Lowering the drinking age and the concept of license to drink
There has been talk on the news of lowering the drinking age to the age of 18. I believe this would be a stupid idea, the drinking age should be lowered to 19 instead. The problem with 18 is a good chunk of people are still in High School when they turn 18. By the time your 19 your probably done with High School. Any ways, despite this many would wine that 19 would be too young because it would increase the amount of drunk driving. They make it sound that when you turn 21 you magically become responsible enough to not to drink and drive. Though I do agree that there are a lot of immature 19 year olds, there are also many immature 21-100 year olds, though be there less than them. Eventually adults should be treated like adults and allowed to drink if they would like. As for binge drinking, I had no problem drinking myself stupid when I was under 21. It would be off cheap shitty booze that my older friends would buy. When I turned 21 I stopped binge drinking as often, not because I was more mature but because it lost it's appeal and I was able to start enjoying high quality drinks that were more filling than piss beer and vodka.
I do believe that lowering the drinking age would increase the amount of drunk driving deaths if precautions were not taken. This is were the idea of the drinking license comes in. The idea is when you turn 19, you will automatically be issued this license if you choose to drink. You will need this license to purchase alcohol from anywhere whether they be bars or liquor stores. The idea is that if you mess up, whether it be drunk driving, public drunkenness or providing liquor for your underage friends this license will be taken away from you. This will apply to everyone, including people over 21. The license can be taken away from you for a certain amount of time depending on how bad the offense is. For drunk driving, you will not be legally able to drink for 2 years. Public drunkenness you will lose your license for 2 months. For providing alcohol for minors you will lose your license for a year. The kicker is that you will also be able to enforce probation violations. If the judge orders someone not to drink, all they would have to do is take away the license and at the very least, the offender would not be able to purchase alcohol from liquor stores or from bars.
In the end I believe a system like this would decrease drunk driving even if the drinking age was lowered because there would actually be a way to prevent drunk drivers from drinking.