns and adverse event rates of young adults subject to the law with a similar group of young adults not subject to it. Since all young adults under age 21 in the United States are subject to the minimum legal drinking age, difficult to find a reasonable comparison group for this population. Because of cultural differences and different legal regimes, young adults in countries where the drinking age is lower than 21 are unlikely to constitute a good comparison group.

However, researchers working on this issue have identified two plausible comparison groups for 18 to 21 year-olds subject to the minimum legal drinking age. The first is composed of young people who were born just a few years earlier in the the same state (and who thus grew up in very similar circumstances) but who faced a lower legal drinking age due to changes in state drinking age policies. In the 1970s, 39 states lowered their minimum legal drinking age to 18, 19, or 20. These drinking age reductions were followed by increases in motor vehicle fatalities, which were documented by numerous researchers at the time (for a review, see Wagenaar and Toomey, 2002 ). This evidence led states to reconsider their decisions and encouraged aged Congress to adopt the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, which required states to adopt a minimum drinking age of 21 or risk losing 10 percent of their federal highway funds. By 1990, every state had responded to the federal law by increasing its drinking age to 21. Thus, within the same state some youths were allowed to drink legally when they turned 18, while those born just a short time later had to wait until they turned 21. We use a fixed-effects panel approach to compare the alcohol consumption and adverse event rates of these two groups.

The second approach for identifying a credible comparison group is to consider a period when the minimum legal drinking age is 21 and compare people just under 21 who are still subject to the minimum legal drinking age with those just over 21 who can drink legally. These two groups of people are likely to be very similar, except that the slightly older group is not subject to the minimum legal drinking age. This approach is called a regression discontinuity design ( Thistlewaite and Campbell, 1960 ; Hahn, Todd, and Van der Klaauw, 2001 ). In the next two sections, we describe these two research designs in detail and how we use them to estimate the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on mortality.

Panel Estimates of the Effect of the Drinking Age on Mortality

The panel approach to estimating the effects of the minimum legal drinking age focuses on the changes in the drinking age that occurred in most states in the 1970s and 1980s. We begin by presenting graphical evidence in Figure 1 on the relationship between the drinking age and the incidence of fatal motor vehicle accidents. The data underlying the series in Figure 1 come from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System for 1975–1993 for the 39 states that lowered their drinking age during the 1970s and 1980s. In figure, we present the time series of deaths due to motor vehicle accidents among: 18–20 year-olds during nighttime (solid circles); 18–20 year-olds during daytime (dotted line with hollow squares); and 25–29 year-olds during nighttime (stars). The time series in the figure are centered on the month in which a state took its largest step towards raising its drinking age back to 21. The daytime/nighttime distinction is standard in the literature (for example, Ruhm, 1996 ; Dee, 1999 ) and is useful for understanding the effects of young adult alcohol consumption because the majority (67 percent) of fatal motor vehicle accidents occurring in the evening hours (defined here as between 8:00 p.m. and 5:59 a.m.) involve alcohol, while only about a quarter of fatal motor vehicle accidents occurring in the daytime hours involve alcohol.

Notes : This figure is estimated from the 39 states that lowered their drinking age to below 21 at some point in the 1970s or 1980s. A nighttime accident is one occurring between 8:00 p.m. and 5:59 a.m.; 67 percent of these accidents involved alcohol and 26 percent of daytime accidents involved alcohol. The figure is centered on the year a state took its largest step towards raising its drinking age back to 21.

We also plot the percent of 18–20 year-olds that can drink legally in the 39 states that experimented with a lower minimum legal drinking age. This line does not drop instantly from 100 to 0 percent because some states increased their drinking age from 18 to 19 and then from 19 to 21 a few years later, and other states allowed people who could drink legally when the drinking age was increased to continue drinking legally.

Figure 1 reveals that, in the seven years after the increase in the drinking age, there is a substantial reduction in deaths among 18–20 year-olds due to nighttime motor vehicle accidents and much smaller reductions in deaths of 18–20 year-olds due to daytime accidents and of 25–29 year-olds due to nighttime accidents. That the largest reduction in death rates occurs for the type of accident most likely to drop in response to an increase in the drinking age is consistent with the possibility that the increase in the drinking age reduced the motor vehicle fatality rates of 18–20 year-olds. However, the graphical evidence in favor of the hypothesis that increasing the drinking age reduced deaths is not fully compelling. First, the decline in deaths due to nighttime motor vehicle accidents among 18–20 year-olds is not as abrupt as the decline in the percent of this population that can drink legally. Second, as can be seen in the figure, the number of 18–20 year-olds that die in nighttime accidents was already declining before the drinking age was raised in most states. For this reason turn to a state-level panel data approach that allows us to adjust for trends and time-invariant differences across states and estimate the effect of the minimum legal drinking on mortality rates.

To obtain an estimate of the decline in mortality attributable to the drinking age, we implement a panel regression analysis of the following form:

where ( Y st ) is the number of motor vehicle fatalities per 100,000 person-years for one of four age groups: 15–17 year-olds, 18–20 year-olds (the group directly affected by changes in the drinking age), 21–24 year-olds, and 25–29 year-olds in state ( s ) in time period ( t ). For each age group, we separate daytime and nighttime motor vehicle fatality rates. As noted above, any effects of the minimum legal drinking age on motor vehicle fatalities should be primarily on evening accidents because they are much more likely to involve alcohol. The regressions include a dummy variable for each state (θ s ) to remove time-invariant differences between states and dummy variables for each year (μ t ) to absorb any atypical year-to-year variation. 2 In addition, the regression includes state-specific linear time trends (ψ st ). The inclusion of state-specific dummies in combination with the state-specific time trends mean that the regression will return estimates of how raising the drinking age changes the level of motor vehicle mortality in a typical state, while adjusting for any state-specific trends in outcomes that preceded the change in the drinking age. This approach lets us compare people born in the same state just a few years apart who became eligible to drink legally at different ages. The variable MLDA (an acronym derived from Minimum Legal Drinking Age) is the proportion of 18 to 20 year-olds that can legally drink beer in state s in time t , and the coefficient on this variable is our best estimate of the impact on mortality rates of lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18. 3 The regressions are weighted by the age-specific state-year population, and the standard errors clustered on state are presented in brackets below the parameter estimates ( Bertrand, Duflo, and Mullainathan, 2004 ).

The estimates of the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on mortality for the subgroups described above are presented in Table 1 and are consistent with a large body of previous research showing that the minimum legal drinking age has economically significant effects on the motor vehicle mortality rates of young adults (for example, Dee, 1999 ; Lovenheim and Slemrod, 2010 ; Wagenaar and Toomey, 2002 ). Specifically, we find that going from a regime in which no 18–20 year-olds are legally allowed to drink to one in which all 18–20 year-olds are allowed to drink results in 4.74 more fatal motor vehicle accidents in the evening per 100,000 18–20 year-olds annually. Relative to the base death rate for this age and time of day, this is a 17 percent effect (4.74/28.1 = 0.17), and it is statistically significant. The associated point estimate for daytime fatalities (the majority of which do not involve alcohol) among 18–20 year-olds is much smaller, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the daytime fatality rate, and it is not statistically significant. In addition, the changes in evening fatalities among 15–17 year-olds and 25–29 year-olds (whose behaviors should not be directly affected by the drinking age changes) are not statistically significant, though the 95 percent confidence intervals around the point estimates for these groups cannot rule out meaningfully large proportional effects relative to the low average death rates for individuals in these age groups. Overall, these patterns are consistent with a causal effect of easier alcohol access on motor vehicle fatalities among the 18–20 year-old young adults whose drinking behaviors were directly targeted by the laws. However, the rate of motor vehicle fatalities in the evening for 21–24 year-olds also changes when the minimum legal drinking age changes. While the proportional effect size for 21–24 year-olds (2.61/23.2 = 0.1125, or about 11 percent) is substantially smaller than for 18–20 year-olds (17 percent), this approach does not have sufficient statistical power to reject that the two estimates are equal. The apparent effect of the minimum legal drinking age on fatalities among 21–24 year-olds could reflect the effects of other unobserved anti-drunk driving campaigns that were correlated with drinking-age changes and targeted at young adults, or it may reflect spillovers, as members of these two groups are likely to socialize.

Panel Estimates of the Effect of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age on Motor Vehicle Fatalities (deaths per 100,000)

Source: The mortality rates are estimated using data from the Fatal Accident Reporting System 1975–1993.

Notes: For the regression results presented in this table, the top number is the point estimate and its standard error is directly below in brackets. All the regressions include year fixed effects, and state-specific time trends. The regressions are weighted by the age-specific state-year population. The dependent variable in each regression is the motor vehicle fatality rate per 100,000 person years for a particular age group and time of day. A nighttime accident is one occurring between 8:00 p.m. and 5:59 a.m.; 67 percent of these accidents involve alcohol and 26 percent of daytime accidents involve alcohol. The independent variable in each regression is the proportion of 18–20 year-olds who can drink legally. The "Average mortality rate" is that from motor vehicle accidents for each particular age group and time of day.

In Table 2 , we present estimates of the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on a more comprehensive set of causes of death. The mortality rates for this part of the analysis are estimated from the National Vital Statistics death certificate records. Since these records are a census of deaths and include substantial detail on the cause of death, it is possible to examine causes of death other than motor vehicle accidents. We present estimates of the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on all-cause mortality in Table 2 using the same fixed-effects specification as in Table 1 . Specifically, the dependent variable in each regression in the bold row of Table 2 is the death rate of 18–20 year-olds per 100,000 person-years estimated from the death certificate records. All models in Table 2 include state fixed effects, year fixed effects, and linear state-specific time trends. To increase the precision of the estimates, the regression are weighted by the size of the relevant population in that state and time period.

Panel Estimates of the Effect of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age on Mortality Rates (deaths per 100,000)

Notes: Each of the estimates presented above is from a separate regression, and its standard error is presented directly below it in brackets. The dependent variable in each regression is the mortality rate per 100,000 person years for a particular age group and cause of death. The independent variable of interest is the proportion of 18–20 year-olds that can drink legally. The regressions are weighted by the age-specific state-year population. All regressions have year fixed effects, state fixed effects, and state-specific time trends. The mortality rates are estimated from death certificate records for the 1975–1993 period. Deaths are categorized according to the primary cause of death on the death certificate.

The first estimate for all-cause mortality in Table 2 suggests that when all 18–20 year-olds are allowed to drink, there are 7.8 more deaths of 18–20 year-olds per 100,000 person-years (on a base of 113 deaths) than when no 18–20 year-olds are allowed to drink. This estimate is not statistically significant at conventional levels. Though the table reveals no evidence of a statistically significant increase in deaths due to internal causes (like cancer), it does reveal statistically significant increases in deaths due to motor vehicle accidents (4.15 more deaths on a base of 45.5 deaths, or a 4.15/45.5 = 0.091, or a 9.1 percent effect). This does not exactly match the estimate from Table 1 because the Vital Statistics records do not include the time of day when the accident occurred, so we are unable to split the rates based on the time of the accident as we did with the earlier data. 4 Table 2 also shows that increasing the share of young adults legal to drink leads to a statistically significant 10 percent increase in suicides (1.29/12.8 = 0.10), which is consistent with work by Birckmayer and Hemenway (1999) and Carpenter (2004b) . There is no evidence of statistically significant effects on the other causes of death for 18–20 year-olds. The lack of a discernable impact on deaths directly due to alcohol is surprising, though in this period deaths due to alcohol overdoses appear to have been significantly undercounted ( Hanzlick, 1988 ).

In the remainder of Table 2 , we present estimates of the relationship between the proportion of 18–20 year-olds that can drink legally and the mortality rates of three age groups: 15–17, 21–24, and 25–29 year-olds. Since the proportion of 18–20 year-olds that can drink should not directly affect these groups (except possibly through spillovers), these groups should experience at most modest increases in mortality rates. As can be seen in the table, with the exception of 21–24 year-olds there is no evidence of statistically significant changes in the mortality rates of the three age groups surrounding 18–20 year-olds. This suggests that the changes in mortality rates of 18–20 year-olds are probably not being driven by safety initiatives that may have been implemented at the same time the drinking age was increased as these would have affected the other age groups also. Overall, the patterns in Tables 1 and ​ and2 2 suggest that easing access to alcohol increases the overall death rate of 18–20 year-olds due to increases in two of the leading causes of death for this age group: motor vehicle accidents and suicides.

Regression Discontinuity Estimates of the Effect of the Drinking Age on Mortality

Our other main strategy for identifying a plausible comparison group for people subject to the minimum legal drinking age is to take advantage of the fact that the drinking age “turns off” suddenly when a person turns 21. People slightly younger than 21 are subject to the drinking age law while those slightly older than 21 are not, but otherwise the two groups have very similar characteristics. If nothing other than the legal regime changes discretely at age 21, then a discrete mortality rates at age 21 can plausibly be attributed to the drinking age.

Again, we begin with the graphical approach by presenting the age profile of mortality rates for 19–22 year-olds in Figure 2 . This figure is estimated using Vital Statistics mortality records from 1997–2003. The age profiles are death rates per 100,000 person-years for motor vehicle accidents (dark circles), suicides (cross hatches), and deaths due to internal causes (open squares), by month of age. A best-fit line for ages 19–20 shows a decreasing trend in motor vehicle fatalities. Similarly a best-fit line from age 21 to 22 shows a decreasing trend. However, the two trends show clear evidence of a discontinuity at age 21, when drinking alcohol becomes legal. The visual evidence of an effect of the minimum legal drinking age in the regression discontinuity setting in Figure 2 for motor vehicle accidents is notably stronger than the associated evidence from the annual time-series trends in Figure 1 . There is also evidence of an increase in deaths due to suicide at age 21. In contrast, as can be seen in Figure 2 , there is little evidence of a discontinuous change in deaths due to internal causes at the minimum legal drinking age of 21.

Notes : The death rates are estimated by combining the National Vital Statistics records with population estimates from the U.S. Census.

To estimate the size of the discrete jumps in the outcomes we observe in Figure 2 , we estimate the following regression:

where y is the age-specific mortality rate. MLDA is a dummy variable that takes on a value of 1 for observations 21 and older, and 0 otherwise. The regressions include a quadratic polynomial in age, f( age ), fully interacted with the MLDA dummy. This serves to adjust for age-related changes in outcomes and, as seen in Figure 2 , is sufficiently flexible to fit the age profile of death rates. The Birthday variable is a dummy variable for the month in which the decedent's 21 st birthday falls and is intended to absorb the pronounced effect of birthday celebrations on mortality rates. We have recentered the age variable to take the value zero at age 21. As a result the parameter of interest in this model is β 1 , which measures the size of the discrete increase in mortality that occurs when people turn 21 and are no longer subject to the minimum legal drinking age. The parameter β 1 has the same interpretation as the parameter α from the panel models: it is the effect of going from no one in a population being allowed to drink legally to everyone in a population being allowed to drink legally.

We present regression estimates of the paramete β 1 in Table 3 . The regressions are estimated using mortality rates for the 48 months between ages 19 and 22. As with the state-year panel evidence in Table 2 , we estimate the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on the overall death rate as well as deaths due to various causes. The results in Table 3 are consistent with the graphical evidence and reveal a statistically significant 8.7 percent increase in overall mortality when people turn 21 (8.06 additional deaths per 100,000 person-years from a base of 93.07 deaths corresponds to 8.06/93.07 = 0.087, or an 8.7 percent increase). 5 The increase in overall mortality at age 21 is almost entirely attributable to external causes of mortality. We estimate that deaths due to internal causes increase by just 3.3 percent at age 21 (0.66/20.07 = 0.033), and this estimate is not statistically significant. Among the various external causes of death, deaths due to suicide increase discretely by a statistically significant 20.3 percent at age 21 (2.37/11.7 = 0.203), and motor vehicle mortality rates increase by 12.2 percent (3.65/29.81 = 0.122). We find no statistically significant change in homicide deaths at age 21. Deaths coded as due to alcohol (including some non-vehicular accidents where alcohol is mentioned on the death certificate) increase by about 0.41 deaths at age 21 (a very large effect given the average death rate from alcohol overdose of just 0.99 per 100,000). Overall, the visual evidence in Figure 2 and the corresponding regression estimates in Table 3 provide persuasive evidence that the minimum legal drinking age has a significant effect on mortality from suicides, motor vehicle accidents, and alcohol overdoses at age 21.

Regression Discontinuity Estimates of the Effect of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age on Mortality Rates (deaths per 100,000)

Notes: In the table above, we present estimates of the discrete increase in mortality rates that occurs at age 21 with the associated standard error directly below in brackets. The regression estimates are from a second-order polynomial in age fully interacted with an indicator variable for being over age 21. All models also include an indicator variable for the month the 21 st birthday falls in. Since the age variable has been recentered at 21, the estimate of the parameter on the indicator variable for being over 21, which we present in the table, is a measure of the discrete increase in mortality rates that occurs after people turn 21 and can drink legally. The mortality rates are estimated from death certificates and are per 100,000 person-years. The fitted values from this regression are superimposed over the means in Figure 2 . The mortality rates presented below the standard errors are the rates for people just under 21. Deaths are catgorized slightly differently than for Table 2 . Whereas Table 2 focused on the primary cause of death listed on the death certificate, Table 3 considers all factors mentioned on the death certificate and imposes the following precedence order: homicide, suicide, motor vehicle accident, alcohol, other external, internal.

Effects of the Drinking Age on Nonfatal Injury and Crime

In addition to premature death, alcohol use has been implicated in other adverse events such as nonfatal injury and crime. 6 Surprisingly, however, there is very little research directly linking the minimum legal drinking age to nonfatal injury. This is due, in part, to the lack of precise age-specific measures of injury rates during the 1970s and 1980s, which makes it impossible to estimate the effects of the minimum legal drinking age with precision using the panel approach. In ongoing work, however, we have used the regression discontinuity approach to estimate the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on nonfatal injury rates using administrative data on emergency department visits and inpatient hospital stays ( Carpenter and Dobkin, 2010a ). Although injuries have lower costs per adverse event than deaths, accidents resulting in a nonfatal injury are much more common than fatal accidents. We find that rates of emergency department visits and inpatient hospital stays increase significantly at age 21, by 408 and 77 per 100,000 person-years, respectively. These increases in nonfatal injuries are substantially larger than the increase in death rates of 8 per 100,000 person-years documented in Table 3 . However, estimating the discrete increase in adverse events at age 21 in percentage terms reveals that emergency department visits are increasing by 1 percent, hospital stays by 3 percent, and deaths by 9 percent. This pattern holds even when we restrict the analysis to motor vehicle-related injuries and fatalities, which suggests that alcohol plays a disproportionate role in more serious injuries.

Another costly adverse outcome commonly linked to alcohol is crime, including nuisance, property, and violent crime: we provide a review in Carpenter and Dobkin (forthcoming). Since the pharmacological profile of alcohol includes both disinhibition and increased aggression, a causal effect of minimum legal drinking ages on crime rates is plausible. Three studies have examined the effects of drinking ages on crime. Two have used the state-year panel approach described above to test whether more permissive drinking ages increased arrests for youths age 18–20. Using data from the Uniform Crime Reports, Joksch and Jones (1993) show that states that raised their minimum drinking age reduced nuisance crimes, such as vandalism and disorderly conduct, significantly over the period 1980–1987; these results are confirmed and replicated in fixed-effects models estimated in Carpenter (2005a) . More recently, we have applied the regression discontinuity design design to evaluate the relationship between alcohol access and crime ( Carpenter and and Dobkin, 2010b ). Using data encompassing the universe of arrests in California from 2000–2006, we found an 11 percent increase in arrest rates exactly at age 21. These effects were concentrated among nuisance crimes and violent crimes. Of the crimes for which we find a statistically significant effect, the two with the most substantial social costs are assault and robbery (larceny with force or threat of force) which increase by 63 and 8 arrests per 100,000 person-years, respectively.

Much of the literature on the minimum legal drinking age and the social costs of alcohol has focused on mortality. The evidence on other adverse outcomes suggests that an exclusive focus on mortality will lead one to substantially under-estimate the protective value of the minimum legal drinking age.

Effect of the Drinking Age on Alcohol Consumption

Estimating how a lower minimum legal drinking age would affect alcohol consumption is difficult. In addition to all of the challenges confronting researchers trying to estimate the effect of the drinking age on adverse event rates, there is an additional problem of data quality. While most adverse events are well-measured, alcohol consumption is not. Specifically, surveys of drinking do not generally include objective biological markers of alcohol consumption (such as blood alcohol concentration). Self-reported measures of drinking participation and intensity are subject to underreporting on the order of 40–60 percent ( Rehm, 1998 ). An additional issue is that, despite the usual confidentiality assurances given by survey administrators, 18–20 year-olds probably underreport alcohol consumption even more than the typical survey respondent because it is illegal for them to drink. 7

Recognizing these concerns, we nonetheless present estimates of the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on alcohol consumption from both the panel fixed-effects approach,and the regression discontinuity approach. For the fifi xed-effects approach, we focus on alcohol consumption reported by high school seniors age 18 and over who were surveyed in the Monitoring the Future study between 1976 and 1993. We use the same panel fixed-effects approach used to examine mortality rates with added controls for individual demographic characteristics such as race and gender. We examine three measures of alcohol consumption: whether the person drank at all in the past month, whether the person drank heavily in the past two weeks (defined as five or more drinks consumed at a single sitting), and the number of times the person drank in the last month. The effect of the minimum legal drinking age on these measures of alcohol consumption as estimated using a panel fixed-effects approach are presented in the first three columns of Table 4 . The relevant independent variable in each of the first three columns is the proportion 18–20 year-olds legal to drink in the state. The results indicate that allowing 18–20 year-olds drink increases drinking participation by 6.1 percentage points, heavy episodic drinking by 3.4 percentage points, and instances of past month drinking by 17.4 percent (0.94/5.4 = 0.174). These results are similar to previous estimates of the effect of the minimum legal drinking age that used these same data and a similar approach ( Dee, 1999 ; Carpenter, Kloska, O'Malley, and Johnston, 2007 ; Miron and Tetelbaum, 2009 ).

The Effect of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age on Alcohol Consumption

Notes: The independent variable of interest for the regression results presented in the first three columns is the proportion of 18–20 year-olds who can drink legally. These regressions are estimated using responses of high school seniors age 18 and older at the time they completed the Monitoring the Future survey. The regressions include state fixed effects, year fixed effects, state-specific time trends, and dummies for male, Hispanic, black, or other race. The regressions are estimated using a sample of 121,279 high school students from 1976–2003. The estimates in the last three columns are regression discontinuity estimates of the discrete increase in each drinking behavior that occurs after people turn 21. These are estimated using responses of 16,107 19–22 year-olds in the 1997–2005 National Health Interview Survey. These regressions include a quadratic polynomial in age interacted with a dummy for being over 21 at the time of the interview and the following covariates: indicator variables for census region, race, gender, health insurance, employment status, 21 st birthday, 21 st birthday + 1 day, and looking for work. People can report their drinking for the last week, month, or year, and 71 percent reported on their drinking in the past week or month. All the regressions include population weights. Standard errors for the panel fixed-effects analysis are clustered on state and reported in brackets below the point estimates in the first three columns. Robust standard errors for the regression discontinuity analysis are reported in brackets below the point estimates in the last three columns.

We also estimated the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on alcohol consumption using the regression discontinuity design. Since this approach required detailed information on alcohol consumption for people very close to age 21, we used the National Health Interview Survey which includes questions on drinking participation heavy episodic drinking, and the number of days in the last month on which the person consumed alcohol. We estimated the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on these measures of alcohol consumption using a version of the regression discontinuity design used earlier enriched with controls for individual demographic characteristics such as gender, race, region, and employment status. The estimates of β 1 are reported in the last three columns of Table 4 . Given that the regression model includes a polynomial in age fully interacted with a dummy variable for being over 21 and that the age variable has been recentered at 21, these are estimates of the discrete change in drinking that occurs at exactly age 21. We find that the probability an individual reports having consumed 12 or more drinks in the past year increases at age 21 by about 6.1 percentage points, and the estimate is statistically significant. We find a 4.9 percentage point increase in the probability an individual reports heavy drinking (five or more drinks on a single day at least once in the previous year), and we estimate that the number of drinking days in the previous month increase by 19.6 percent (0.55/2.8 = 0.196) at age 21, though only the second of these estimates is statisically significant at the conventional level. These estimates are quite similar to the estimates from the panel approach and have also been replicated using other datasets including the California Health Interview Surveys ( Carpenter and Dobkin, 2010b ) and the National Surveys on Drug Use and Health ( SAMHSA/OAS, 2009 ).

Below, we require an estimate of the number of additional drinks consumed if the drinking age were lowered from 21 to 18, in order to appropriately scale the cost estimates on a per-drink basis. In Column 3 of Table 4 , with the panel design, we estimated that moving from a situation in which no 18–20 year-olds can drink legally to one in which all 18–20 year-olds can drink would increase the number of times a youth reported drinking in the past month by about 0.94 instances. In Column 6 of Table 4 , using the regression discontinuity design, we estimated that the minimum legal drinking age increases the number of days the individual drank in the past 30 by about 0.55 days. Assuming instances are similar to days, the average of these two estimates implies that the minimum legal drinking age reduces alcohol consumption by about 0.745 drinking days per month. To put this on the same scale as the adverse event estimates (which are per 100,000 personyears), we calculate 0.745 × 12(months) × 100,000(persons) = 894,000 drinking days averted per 100,000 person-years. Young adults consume about 5.1 drinks on average each time they drink, so 894,000 drinking days corresponds to about 4.56 million drinks.

How Credible are the Estimates of the Effects of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age?

We have presented estimates of the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on alcohol consumption, mortality, and a variety of other adverse events from panel fixed-effects models and regression discontinuity models. Before using these estimates to compare drinking age regimes, it is important to examine how credible the evidence from each of these research designs is. The two approaches have different strengths and limitations, which can be roughly grouped into two categories: “internal validity” and “external validity.” In the context of this paper, internal validity refers to how well a research design estimates the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on a particular population in a particular place and time. External validity refers to how well estimates from a research design are likely to predict the effect of the policy under consideration. External validity is a function of both the internal validity of the estimates and how similar the regime (population, policy, and environment) in which each of the research designs was estimated is to the regime in which the policy is being proposed.

We examine internal validity first, because the internal validity of an estimation strategy directly affects its external validity. The panel approach is subject to the concern that some states raised the drinking age at the same time that they implemented other policies targeting both alcohol consumption and its adverse consequences. If this were the case, estimates from the panel approach would likely overstate the true effect of the minimum legal drinking age because the estimates would reflect the benefits of both the minimum legal drinking age and the other policies. 8 By contrast, estimates from the regression discontinuity design are less likely to be biased by policy changes, because to cause bias the policies would have to go into effect at exactly age 21. Another possible problem with the panel approach is that enforcement of the higher drinking age was plausibly less stringent in states that were compelled to raise their drinking age by the 1984 federal National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which could impart downward bias to our panel estimates. Here again the regression discontinuity approach is unlikely to suffer from this bias because the age-21 drinking limit was a long-standing policy by the late 1990s, which is the period on which the regression discontinuity analysis is focused. A threat to the internal validity of both designs is that part of the increase in adverse events that occurs when people are first allowed to drink is probably due to people having to learn to drink responsibly. As a result, there may be an increase in mortality in the first few months after people are first allowed to drink whether the drinking age is set at 18, 21, or higher. As a result, computations that treat the reduction in deaths due to learning effects as saved lives would overstate the effect of the minimum legal drinking age. However, Tables 2 and ​ and3 3 reveal that the panel and the regression discontinuity estimates of the impact of the minimum legal drinking age are quite similar, which would not be the case if learning effects were substantial, because learning effects would result in much more bias to the regression discontinuity estimates than to the panel estimates.

Yet another threat to the internal validity of the panel design is that there is likely slippage in the assignment of the treatment regime for young adults in a given state and year. These errors may arise due to border effects, as neighboring states sometimes had different drinking ages (as discussed in Lovenheim and Slemrod, 2010 ). Errors could also arise from grandfathering policies, in which some states allowed youths who could drink legally before the minimum legal drinking age was raised to continue drinking after the new drinking age was instituted, even if they were younger than the new legal age. This will result in imperfect assignment of treatment status due to the fact that exact age is not available in the datasets used in the panel analyses. These kinds of measurement errors would generally bias the estimated effects of the minimum legal drinking age downward.

Regarding external validity, the major advantage of the state-year panel approach is that it directly examines the effect of allowing 18–20 year-olds to buy and consume alcohol legally, which is the type of policy change that is being debated. Its primary disadvantage is that it examines changes in drinking ages that occurred 30 years ago, and many things have changed since then. For example, the minimum legal drinking age is probably more rigorously enforced now than it was in the 1970s. Public sentiment and legal sanctions against drunk driving have both increased greatly since the 1970s and 1980s. There have been numerous improvements in medicine and automobile safety in the last 30 years, including trauma centers and air bags. These changes would bias the results from the panel studies in opposing directions. The main issue with the external validity of estimates from the regression discontinuity approach is that the estimates are valid for people very near their 21 st birthday, and the proposed policy change would be to move the drinking age of 21 to 18. This is a problem for the external validity of the regression discontinuity estimates if the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on an 18 or 19 year-old are substantially different than the effects on a 21 year-old.

It is not possible to assess the effect of each of the threats to the internal and external validity on our estimates. However, we have some evidence that despite these concerns the estimates still may be of substantial use for predicting the likely effect of a policy change. A comparison of Tables 2 and ​ and3 3 reveal that the two research designs give very similar estimates of the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on all-cause and cause-specific mortality. 9 An examination of Table 4 reveals that the two designs generate fairly similar estimates of the impact of the minimum legal drinking age on alcohol consumption. Most of the sources of bias described above affect the two research designs to different degrees so they should be moving the estimates from the two designs away from each other. We interpret the similarity in the estimated effects as suggesting that the various biases are either not very large or that they are at least partially canceling out.

When considering whether it makes sense to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18 the critical issue is determining whether the increase in consumer surplus that results from allowing 18–20 year-olds to drink is large enough to justify the increase in alcohol-related harms. The most direct way to make this comparison is to estimate the change in consumer surplus and compare it to the increase in harms as measured in dollars. However, it is very challenging to credibly estimate the consumer surplus associated with the additional drinks that 18–20 year-olds would consume if the drinking age were lowered to 18. For this reason we implement an alternative approach of estimating the harm per drink to the person consuming the drink and the harm per drink imposed on other people.

The greatest immediate cost to the individual of an additional drink is that it increases their risk of dying. The estimates in Table 3 suggest that if the drinking age were lowered to 18, there would be an additional 8 deaths per 100,000 person-years for the 18–20 age group. A common estimate of the value of a statistical life is $8.72 million ( Viscusi and Aldi, 2003 , converted to 2009 U.S. dollars). This suggests that for every 100,000 young adults allowed to drink legally for a year, the cost in terms of increased mortality is about $70 million (8 × $8.72 million). Given that we estimate an increase of 4.56 million drinks for every 100,000 person-years, this suggests that the hidden cost of each drink due to the increased mortality risk is over $15 (70/4.56). 10 Given that each drink potentially has other adverse impacts on the individual, such as injuries, reduced productivity, and reduced health, this estimate is a lower bound.

The costs of the reduction in the minimum legal drinking age borne by people other than those consuming the drink come from many sources: we focus on three of the major ones. The first external cost includes the risk that an individual will be killed by a drinker in a motor vehicle accident. Our best estimate is that the typical young adult killed while driving drunk kills another person 21 percent of the time ( Carpenter and Dobkin, 2009 ). This suggests that lowering the drinking age will kill at least an additional 0.77 people (3.65 drivers killed in motor vehicle accidents from Table 3 × 0.21) annually for every 100,000 18–20 year-olds allowed to drink. Using the value of a statistical life from above, this is a cost of $6.7 million (8.72 × 0.77 = 6.7) for every 100,000 people allowed to drink after the drinking age is lowered. This estimate is a lower bound, because it does not include the people killed where the drunk driver survives. The second external cost is due to the increased risk that a drinker will commit robbery or assault. The best available estimate suggests that lowering the drinking age will result in 63 additional arrests for assault and 8 additional arrests for robbery annually for every 100,000 newly legal drinkers ( Carpenter and Dobkin, 2010b ). Given that not every crime results in an arrest, these two estimates need to be rescaled by the proportion of reported assaults and robberies that are cleared by an arrest, which are 54 and 25 percent, respectively ( U.S. Department of Justice, 2007 ). At an estimated cost of $20,500 per assault and $17,800 per robbery ( Miller, Cohen, and Wiersema, 1996 , converted to 2009 U.S. dollars), the crime cost imposed on others is $2,400,000 ($20,500 × 63/0.54 ≈ $2,400,000) for assaults and $656,000 ($17,800 × 8/0.25 ≈ $570,000) for robberies. A third external cost is that the drinker will injure themselves and require medical treatment. If the medical care is covered by insurance or if the costs are absorbed by the hospital, these costs are effectively borne by people other than the drinker. The 408 additional emergency department visits and 77 additional hospital stays per 100,000 person-years that would likely occur and 77 additional hospital stays per 100,000 person-years that would likely occur if the drinking age were lowered (estimated in Carpenter and Dobkin 2010a ) impose a substantial cost: the average cost of an alcohol-related emergency department visit is $3,387, and the average cost of an alcohol-related inpatient hospital stay is $12,562 for a total cost per 100,000 person-years of $2.35 million [(3,387 × 408) + (12,562 × 77)]. 11 Summing these externality costs gives a total cost of about $12.02 million per 100,000 person-years (that is, $6.7 million + $2.4 million + $0.57 million + $2.35 million = $12.02 million). Dividing this estimate by the change in the number of drinks yields an externality cost of $2.63 ($12.02/4.56) per drink. Given that there are numerous alcohol-related harms not included in this calculation, this is a downward-biased estimate of the cost that the drinker imposes on others.

The estimates above suggest that the total cost of a drink to the person drinking it is at least $15 plus what the person paid for the drink. It is unlikely that the average drinker values a drink this highly. This finding suggests that the drinker is not fully aware of the personal costs of their behavior and there is a role for government intervention. Moreover, with each drink there are costs imposed on others of at least $2.63, which again suggests a role for government intervention to deal with this externality. These estimates clearly suggest that lowering the drinking age will lead to an increase in harms that is very likely larger than the value that people put on the additional drinking.

Our focus here has been on predicting the effects of lowering the minimum drinking age, but of course, a lower drinking age might be combined with other age, but of course, a lower drinking age might be combined with other policies like mandatory alcohol licensing (similar to driver licensing) and relevant, reality-based alcohol education, both of which are advocated by the Choose Responsibility group. Although the research summarized here convinces us that an earlier drinking age alone would increase alcohol-related harms, we do not think there is enough evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of alcohol education and alcohol licensing, either in isolation or in combination with a lower minimum drinking age. While we are certainly not opposed to experimentation with alternative policies for encouraging responsible alcohol consumption, the evidence strongly suggests that setting the minimum legal drinking age at 21 is better from a cost and benefit perspective than setting it at 18 and that any proposal to reduce the drinking age should face a very high burden of proof.

Acknowledgments

We thank David Autor, Chad Jones, John List, Justin Marion, and Timothy Taylor for very useful comments and suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge grant funding from NIHNIAAA R01 AA017302-01.

1 Other possible interventions have received attention in the economics literature. For example, age-targeted drunk driving laws and graduated licensing programs set very low legal blood alcohol content limits for young adult drivers and have been shown to reduce youth drinking and related harms (for example, Carpenter, 2004a ; Voas, Tippetts, and Fell, 2003 ). Increases in sanctions and/or enforcement of age-targeted drunk driving laws might further reduce youth alcohol consumption and its related harms ( Kenkel, 1993a ). Kenkel (1993b) explores the theoretical possibility of a “teen tax” that could be levied only on young adults, though there is no consensus on the effectiveness of state beer excise taxes on youth drinking and related harms (for example, Dee, 1999 ; Cook and Moore, 2001 ). Finally, public health education about the risks of alcohol use has been widely mentioned as an alternative strategy to reduce alcohol-related harms among youths, although we are not aware of economic evaluations of such policies. We focus here on the minimum legal drinking age due to recent high-profile attention garnered by the Amethyst Initiative and related organizations such as Choose Responsibility.

2 This fixed effects panel approach was introduced to this literature by Cook and Tauchen (1982) , who examined the effects of alcohol taxes on death rates from liver cirrhosis; it has now become standard in evaluations of this type. Note that this model cannot support inclusion of a full set of state-by-time fixed effects, because these would also absorb almost all of the variation in the minimum legal drinking age variable.

3 Our parameterization of the minimum legal drinking age variable—that is, the proportion of 18–20 year-olds in the state who are legal to drink beer—is slightly different from most previous work on this topic, which often includes separate controls for age-18, age-19, and age-20 state drinking ages. This choice has no substantive effect on the results and is only done to facilitate a more natural comparison with the regression discontinuity approach we describe below.

4 We assign deaths in the Vital Statistics data to the state of residence of the decedent. In the Fatality Analysis Reporting System analyses we assigned deaths to the state of occurrence because of incomplete information on state of residence. We also calculated Vital Statistics panel estimates by state of occurrence, and these models returned larger effects of the minimum legal drinking age. This is consistent with the idea that different drinking ages across states created “blood borders” ( Lovenheim and Slemrod, 2010 ).

5 For consistency with the panel regression evidence presented above, we estimate the regression discontinuity models of the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on mortality rates as opposed to mortality counts, though the latter are preferred as the population estimates used to create the rates reduces the precision of the estimates. This is the cause of the slight difference in the magnitude of the estimates from our previously published work ( Carpenter and Dobkin, 2009 ).

6 Some research has examined the relationship between the minimum legal drinking age and risky sexual behavior, though we are not aware of any that uses the regression discontinuity approach. Note that the pharmacological effects of alcohol on sociability and disinhibition could lead drinkers to engage in unplanned sexual behavior or riskier sex than they would have had in the absence of alcohol. Dee (2001) estimates panel regressions of teen childbearing for youths in the age groups affected by the changes in the minimum legal drinking age. He finds that the drinking age is related to childbearing rates among black teens, suggesting a causal effect of alcohol use on sexual activity leading to childbirth. Fertig and Watson (2009) also study state drinking-age policies and fertility outcomes in a fixed-effects framework, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youths and Vital Statistics birth records. They find that exposure to more permissive drinking ages increased poor birth outcomes for young women, especially black mothers, and they find suggestive evidence that this is due to an increase in unplanned pregnancies. Finally, Carpenter (2005b) uses a similar panel approach to examine an alternative risky sexual outcome: rates of sexually transmitted infections. He finds suggestive evidence that a higher drinking age reduced gonorrhea rates for whites, but not for blacks.

7 In Carpenter and Dobkin (2009) , we examine the possibility that there is a discrete change in the probability of underreporting alcohol consumption at age 21, and we do not find much evidence that this change is large in magnitude.

8 Miron and Tetelbaum (2009) make this type of argument by showing that there is heterogeneity in the effects of the minimum legal drinking age according to when states raised their drinking age. Specifically, they document that earlier adopters saw larger reductions in youth fatalities than late adopters and argue that factors other than the drinking age were responsible for the reductions in youth fatalities when drinking ages increased back to 21. These types of biases are not likely to affect regression discontinuity estimates of the minimum legal drinking age, which (as we show above) provided estimates very similar to the panel fixed-effects design, which in turn suggests that other unobserved policies and preferences are unlikely to account for the robust relationship between drinking ages and youth fatalities repeatedly documented in the fixed-effects approach (including in Miron and Tetelbaum, 2009 ). Of course, other types of heterogeneity may be important, such as variation across states in enforcement of the minimum legal drinking age. This is an important area for future research.

9 The panel analysis finds a very low rate of death due to alcohol overdose and no evidence of an increase; the regression discontinuity design, however, finds a much higher rate of alcohol overdoses and a large increase. Given that the alcohol consumption among 18–20 year-olds has dropped rather than increased in the last 30 years, these difference are probably due to coding changes for International Classification of Diseases and for death certificates, as well as a slight difference in our own coding of the information on death certificates between Tables 2 and ​ and3 3 (see notes under these tables).

10 There is, of course, a plausible range of estimates if one were to use different figures for the value of a statistical life, and indeed recent studies have returned lower estimates (see, for example, Ashenfelter and Greenstone, 2004 ). Viscusi and Aldi's (2003) study reports that most credible studies return estimates for the value of a statistical life of between 3.8 and 9 million in 2000 U.S. dollars (or 4.73 to 11.2 million in 2009 U.S. dollars), and the 8.72 million figure we report above is the median reported across 32 studies. Using 4.73 million as the value of a statistical life, for example, reduces the per-drink estimate to $8.30 ($4.73 million * 8 deaths / 4.56 million drinks). If self-reported alcohol consumption is underreported by 50 percent on average (i.e., within the range as suggested by Rehm, 1998 ) then we are overestimating the cost per drink by a factor of two (i.e., the correct per-drink estimate is closer to $7.65 (8.72 million * 8 deaths / 9.12 million drinks).

11 The list charges for a hospital admission by a 21 year-old with a mention of alcohol on the medical record are $33,059, and the list charges for an emergency department visit with a mention of alcohol on the medical record are $8,912 (both measured in 2009 U.S. dollars). Given that hospitals are typically only paid 38 percent of list charges, the costs passed on to consumers are $12,562 and $3,387 for hospital admissions and emergency department visits, respectively ( Reinhardt, 2006 ).

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Argumentative outline: increasing the drinking age to 25 years old.

954 words | 4 page(s)

Topic: Increasing the Drinking Age to 25 years old. General Purpose: The general purpose of this outline is to present arguments for increasing the drinking age to 25 years old.

Specific Purpose: The specific purpose of this outline is to persuade people that the legal drinking age needs to be raise to 25 years old in the interest of public safety as well as the safety of those ages 21 through 24 who are more likely to die in drunk driving accents that any other age group.

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Central Idea/Thesis Statement: Nearly one out of every three drunk driving fatalities involves someone between the age of 21 and 24 years old; therefore, raising the legal drinking age to 25 years old will help save lives and preserve public safety.

Introduction One out of every three drunk driving fatality victims is between the ages of 21 and 24 years old.

Twenty one through twenty four years olds are qualified to serve in the armed forces for this country, raise children, and hold important jobs, however, they have been shown not to be responsible enough to consume alcohol.

Approximately 12,000 people a year die in drunk driving fatalities across the country and more than one third of these people are between the ages of twenty one and twenty five years old according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Raising the legal drinking age to 25 years old will cut down on the number of drunk driving fatalities; thus, saving lives and preserving public safety. Transition: Throughout this outline, I will state arguments in support of raising the legal drinking age to twenty five years old.

Body The legal drinking age needs to be raised in response to the percentage of drunk driving accidents that involve fatalities where the drunk driver is between the ages of twenty one and twenty four years old. Twenty one through twenty four year olds account for thirty four percent of all drunk drivers involved in fatal crashes in the United States. Young people are more likely than older people to be involved in fatal crashes at all level of blood alcohol concentration. Younger drivers are more vulnerable to the effects of alcohol. Younger drivers are more inexperienced drivers. The higher the BAC of the driver, the more likely the driver is to cause a fatal accident. Raising the drinking age has been shown to decrease the amount of alcohol consumption among person who are legally able to drink. Younger people are more likely to binge drink. Transition: It is important to take into account the safety reasons for other privileges when considering raising the legal limit to twenty five for safety reasons.

There are many laws for public safety and in the interest of the public that have higher age limits that are twenty one or higher. State laws have raised the age required to own a handgun, enter a casino, adopt a child, and run for public office. You cannot own a handgun in most states until you are twenty one years old. At the point when the age has been raised from eighteen in the interest of public safety, the legal limit for drinking can be raised to 25 in the interest of public safety. You cannot run for many public offices until you reach the age of thirty to ensure that you are responsible. If twenty one through twenty four year olds are not responsible enough to drink the age limit should be raised. Transition: There are critics that claim that the legal drink ages is already too high. They believe that raising the legal limit would have little effect on safety on the roadways.

Refutation Argument: The raising the legal drinking age would make those between the ages of twenty one and twenty four more likely to binge and overdoes on alcohol. According to ABC News, raising the drinking age make drinking more attractive to young people. According to the Huffington Post, the legal drink age is the most violated law in the country. Raising the drinking age promotes binge drinking. Raising the drinking age promotes drinking behind closed doors for the purposes of drinking

Refutation Argument: Raising the drinking age should not be credited with a decrease in drunk driving fatalities between the ages of 18 and 21. Therefore, it is not effective. Education can be credited with decreasing the number of drunk driving accidents in this age group. MADD and other organizations went on a campaign to educate young people about the dangers of drunk driving. Public awareness about drunk driving accidents was increase around the same time the drinking age was raised.

Impact Statement: There is nothing to prove that the raising the legal limit encourages drinking. These young people who drink illegally would probably drink the same amount legally if the limit were lower. In addition, public awareness was not as effective as making sure there were penalties for providing young people with alcohol and making alcohol harder to buy in reducing fatalities in that age group.

Conclusion One out of every three drunk driving fatalities involves someone between the age of 21 and 24 years old; therefore, raising the legal drinking age to 25 years old will help save lives. Younger people are less experienced both with drinking and driving. This coupled with the fact that younger people are more likely to drink and drive makes it important to consider raising the legal limit to 25 years old. Other laws in the public interest have higher age limits. The legal limit for the purchase and consumption of alcohol should be raised to 25 to make our roadways safer.

• Jacinto, Leela. ‘Should the Drinking Age Stay at 21?’ ABCNews.com. 1 June 2014. Web. 25 October 2014.
• Tracy, Sam. ‘Is the National Drinking Age Doing More Harm Than Good?’ The Huffington Post. 23 January 2014. Web. 25 October 2014.

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Should the Legal Drinking Age be Raised to 25?

In the last few years, new studies have shed light on the age that young people reach physical maturity and it’s not 18. It’s also not 21. It’s 25. Numerous scientists studying the effects of alcohol or drugs on teens and young adults have made the statement that physical maturity, especially of the brain and nervous system, does not occur until a person reaches 25.

While a person is still growing and developing physically, it’s understandable that drugs or alcohol could have a more profound effect on the body than when they are older. After all, when alcohol or drugs are used during pregnancy, the effects on a rapidly growing baby can be severe. Effects such as the following are possible:

Marijuana: Higher risk of asthma and breathing problems, lower verbal, memory and reasoning ability, lower birth weight, poorer eyesight, greater risk of a heart defect.

Cocaine: Miscarriage due to shutoff of oxygen to the baby, greater risk of premature birth, smaller heads and brains, defects to hearts, kidneys, brains, arms or legs.

Alcohol: Babies born to a mom who drank may suffer from FASD—Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder—a combination of symptoms that include physical changes, smaller brains, learning and behavior problems, heart defects and problems with muscle tone and coordination.

Young Adults Still Developing, Too

If it’s true that young adults through the age of 25 are still developing, then it could certainly be possible for alcohol and drugs to have a more profound effect on them than it does on older adults. This theory seems to be supported by recent studies involving teens and young adults.

A recent Wall Street Journal article about the effects of alcohol on young brains noted that “from a neuroscientist’s perspective, the brain isn’t fully developed until age 25 and can exhibit these negative effects of alcohol consumption until then.” Similar damage to the brain was found in young people between 18 and 25 who participated in a 2014 study. These young adults used varying amounts of marijuana and the changes in their brains were tracked by performing scans. Even the light and occasional smokers developed abnormalities in their brains. This study came from Harvard and Northwestern Universities.

Another study of marijuana use from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee revealed this result: “A close look at the under-25 age group shows cognitive decline, poor attention and memory and decreased IQ among those who regularly smoke pot, defined as at least once a week.”

So What About that Legal Age to Drink?

So this raises the question—should the legal drinking age be raised to 25? Given the science on physical development that has been published in the last few years, perhaps there should be a more informed conversation on this subject to determine if legislation changes should follow.

No matter what the legal drinking as is, young people should be informed what the risks are. Anyone drinking alcohol, using medication they get from a doctor or illicit drugs they got off the street deserves to know what they are getting into. If there is a strong risk of causing significant physical damage from alcohol or drug use during the time that our young people should be getting their education and making plans for the future, they should know about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/education/edlife/this-is-your-brain-on-drugs-marijuana-adults-teens.html

Sue Birkenshaw

Sue has worked in the addiction field with the Narconon network for three decades. She has developed and administered drug prevention programs worldwide and worked with numerous drug rehabilitation centers over the years. Sue is also a fine artist and painter, who enjoys traveling the world which continues to provide unlimited inspiration for her work. You can follow Sue on Twitter, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Alcohol—The Most Addictive Drug in the World

When people hear that alcohol is the most addictive drug in the world, their instantaneous response is usually one of disbelief. Most people do not believe this to be true, because after all, everyone drinks, right? Certainly, except for perhaps cigarettes, and maybe sugar or coffee, alcohol is the most commonly used substance that could be considered to be addictive.

Alcohol Is the Cause of One in Five Young Adult Deaths

An alarming new study shows that not only do more Americans lose their lives from alcohol-related causes each year than drug-related causes, but an increasing number of those who die are young-to-middle-aged adults. These findings suggest that the American people need to start viewing alcohol as the harmful drug that it is. To do otherwise will simply lead to more harm and loss of life.

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Drinking Age in America — Drinking and Driving: Raising the Drinking Age in America

Drinking and Driving: Raising The Drinking Age in America

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Published: Feb 8, 2022

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At 18, Is It Time for a Drink? Argumentative Essay

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An American teenager who is eighteen years old is allowed to do several things, such as vote, join the military, and get married; however, drinking is not allowed until he or she is twenty-one years old.

The officially permitted drinking age in the U.S. was raised from eighteen to twenty-one in 1988 due to the National Minimum Age Drinking Act that had been signed into law four years earlier by President Ronald Reagan.

The main reason was maturity; that is, at eighteen one is not mature enough to drink responsibly (Kiesbye, 2). However, I agree with the verdict of the group of university and college presidents that the drinking age should be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen.

Opponents of lowering the legal drinking age usually refer to the dangers of binge drinking. They say that the practice is increasing and that any person who is below eighteen is simply not responsible enough to have an alcoholic beverage.

This type of drinking most of the time occurs in the underground and hidden places where the teenagers cannot be discovered. However, although binge drinking is a problem in America, the root cause is the high drinking age that our lawmakers have instituted ignoring certain realities.

Let us face the reality: if a person wants to drink, he or she will definitely find a way to do that. And since legal adults (those over eighteen) are unable to get hold of alcohol themselves, they will inevitably go to hidden places and drink excessively without any supervision or guidance.

When the drinking age is lowered, teenagers can drink responsibly without having to hide themselves. Therefore, “the current limit ignores the reality of drinking during college years and drives it underground, making binge drinking more dangerous and students less likely to seek help in an emergency” (Gordon and Holland, para. 2).

I think it is of essence to question this law: why is it that the age of twenty-one is the “magical’ age that a person is considered as intelligent and mature enough to drink alcohol? Truly, some adults consume alcohol irresponsibly. On the other hand, some young people are able to drink responsibly.

At eighteen, Americans are regarded as adults. It may seem odd to allow those above eighteen years to marry, drive their own cars, and do other sorts of things, and yet to be prevented by the same law from taking a glass of wine in a café or even a glass of champagne at their own wedding party. I feel that it does not make sense to have a limit that is higher than the legally recognized age of maturity.

Young people look at alcoholic beverages as something exciting (Bishop, 19). They consider it an activity preserved for the adults; however, young people want to be adults As Soon As Possible. Therefore, as is the case in most institutions, they usually carry fake identity cards to drinking dens; thus, leading to more problems, or steal the drinks from their parents’ drink cupboard.

Maintaining the drinking age at twenty-one does not encourage responsible drinking. In addition, when the opportunity to take alcohol arises, “Let us compensate for the lost time” attitude crops in resulting in binge drinking, which leads to results that are even more disastrous.

By reducing the legal drinking age, it would inevitably water down some of the temptation to take alcohol since the young people often say that it is more fun when it is illegal.

And, more so, in most cases, young people tend to engage in illicit activities. Therefore, lowering the age will reduce this tendency. In reality, increasing the drinking age is even worse than not doing anything at all simply because most individuals would want to get drunk as a sign of rebellion to the authority. “Not much can be done to control student drinking.

Americans younger than 21 casually defy the law by secretly drinking. If the law was changed, the practice can take place in the open, where it could be better monitored and moderated” (Snelgrove, para. 22). I think that the obsession of wanting to consume alcohol would lose its appeal if drinking were not regarded as purely an adult thing.

As pointed out by the article, “At 18, is it time for a drink?” teen drinking is longstanding problem, which has affected the American society and the drinking age limit has not done enough to cut short.

The American society does not care to instruct the teenagers’ on limits or responsibilities; however, they apparently assume that the teenagers will know their limits and be responsible consumers of alcoholic beverages upon attaining the lawful “magical age” of twenty-one.

A number of developed countries in Europe, such as France, Belgium, and Italy, have established a legal minimum drinking age at sixteen years. It is interesting to note that in those countries one is allowed to drive at eighteen years of age.

If the American society can focus more on educating the youth on responsible drinking habits rather than restriction, then several problems can be prevented (Gordon and Holland, para.16). The youth in the U.S., unlike their counterparts in Europe, are not able to learn how to consume alcohol and other substances gradually, safely and with caution.

Even though the average daily consumption of alcohol in some European nations such as France and Spain is higher than in the United States, the percentage of alcoholism and irresponsible drinking is much lower due to education on safe drinking habits and enforcement of gradual drinking behavior.

Supporters of the legal drinking age often cite possible increase in car accidents as a reason to maintain the drinking age. However, they fail to realize that individuals of all ages get into car crashes, teenagers and adults, when they abuse alcohol.

Educating the public on the dangers of this vice can be more beneficial than simply giving restrictions. In most countries in Europe, teenagers are permitted to drive at eighteen years of age, and also to drink responsibly at the same age.

Therefore, they are able to learn early about the dangers of drinking alcohol and practice good drinking habits. I think that lowering the drinking age would be able to reduce the number of car crashes that are related to excessive consumption of alcohol.

Restrictions can be put to prevent the teenagers from drinking, but can they really be stopped? No one was there to stop the over ten million American teens aged twelve to twenty who have already drunk an alcoholic beverage at present. Out of this number, it is astonishing that about half of them are engaging in binge drinking.

To put more facts on the table, it is estimated that about eighty percent of students in grade nine through twelve will have tasted at least one drink of an alcoholic beverage in their lifetime and about fifty percent of these students have tasted at least one drink of alcohol in the last one month.

So, tell me, are restrictions stopping them from pursing their illicit courses? Abuse of alcohol among the teens is a real problem that we should not ignore the way we are doing now through unfair restrictions.

Since more and more teens are destroying their lives, I suggest that we try something different, something that can ultimately bear fruits since the high drinking age seems to be taking us nowhere. Therefore, I strongly believe that lowering the drinking age and then educating the teenagers on the dangers of alcohol consumption can reduce this problem.

We should all recognize that America has a huge problem with teen drinking. The only way to find a solution to this problem is by stopping to ignore it. “It’s time we look at the issue afresh and see whether there are better solutions than we currently have in place because, after all, we haven’t solved the problem” (Gordon and Holland, para. 8).

The American teenagers should get more education about the effects of alcohol, rather than giving them punishment. The legal drinking age should be restored to eighteen since the current age at twenty-one lacks any real basis. A lowered drinking age will bring us to reality and institute better ways of curbing the vice. Consequently, fewer problems would arise.

Works Cited

Bishop, Bruce. Effects of lowering the drinking age . Salem, Or. : Legislative Research, 1979. Print.

Gordon, Larry, and Holland, Gale. “ At 18, is it time for a drink? ” Los Angels Times . 2008. Web.

Kiesbye, Stefan. Should the legal drinking age be lowered? Detroit : Greenhaven Press, 2008. Print.

Snelgrove, Erin. “18 or 21? Drinking age debate heats up.” Yakima-herald . 2008. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2018, May 15). At 18, Is It Time for a Drink? https://ivypanda.com/essays/at-18-is-it-time-for-a-drink/

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1. IvyPanda . "At 18, Is It Time for a Drink?" May 15, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/at-18-is-it-time-for-a-drink/.

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More than 1,000 readers voted, and they’re fine with a 25-year-old drinking age

“kids are annoying and drink until they vomit. get us some boomer bars that are 35 and over.”.

By Zipporah Osei

The Gazebo, the popular open-air bar in Nantucket, says it will no longer serve alcoholic beverages to people under 25-years-old, and many Boston.com readers are saying good riddance to the young drinkers.

Under 25? This popular Nantucket bar might not serve you

After being hit with an influx of underage drinkers, owner Luke Tedeschi has decided to address the issue by raising its minimum drinking age to 25. Tedeschi said he was turning over as many as 20 suspected fake IDs to the Nantucket State Police barracks every day.

“If I’m losing business I’m losing it to illegal drinkers, which is jeopardizing everything I have,” he said. “When drastic measures need to be taken I am not afraid to take them, regardless of the situation and this happens to be the protection of the establishment, the license, and curbing underage drinking.”

We asked readers if they felt the owner’s decision was fair and out of 1,648 respondents, 74% were on board with the new drinking age policy, and just 26% felt it wasn’t okay. 

“Underage drinking and inappropriate behavior which impacts the rest of a bar or restaurant’s customers is becoming a huge problem,” said TJ from Boston. “Therefore using the age of entry to allow for a pleasant and civil experience is appropriate.”

The move to increase the drinking age requirement at a bar isn’t an unprecedented one. Restaurants in New York and Washington, D.C. have done the same in the past. Eva, a reader from Austin, said they would welcome similar changes to bars in their city. Tedeschi maintains that his ultimate goal is to weed out underage drinking, so patrons below the age 25 requirement who don’t appear to be sneaking in underage drinkers are still welcome. 

Massachusetts liquor laws only mention age in the context of the legal drinking age, and public accommodation laws only prohibit discrimination based on “race, color, religious creed, national origin, sex, handicap (disability), gender identity, or sexual orientation at places of public accommodation,” including restaurants.

Still, some readers feel strongly that increasing the age requirement at the Nantucket bar is an unfair response and should be considered age discrimination. 

“We have laws for a reason, and if you can legally do something, no individual or business owner has the right to tell you differently,” said Jimmy from Quincy. “Age discrimination isn’t right whether it’s the old or the young who are the targets. I know one bar this over 50 guy won’t be patronizing ever.”

We heard from several readers like Jimmy who said they said they won’t be giving The Gazebo their business in the future, while others said they would welcome the new “mature” environment turning away young drinkers would bring. 

“It is a privilege to come into my establishment, not a right,” Tedeschi said. “This is a policy, and I have never claimed it is a law, it is my policy to operate my establishment the way I see fit.”

More than 250 readers let us know in detail how they felt about the recent policy change at The Gazebo. Ahead, you’ll find a sampling of their responses. 

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Do you think it’s okay for bars to increase the drinking age minimum to 25?

Yes, raise the age requirement .

“If the bar is in a location where they see rampant underage folks trying to fake their way in and feel it’s a public safety/health issue, it is their right as a private business owner to increase the age. They just need to make sure all of their employees enforce the rule for all customers or there’s no point to it.” — Megan, Ipswich

“In this case is entirely appropriate.  There are far too many underage kids getting into The Gazebo and quite frankly their juvenile behavior, they can take to the beach. I am sorry it’s coming at the expense of legitimate 21- to 24-year-olds, unfortunately.”  — Bobby, Nantucket

“The owner is trying to protect himself and his business from unnecessary liability. They have absolutely every right to do so. As someone who is in their early 30s, a bar packed with a bunch of 21-year-olds and kids with fake IDs is a major deterrent.” — Sean, Boston    

“Kids are annoying and drink until they vomit. Get us some Boomer bars that are 35 and over.” — Jay, Westford

“Bar owners are legally responsible for the actions of underage drinkers (even those that present fake IDs). Any steps they make are within their discretion. Not saying I agree with his thinking, but it is his right to do so.” — Will, West Roxbury

“Although I do not necessarily agree with the age limit change, I do believe that restaurant owners have the right to make these decisions. They are the ones putting their business at risk if it is met with backlash.” — Mark, Quincy

No, it’s an unfair change

“I’m 57 and don’t really go to bars, so this doesn’t affect me, but this sounds like age discrimination, plain and simple. Age is apparently not a protected class, but perhaps it should be.” — Nick, Somerville

“Never. If anything, the drinking age should be lowered to 18. If you can fight and die in a war for your country, you should at least be able to buy a beer.” — Steve, Framingham

“Moral policing is never appropriate.”

“It’s plain and simple age discrimination. If he can’t stand the heat get [out] of the business.”

“The law is 21. I understand underage drinking is bad, however, being 21 you should be able to go out and enjoy yourself. I lived in England being legal at 18 and we were able to have a good time without being ‘rambunctious.’ Who is to say that a 22-year-old is any better than a 25-year-old when it comes to the maturity of drinking? As a bartender, I have had much worse encounters with men in their 50s than young people. It’s ageism. They lost my business and respect.”

“This unfairly groups all people of a certain age together and I don’t think it is acceptable in any circumstances. You can deny service if you suspect someone is underage or if they are causing trouble but not simply because of their age. This is ageism the same way you can’t deny people over a certain age.” — Cathy, Hudson

Boston.com occasionally interacts with readers by conducting informal polls and surveys. These results should be read as an unscientific gauge of readers’ opinion.

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Alcohol Tolerance Lowers As You Age: Why Older Adults Need To Drink More Responsibly

As we age, our bodies undergo physiological modifications that complicate our ability to regulate alcohol consumption. This is why senior individuals must consume alcohol more responsibly.

Knowing about these changes in the body can help lower health risks and encourage people to drink less.

The Science Behind Lower Alcohol Tolerance

One big reason older people can't handle as much booze is that their bodies have changed . Some people gain body fat as they age but lose muscle strength. This means they have less water in their bodies.

Since alcohol dissolves in water, your blood alcohol content (BAC) will rise if you drink more quantity but have less water. In 2023, Kidney Research and Clinical Practise reported that men's and women's bodily water percentages dropped significantly beyond 60. This makes the effects of drinking worse.

Moreover, the less functional livers of older people lower the efficacy of the alcohol-breaking enzymes. This increases the effects of the alcohol and prolongs their circulation lifetime.

Older adults's livers don't function as effectively. Thus, even moderate drinking can result in more excellent blood alcohol content (BAC). It follows that their perception of alcohol's effects is quicker and lasts longer.

READ ALSO: Toxic Alcohol Claims Lives of at Least 54 People in India; How Dangerous Is Methanol, Illicit Liquor?

Health Risks and More Sensitivity

The effects of alcohol on the brain are more potent in older people . It can make it harder to coordinate, balance, and think clearly. This makes people more sensitive, which raises the chance of accidents and falls.

This is a big problem because falls kill older people more than anything else. Also, drinking too much can make age-related illnesses like high blood pressure, heart disease, and mental illnesses like depression and worry worse.

Medicines for diabetes, blood thinners, and sedatives that are often given to older people may not work well with alcohol . When taken together, some combinations may make side effects worse or make drugs work less well.

For instance, mixing drinking with drugs for high blood pressure can make you feel dizzy and raise your risk of falling. So, older people should talk to their doctors about how much booze they drink and how it changes the way their medicines work.

Practical Tips for Safer Drinking

Elderly persons should avoid drinking since it will always produce problems. According to the USDA Dietary Guidelines, men and women should consume no more than two beverages daily.

Older people may require stricter rules. Moderately drink alcohol, balance it with food, and alternate it with water to help reduce the negative consequences.

Older people can also better control their alcohol intake by knowing what constitutes a normal drink: 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits. Finally, maintaining open contact with healthcare practitioners about drinking habits and any concerns will ensure that older persons receive individualized recommendations customized to their health requirements.

Alcohol tolerance decreases with age. Because of this, older adults must drink responsibly more than ever. Learn about the changes in their bodies that make them less tolerant of alcohol and drink safer as an older adult.

RELATED ARTICLE: Blackout Drinking When Young Can Chronically Affect Learning, Memory, Facial Recognition [STUDY]

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Why your alcohol tolerance diminishes as you age

The same amount of alcohol is likely to have a bigger impact in your 60s or 70s than it did in your 20s. Here’s why one margarita could feel like two or three.

If you’ve noticed that having a cocktail or two packs a bigger punch now than it did when you were younger, it’s not your imagination.

Many people don’t realize that both men and women develop an increased sensitivity and a decreased tolerance to alcohol as they get older. It's important to pay attention to this issue because research has shown that alcohol use has been increasing among people ages 65 and older in recent years —and the size of the older adult population is expanding rapidly now that people are living longer, notes George Koob, a neuroscientist and director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. “People are largely unaware of the physiological changes [related to aging] that lead to higher blood alcohol levels and bigger impairments in behavior and cognition.”

“The effects may be sneaky in the sense that people think, Well, I used to be able to drink X— but they can’t necessarily pick up where they left off because it’s going to have more of an impact when they’re older,” says Michael Weaver, medical director of the Center for Neurobehavioral Research on Addiction at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “There are a lot of physiological changes that take place as we get older.”

The simple truth: having one martini or margarita in your 60s or 70s could affect you the way two or three of these cocktails did in your 20s or 30s.

What’s behind the lower tolerance

As people get older, their bodies change. Over decades, for example, a person’s body composition shifts: The percentage of body fat tends to increase as people get older , even if their body weight stays the same, and the amount of water in the body decreases.

A study in a 2023 issue of the journal Kidney Research and Clinical Practice found that in people whose body weight is in the normal range, water accounts for 62 percent of that weight between the ages of three and   10; after that, it stays steady in males and declines to 55 percent in females between the ages of 11 and 60. At age 61, body water decreases in both sexes—to 57 percent in men and 50 percent in women.

The decline in the body’s water content is significant because “alcohol is a water-soluble substance,” says Alison Moore, director of the Stein Institute for Research on Aging and the UC San Diego Center for Healthy Aging. Because people have less body water as they get older, “if you drink the same amount at 80 as you did at 30, your blood alcohol level will be much higher.” In that scenario, one drink can have the same impact as two or three did when you were younger, causing you to feel intoxicated much sooner.

Keep in mind: At any age, women are more susceptible to the effects of alcohol because pound for pound women have less body water than men do. Women also have less of a stomach enzyme that helps with the metabolism of alcohol, Moore says. As a result, if a man and a woman who each weigh 150 pounds drink the same amount of alcohol, the woman will have a higher blood alcohol level than the man will. While this is true at any age, it also means that women will be even more susceptible to the effects of alcohol, as they get older.

( Alcohol is killing more women than ever before )

Meanwhile, people’s ability to metabolize alcohol changes as they get older because the activity of certain enzymes—alcohol dehydrogenase, aldehyde dehydrogenase, and cytochrome P450 2E1 —that process alcohol diminish with age, says Olivera Bogunovic, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and medical director of the Alcohol, Drug, and Addiction Outpatient Program at McLean Hospital.

As a result, “the effects of alcohol build up faster and last longer,” says Stephen Holt, an addiction medicine specialist and associate professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine.    

The brain also becomes more sensitive to the effects of alcohol as people get older, Moore says. “This can make people more prone to developing problems with coordination or balance,” increasing their risk of falls. It also can impact judgment, reaction time, and driving ability.

Taken together, “all of these physiological changes add up,” Weaver says. “It’s a gradual change over time during adulthood.”

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In other words, there isn’t a sharp shift. The changes in physiology begin in the 40s and 50s and become more dramatic in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Moore says.

The potential for harm

An often overlooked concern: Older adults frequently take more medications than younger people do, and many prescriptions (including for some anticoagulants, sedatives, and diabetes drugs) and over-the-counter drugs (such as pain relievers and sleep aids) can have problematic interactions with alcohol.

This is a risk especially with medications that are metabolized by the liver, says Holt. “Alcohol could slow the metabolism of drugs or drugs could impair the metabolism of alcohol.”

These interactive effects could cause medications to become less or more effective. Or, they could create additive side effects such as heightened drowsiness or an increased risk of gastrointestinal bleeding, says Moore. If you’re taking any medication, be sure to read the package label and insert carefully—and/or talk to your doctor—to see if you should abstain from drinking alcohol altogether.

( Are you taking the wrong medications? You might be surprised. )

It used to be thought that moderate alcohol consumption confers health benefits, but experts now recognize that regularly imbibing can have a variety of harmful health consequences. “It can exacerbate depression, increase blood pressure, and lead to cardiac arrhythmias,” Koob says.

Alcohol also can interfere with sleep. Sometimes people have a nightcap to help them fall asleep, Bogunovic says. “Often they don’t realize that alcohol disrupts sleep architecture, causing them to spend less time in deep sleep and to have more fragmented sleep.” This can be especially problematic as people get older, given that insomnia and other sleep disturbances become more common with advancing age .

Meanwhile, the chances of developing many chronic diseases increase as people get older, and alcohol consumption can amplify some of these risks. Regular alcohol consumption is a major risk factor for liver disease and head and neck cancer, and chronic alcohol use has been linked with an acceleration of age-related cognitive decline and brain atrophy. Research has found that having as little as one alcoholic beverage per day increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer , especially for estrogen-receptor positive tumors.

Plus, with advancing age, people often have medical conditions such as heart failure, liver or kidney disease, obstructive sleep apnea, or lung disease, Holt says, and “when you add alcohol on top of these, they become more dangerous.”

Playing it safe

Ultimately, the risk-vs-enjoyment calculus of consuming alcohol should be considered on an individual basis, based on your current health status, your medication use, and other factors, experts say. “I don’t think alcohol is evil by any means but it’s a riskier proposition as you get older—you have to be more cautious,” says Moore.

If you do drink alcohol, “make sure you monitor what you’re doing,” Koob says, and “know what a drink looks like.” Depending on where you go or who’s pouring, an alcoholic beverage can look different. But the definition of a “standard drink” is consistent : 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1½ ounces of distilled spirits (such as vodka, gin, or tequila).  

( What's worse than a hangover? Hangxiety. Here's why it happens. )

According to the current USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans , the recommendation for moderate drinking is a maximum of two drinks per day for men, one drink per day for women. Based on the age-related physiological changes in the way people respond to alcohol, some experts believe the criteria should be changed for older adults—perhaps limiting intake to no more than one drink per day after age 65.

When you drink, try to have a meal or snack before having a cocktail or have a glass of wine with a meal, which will slow absorption of alcohol, Weaver says. And be sure to drink plenty of water or another non-alcoholic beverage—perhaps alternating these with alcoholic drinks—to help you stay hydrated.        

“Being around friends and family is so important as people get older,” Holt says. “Just be careful about trying to keep up with drinking with younger friends and family members.”

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