Imagine winning the State Basketball Championship. You get back to your house with a few friends and feel a party is in order, so you start drinking a few beers after your parents go to bed. Someone suggests that you drive somewhere to get rid of the empty cans. "Yes, that's not a bad idea", so you all pile into the car and take off. A few hours later, your parents receive a telephone call to come down to the station. There has been a terrible accident, and they must identify the body. This is the one phone call all parents dread. This true story is detailed in the Germantown, Tennessee high school newspaper. Stories like this compel me to believe that the legal drinking age should be kept at twenty-one.

Almost every state set a legal drinking age of twenty-one, the legal voting age at the time, after prohibition was repealed. Between 1970 and 1975, twenty-nine states lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, twenty-nine states also lowered their drinking age to eighteen or nineteen. During the late seventies, studies showed that traffic cra

One of the largest arguments in favor of lowering the drinking age is the use of Europe as a comparison. Where as in Europe, where there isn't a prescribed legal age for drinking, the age for obtaining a drivers license is eighteen. Sixteen is the average age for obtaining a license. This lower age for driving in combination with the lowered drinking age incurs a rise in traffic accidents and even death. Drinking before twenty-one causes more deaths than illnesses. On the other hand, those countries have their share of alcohol problems. The rate of alcohol-related diseases such as cirrhosis to the liver is the same, if not higher, as in the United States. Also drunk driving among youth in Europe is lower, but only because the legal driving age in most European countries is higher. Furthermore the use of public transportation is greater in Europe, where as in the United States fewer people take advantage of public transportation. Public transportation is either frowned upon or not available.

Sherman, Laura. "Tragedy After An Enormous Accomplishment." Germantown High School News. 4-15-99

Furthermore, most studies show an increase in traffic accidents, and even deaths, among youths when the drinking age was lower. The Encyclopedia of Alcohol and Drugs also states that the result of lowering the drinking age caused a five to twenty percent increase in the number of fatal injury-causing crashes "likely to involve alcohol, such as single-vehicle accidents occurring late at night" Alcohol use is typically reported in one-fifth to two-thirds of these problems; youth drowning, vandalism, assaults, suicides, and teenage pregna

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