Dear Mr. President:

My sister drank in high school, my Mom and Dad drank in high school, my grandpa was an alcoholic, my uncle was an alcoholic until his passing, and my half-sister’s Mom is an alcoholic. Alcohol has been a problem for many people and for this reason I would like to share my concerns with you about lowering the drinking age to 18. The law states that you are not allowed to drink until the age of 21. However, even with this law, teenagers continue to drink illegally. And lowering the drinking age would not stop illegal drinking. This is why I believe that the drinking age should stay at 21.
“Drinking is more dangerous for youth because they are still developing mentally and physically”, Robert Voss from esmonitor.com says. At 18, the mind isn’t fully developed. Kids cannot comprehend their actions as well as a 21-year-old. Drinking at a younger age interferes with the development of the brain. Without a fully developed brain, teenagers who choose to drink have a higher probability of becoming an alcoholic. "There is no doubt about it now: there are long-term cognitive consequences to excessive drinking of alcohol in adolescence," said Aaron White, an assistant research professor in the psychiatry department at Duke University. Dr. White and other researchers placed sensors inside living brain slices from the hippocampi of adolescent rats and discovered that alcohol drastically suppressed the activity of specific chemical receptors in the region.
Our generation is the most immature compared to past generations. It doesn’t make sense to put alcohol in the hands of immature teenagers. “This will only cause more problems and increase drunk driving, violence and highway deaths” says Eric m. Bromwell from gazette.net. Immature teenagers drinking alcohol make dumb decisions: drinking and driving, fighting with classmates and family members. According to the National Institute on alcohol abuse and alcoholism, about 5,000 people under the age of 21 die each year as a result of underage drinking, 1,900 of those deaths are from auto accidents. There is a much greater chance that an individual will drink and drive if they had their first drink before the age of 19, 31% of teenage car accident fatalities involved alcohol, stated in the National Institute on alcohol abuse and alcoholism.
Lowering the drinking age will cause a distraction in education. If teenagers are able to drink at 18, they could leave school, buy alcohol, get intoxicated and come back. This will disrupt the students and teachers. The alcohol will interfere with not only their learning capabilities, but also the surrounding students. If it’s legal to drink at 18, the number of parties in college would increase causing more violence and more students failing. According to the National Crime Prevention Council, kids who start drinking at a younger age are more likely to start using other illicit drugs. Having the drinking age at 18 would increase binge drinking and make alcohol much easier for kids in high school and even kids in middle school to obtain alcohol.

Lowering the drinking age would not be responsible. The 21 law was put in place to decrease fatalities and keep alcohol out of the high schools. If the law was changed to a legal drinking age of 18, the U.S would have the same problems it did before. Why reverse something that has done so much good?