Drinking at Sixteen

Nathan Orts

Mr. Shipman

AP English Language and Composition

1/12/16

Drinking at 16

In the United States the drinking age, as you most likely know, is twenty one years of age. Before 1984 the drinking age was eighteen years old but in that year Ronald Reagan raised it to twenty one due to a high number of car accidents being caused by drunk driving. At the time the age that one had to be was sixteen years old to get a driver’s license so there was a two year gap between someone getting their license and being able to legally purchase and consume alcohol. Today there are five years in between being able to drive and being able to drink but Europe is completely the opposite, letting their minors drink before they can drive, which I think is the better idea.

In most parts of the world the drinking age is far lower than that of the United States, in fact there are only eleven other countries in the world that have drinking ages as high as ours. 61 percent of the countries in the world have drinking ages of between eighteen and nineteen years old, that’s 115 countries, but only eleven percent have their drinking age between fifteen and sixteen. In some european countries like Belgium and the nordic countries the drinking age is sixteen and the driving age is eighteen. It is my opinion that the US should do the same for more than a few reasons.

First of all I would like to acknowledge that drunk driving is a very bad thing and that people who do it put themselves and others at great risk of injury or death. If the United States changed the drinking age to sixteen and the driving age to eighteen I believe that drunk driving would stay the same or maybe even be improved, this is because if the teens are able to start drinking in a safe environment with their parents then hopefully they will be instilled with a good sense of what it is like to drink responsibly. Some may say that starting drinking at an early age like that would be detrimental but I know that there are a lot of people who drink in highschool anyways, and since it’s against the law they don’t let their parents know and they are therefore unable to guide them towards being responsible teenagers. Furthermore, I think that alcohol is much more accessible to teens than a car is. Most households have some alcohol in them which anyone can take unless it is locked away making it easy for someone to take, however, getting a license is far more difficult. It is true that anything can be done with enough motivation, like counterfeiting, but if a cop pulls you over with a fake, you are done and will be fined and will not drive again for a while. The relative difficulty of acquiring a driver’s license through illegal means makes it so that many people can’t and won’t do it whereas teens can get alcohol relatively easily. And since teens are drinking young anyways why not have them start off knowing how to behave themselves properly rather than how most do today: getting completely F’ed up.

Lowering the drinking age and raising the minimum driving age may seem like a bad idea but I believe that it would be beneficial to our society. Changing to this way of operating would allow teens to learn from responsible parents or guardians how to drink responsibly before they get behind the wheel rather than starting without any experience or education.