Essay on Drinking: Drinking Culture and Legal Drinking Age

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What does drinking bring to us? Maybe you can come up with examples of emotional outburst, inspiration of the art etc. Many people really enjoy such happiness brought about by drinking. Besides these aspects of drinking, what else can we gain from drinking? Drinking may cause troubles such as vomiting after drinking, getting into fights and drunk driving. Actually, we all know that drinking does more harm than good for people especially for teenager. Therefore, it is obviously unwise to lower the legal drinking age below the age of 21.
The current legal drinking age absolutely works effectively and irreplaceably. Some argue that “the law making 21 the legal drinking age are not working, in fact, are counterproductive” (248 ENGS). Engs provide us with a group of statistics, which shows that a greater proportion of students under age 21 classify themselves as heavy drinkers compared to students over the age of 21. However, these statistics do not explain too much. Teenagers classify themselves as heavy drinkers sometimes just because they think it sounds cool but not speaking of the fact. It is a lack of gist to say students who are under the age of 21 are more likely to be heavy, or “binge” drinkers since evidence proving otherwise cannot be provided. After Congress passed the law to raise the drinking age to 21, there was a significant decrease in drinking and driving problems in America. There are certainly contributions to the decrease in numbers made by other factors such as education programs concerning drunk driving designated-driver programs, increased seat belt and air bag usage etc. However, the law undoubtedly made a profound impact on solving these problems as well. According to Hurley “One thousand young lives are being saved every year, making it one of the more effective things that Congress has done in recent memory” (249 Hurley).
It is conceivable that a lot of negative effects will occur if we lower the legal drinking age. As everyone knows, people tend to form lifelong habits during their adolescent phase. If adolescents start drinking at a young age, it will increase the risk for them to get into the habit of drinking. On the other hand, early drinking is harmful to one’s health. Excess alcohol severely hurts one’s gastrointestinal function. People have not reached full maturity when they are at their adolescent stage. The ability of their body to defend against external trauma has not strongly developed enough yet. So the health of teenagers are sure to face challenges if we lower the legal drinking age. Furthermore, compared with adults, teenagers’ self-control abilities are relatively poor. Think about the tragedies during the Vietnam War. During that time, “Drinking ages were lowered base on the adage ‘old enough to fight, old enough to drink’”(248). This is a direct result from increasing of teenagers’
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