It is legal for eighteen year olds to vote, get married, buy a lottery ticket, drive a car or even a plane, pay taxes, buy a house, serve in the military, and be tried as an adult in the court systems. You are now seen as an adult, your parents begin to treat you differently, they expect you to take control of situations on your own. Yet this is hard to accept when laws state that you are not responsible to have a drop of alcohol.
Many people think that the drinking age should stay at 18. These people believe that people under the age of twenty one are not mature enough to handle the responsibility .
that comes with drinking. The answer to that is that there are many examples of immature adults in all age groups. I agree that there are some eighteen and nineteen year-olds that are barely mature enough to cross the street by themselves, but if you look in almost any newspaper you will probably find articles about forty year-olds who can't be trusted to do even that. The fact is, most nineteen and twenty year-olds are either risking their lives for their country in the armed forces, working to support themselves or a family, or are under the pressure of earning a higher education. These people certainly demonstrate enough responsibility for them to have a glass of beer. .
One thing not in dispute is the segregatory effect of the drinking age, encouraging entertainment establishments to shut out people under 21. It limits where and with whom young people can spend their free time. Like other age restrictions, the drinking age makes clear that no matter how hard you work, no matter how successful you are, you are still a second-class citizen unfit for association with adults until you reach an arbitrary age.
The U.S. has the strictest youth drinking laws in western civilization and yet has the most drinking-related problems among its young. And there seems to be a connection between these two facts.