If the drinking age of 21 is supposedly meant to protect brain development, isn’t the age of 25 really when the brain completes its development?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

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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