Research Narrative

My topic is the legal drinking age. Specifically I am researching why the legal drinking ages should be lowered from 21 to 18 years old. I believe that this is a very important and interesting topic because the community that it affects the most is college students. I have learned a lot about the community and what a community is through all the readings that we have been doing in class. I found that the article that related most to my topic was the first article by Carter that we read. This article talked about how there are all different kinds of communities. Within each of the communities there are different practices that they have. In the community of college students age 18-20, almost all of them drink illegally and when they drink they are binge drinking. This is just the practice that this community has, however binge drinking is very dangerous to do because they often drink way too much and it creates a very dangerous situation. We need to break this practice as soon as we can because it is causing thousands of deaths each year. I believe that allowing these kids to drink at a lower age will allow them to learn how to be responsible with alcohol and stop them from getting into those dangerous situations. It was not very hard for me to find scholarly articles about lowering the legal drinking age. There are many people out there with the same views as me on the topic. The main reason why they want to lower the drinking age is because the kids are doing it anyway; maybe if it were legal it would take away the incentive of doing it because it is illegal. Another main reason to lower the drinking age is because there are so many kids that are not responsible while drinking. If the drinking age way lowered then the kids would be able to start drinking earlier and start learning how to be responsible. If they were in a bar it would be with other people that are older and know how to be responsible. We need to improve the environment that these kids get associated with drinking. The only reason I was seeing while I was researching to not lower the legal drinking age is because the majority of the drunk driving accidents is from the community of young adults from ages 18-20. I believe that this accident number is directly correlated with how responsible this community is while drinking. If we can figure out some way to make these kids more responsible while drinking then the number of alcohol related car accidents will decrease. I was also able to read a book College Drinking by George Dowdall, this book talked about a lot of the drinking habits that students have while