Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on setting legal drinking age.

Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on setting legal drinking age. This argument is put forward keeping in view the fact that most teenagers do drink despite bar on their legal age to start drinking.

However, despite the fact, many teenagers drink before their legal age, the Federal government should retain the Minimum Legal Age of 21 as lowering the drinking age would expose the teenagers to more risky behaviors like abnormal sexual derive, higher alcoholism rates besides hampering their brain development.

To start with, underage alcohol drinking is one of the major causes of deaths in teenagers mainly due to injuries. These injuries include not the only car crashes due to drunk driving but also include falling and drowning, homicides as well as suicides. Accidents through motor vehicles are considered the leading causes of death among children aged between 15 to 21. Apart from that adolescents are already exposed to high risk due to the lack of driving experience whereas the children under the age of adolescences have high respectability to driving accidents as use of alcohol impair their driving skills therefore lowering the MLDA would result in an increase in the injury and death among youngsters. This argument can be further substantiated from the fact that during the Vietnam War era, many States reduced the minimum age of drinking mainly due to the lowering of the age for military enlistment and voting however the results were worst than expected. There was a steep increase in alcohol traffic fatalities and other allied injuries caused to the teenagers who were allowed to drink legally at a much lower age. However, subsequently, when the MLDA was raised to 21, there was a sharp decline in the same. Data compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) from 1975 to 2002 suggested that an increase in the minimum age for drinking has saved more than 21 thousand lives in 50 states of the country. The forecasts by NHTSA also suggest that the current MLDA would save approximately 1000 lives each year. Apart from that road accidents in 1982 due to drinking were counted for 60% of the fatalities in the US however the same figure has reduced to just 39% in 2005. These statistics clearly suggest that the current MLDA is perfect in at least reducing the social cost for the government.