The Law, the Worse Influencer

In the United States only people 21 years of age or older can consume alcohol. Despite of the this, many teens go ahead and drink anyway. The strict law has encouraged teens to drink more. This law has an negative impact on the teens in the country. The drinking regulations and lack of education in the U.S. has triggered a rebellion and therefore, influencing teenagers to overly consume alcohol.

Parents are always striving to raise their children the best they know how. While doing that that parents may weigh their children down with harsh regulations. This is restricting kids to be a kid and live their lives.  According to Dr. Laura Markham, a clinical psychologist, “strict parenting deprives children of the opportunity to learn self-discipline”. Life is a process and you learn from it, parents should allow room for lessons and mistakes. Those things are vital for character development and  for room to grow. Strict parenting may also cause teens to act out and develop behavior problems. For example, when some young adults enter college they do a lot of wild partying, drinking, and experimenting with drugs. This may be a result of strict parenting mixed with a lot of freedom.

This strict parenting relates to the strict drinking regulations in the U.S. The fact that teens aren’t allowed to drink make them want to drink even more. Therefore they might binge drink or drink and drive. If the drinking age was lowered teen dui rates and binge drinking would decrease. The U.S is one of the six countries that have a drinking regulation as high as 21 years of age. 132 countries have lower drinking ages. In the United Kingdom where the legal drinking age is 18, only 20% of accidents were caused by drunk driving in 2011. Whereas in the U.S. in 2011,  38% of the accidents were caused by driving under the influence. That’s almost a 20% difference.  Teens in the United Kingdom have experience and are not as eager to rebell in comparison to the teens in the United States.This proves that if teens were given more opportunities to be responsible they would be wise.

In Bermuda the legal drinking limit is 18. Bermuda has a population of 64,564. Out of that population only 9 people have been killed by automobile accidents. These are just accidents not detailing drunk driving. That’s impressive, even if the population there is smaller.

The National Minimum drinking Age act was put into place in 1984. Before that the standard age for drinking was 18. Regulators noticed that the chaos on the street was at an all time high. Therefore they decided to change the age. Back then, people were not really educated about drugs and alcohol. Now people can learn about those things in health classes, commercials, through the internet, and though many people. Now that people are educated, drunk driving has gone down. Every year it seems as if the percent of drug related fatalities have gone down tremendously. In 1982  60%  of driving fatalities were caused by drunk driving. In 2010 only 31% of of driving fatalities were caused by drunk driving.

In the United States 18-year olds are given a pleather of opportunities. They can lease an apartment, join the military, vote, open up a credit card, and do many other things.  If 18- year olds can do this then they should be given the right to purchase alcohol.  If at this age they can be trusted with guns to defend our country they should have to right to purchase alcohol.

Lowering the drinking age to 18 would be economically good for the economy. If more people are allowed to purchase alcohol then businesses would make more revenue. Bars, restaurant, and  other establishments would highly benefit from this. There would also be a greater tax revenue.