Alcohol and Drinking - Challenging the Legal Drinking Age Essay

Challenging the Legal Drinking suppurate Do the catamenia laws involving the age at which adults can start drink really come across sense? There are many reasons why the goernment changed the well-grounded drinking age to 21, but has this actually caused a decrease in the amount of alcoholic beverage consumed by persons surrounded by 18 and 21? alcoholic drink related crime and traffic accidents have gone down in recent years, but the source of this drop may not plain have to do with raising the drinking age, as the political relation would standardised you to believe. There is a theory in psychology called the Reactance Theory, which disagrees with the idea that by making more restrictive laws, drinking will slow down. The governments draped to lowering the legal drinking age was to decrease the number of prohibit outcomes resulting from irresponsible alcohol use (Allen 34). By limiting the consumption of jr. individuals, they thought that alcohol relate d traffic accidents and crimes pull by junior people could be reduced. Since the last state adopted the 21 and over law for drinking, these activities have decreased. But is it because of the new laws, or other factors? The government would like us to believe that the new laws governing underage drinking are completely dependant on the new laws, but in that location are other factors as well. The overall crime rate, not sightly crimes committed by youths, has decreased. When you statistically correlate the amount of crimes committed between 1987 and 1996, compared to the overall crime rate, there isnt much of a decrease of crimes committed while younger people were under the influence of alcohol. This shows that crime grade have had little effect, but what is the explanation that there ar... ...least some alcohol before they were 21, and Im sure they didnt find anything wrong with it. The government should take a more common sense approach to making laws of this ty pe and not succumb to political interferences. Works Cited Aabacus DUI & Defensive Driving School. Underage Age Drinking Statistics http//dui-defensivedriving.com/du03002.html Allen, Daniel, David Spenkel, and Patrick Vitale. Reactance Theory and inebriantConsumption Laws. Journal of Studies on Alcohol 57 (July 1996) 34-40 Kassin, Saul. Psychology. New Jersey Prentice Hall, 1998 Miller, Peter. Measurement of Alcohol and tobacco Availability to Underage Students. Addictive Behaviors 21 (Sept/Oct 1996) 585-95 Roeper, Peter and Voas, Robert. Underage Drivers argon Separating Drinking From Driving. American Journal of Public Health 89 (May 1999) 755-73.