I wrote this for my English class on Wednesday. Hope you like.

All of my statistics for America came from the CDC’s website and here. The numbers for Great Britain came from here.

I am here to talk with you today about the drinking age in America. As I’m sure all of you know, a great deal of people die from alcohol-attributed deaths in the United States- as many as 75,766 in 2001. Compare that number to the amount of alcohol-attributed deaths in 2001 in Great Britain- 22,000. That’s a 53,766-person difference. What is the drinking age in Great Britain?  16-17 with an adult and in a restaurant; 18 without.

The 21 drinking age is the highest in the world. Only nine other countries in the world have 21 as their legal drinking age, and in many cases – such as that of Saudi Arabia and India – this is because of religious beliefs. While Japan and Iceland, along with several other countries, have drinking ages of 20, the United States has one of the highest number of alcohol-related deaths in the world. Our drinking laws are also the strictest in the Western world.

Even when it comes to traffic fatalities, the 21 drinking age hasn’t really solved our problem. Researchers at the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University found that raising the drinking age to 21 simply decreased the number of deaths between people ages 18-20, and increased them exponentially for people ages 21-24. They concluded, on the basis of their exhaustive federally-funded study, that drinking experience, not drinking age, is the most important factor.

When a person turns 18, they can vote. An 18-year-old is legally an adult. Someone who is 18 can legally smoke, a habit that kills 438,000 people a year (this number includes the 38,000 people who die from secondhand-smoke exposure). If a person is old enough to decide to join the military and die for their country at 18, then they are old enough to drink.

~ by skdunning on 14 November, 2008.