Throughout History, The United States Has Taken On Several

Throughout history, the United States has taken on several policies regarding the minimum legal drinking age that vary in age as well as in state and federal enforcement of the limit. To this day, there is quite a bit of controversy surrounding the subject because advocates of higher, lower, and limitless age regulations all provide decent arguments towards their suggested policies. Regardless of the policy, they all have the same aim: reduce alcohol addiction, binge drinking, drunk driving, and other alcohol related public health risks. The current minimum legal drinking age has made improvements in the number of alcohol related health problems. Times are changing, and advocates for a lower drinking age are on the rise, but with open†¦show more content†¦At the beginning of the war, both the drinking age and the voting age was twenty-one. When the twenty-sixth amendment, passed in 1971, lowered the voting age to eighteen. Based on the reasoning that if an eighteen year old was old enough to fight in a war and vote, they were old enough to purchase alcohol, over thirty states lowered their drinking age too. In the next fifteen years, drunk driving arrests increased by 223 percent (Gale). By the mid-1970s, drunk driving was declared a public health crisis (Gale). Shortly after, activists and lobbyists against teenage drinking gained popularity. Groups such as the Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and others were able to make strong arguments that appealed to the emotions of many US citizens. The founder of MADD was a woman named Candy Lightner whose thirteen year old daughter was killed in a hit-and-run by a man with two previous convictions and was only sentenced with 2 years in minimum security prison after the hit-and-run (Gale). After the creation of MADD in 1980, several people who were parents and relatives of those killed in drunk driving accidents opened their own chapters. 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