This always annoys me. I’m told the drinking age is 21 because a persons brain continues to develop into their mid 20s, but at age 21, technically the brain is not yet fully developed so what’s behind the magic number of 21? Does it make it safer to drink at that age than at 18? Why isn’t the drinking age 25?
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You’re right, it should be 25.
Where I am, drinking age is 19.
21 used to be the age of majority a long time ago (old enough to vote, etc) and coming out of prohibition, it was decided that you had to be an adult to take on the responsibility of deciding whether to drink.
As ages for other things have shifted, the drinking age hasn’t in many places in the US.
On top of this, 21 is when many people who go to college graduate.
I’d like to see the science behind either. The drinking age in America was 18 for the longest time. And before that there was no drinking age. And in most countries the minimum drinking age is 18 or less.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drinking-age-by-country
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The drinking age doesn’t have anything to do with brain development. It’s about “maturity” and keeping kids, who are stupid, from doing stupid things with alcohol like driving drunk.
Also the notion that your brain is done “developing” at any point is pretty much junk. Your brain is always rewiring itself and while alcohol may have more impact on younger minds it is still doing the same damage to older ones.
Bonus also: every once in a while some hype article will come out touting a glass of wine as good for the heart or some such but the general consensus is that there is no “safe”/healthy amount of alcohol to drink. It’s all bad for you, all the time, at any age.
I thought people wanted to keep it out of high school and in the 80s they forced them to change it or lose highway funding. Maybe an age of 19 would be more appropriate.
Similar note in Canada when they legalized marijuana they said they would set the legal age based on the best available science, then they set the legal age to 18.
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Drinking age of 21 is based on the federal government withholding highway funding for states that did NOT raise the age limit. I think the push was to reduce the accident rates of teenager drinking and driving.
Raising the minimum age by too much would be a sure fire way to guarantee under age drinking. There’s no way college kids and military personnel were going to wait til they were 25 before drinking, for example. I don’t remember ever hearing the brain development argument at the time, it was pretty much all about the teenage drunk driving…
Edit: clarity
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