Minimum Legal Drinking Age

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June 20, 2013 Minimum Legal Drinking Age in the U.S.A. Since the dates of the prohibition the minimum legal drinking age in the United States has been debated many times. If one researches the subject, it would be clear that many pros and cons have been weighed as to why each group feels the necessity to have the age changed. It has been said that increasing the minimum legal drinking age in the United States will not be detrimental to our country’s young adults. At the end of the prohibition in 1933 the legal age to drink was twenty one. During the Vietnam War it was eighteen. By the end of the 1970’s not all of the United States were in agreement with each other, some were eighteen and some were twenty one. In 1984 the federal government stepped in and passed the Federal Underage Drinking Act (FUDAA). This act required all states to raise their legal age to twenty one; if they refused, their annual federal highway dollars would be cut by ten percent. This act was backed by Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD). According to MADD the drinking age of twenty one has saved some seventeen thousand lives since 1988. (Daniloff) One of the main groups leading the charge to have the legal age lowered is college presidents all over the United States. In 2007 former Middlebury College President John McCardell founded Choose Responsibility (CR). Choose Responsibility was founded as a nonprofit group focused on the consumption and recklessness of alcohol by young adults. They feel that the legal drinking age can be lowered as long as better education about alcohol consumption is provided to young adults while in high school. Recently over one hundred college presidents signed The Amethyst Initiative, a public statement calling for an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the twenty one year old drinking age. BU Today
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