Have you ever wondered how the legal drinking age in the U.S. came to be 21? You might imagine a group of legislators debating at what age a person reaches mental maturity, with the highest capacity for logical thinking. Interestingly, you’d be wrong. The concept that a person reaches adulthood at age 21 comes from English common law. Centuries ago, that was the age at which a man could, among other things, vote and become a knight.
The fact that the number seems to be rather arbitrary is one reason why people have argued for years that the legal age should be 18. After all, we can purchase cigarettes at 18. We’re considered old enough to make decisions about the governance of our country and choose to go to war to fight for it. So why not drinking? The legal age actually was lower for a brief period. President Franklin Roosevelt approved lowering the minimum age for the military draft from 21 to 18 during World War II. When the Vietnam draft began, people argued that if 18-year-old men were mature enough to fight, they were also old enough to vote. In 1971, the voting age was dropped to 18. At that time, the rules about the legal age of alcohol consumption were still left up to the states, and legislators eventually started applying the same logic to drinking.
After this change, however, people started noticing an increase in automobile fatalities among 18 to 20-year-olds. Because some states allowed 18-year-olds to drink and some didn’t, young people would drive into neighboring states, drink, and then drive home. The result was eventually the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984. This law essentially told states that they had to enact a minimum drinking age of 21 or lose up to 10 percent of their federal highway funding. The law was later amended; after 2012 the penalty became eight percent. Still, this is a considerable amount of money at risk, and states quickly fell in line.
The statistics do seem to agree that a higher drinking age leads to safer roads. Since 1982, drunk driving fatalities have decreased 51 percent. Among drivers under 21, drunk driving-related deaths have decreased by 80 percent. These numbers, along with the fact that drinking can interfere with the development of young adults’ brains, are two of the biggest arguments against lowering the age. Another argument is that allowing alcohol consumption will lead to more illicit drug use by 18 to 21-year-olds. Some people also worry that 18-year-olds being allowed to purchase alcohol would allow easier access by high school students, much like the way that most college students under 21 get their alcohol from older friends. In fact, a survey for the Center for Alcohol Policy found that 86% of Americans support the legal drinking age staying at 21.
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