Pros And Cons Of Lowering The Drinking Age

Today, many people debate the appropriate age restriction for drinking and whether it should be lowered. If we lower the drinking age from 21, teens will be influenced to underage binge drinking and can lead to crucial health problems. Scientists have come up with negative effects that drinking has on your body including hypertension, obesity, and undeveloped brain activity. Despite the age restriction, teens and adults need to be aware of the risks of drinking at a young age. One of the most important reasons why the drinking age should not be lowered is, because teens have not reached a certain age where they are responsible to any responsibility. “Maturation of The Adolescent Brain” is an article that discusses how heredity, sex and the …show more content…
Valenzuela explains how “Alcohol and Neurotransmitter Interaction” occurs. Alcohol also affects neurotransmitters by impersonating GABA, dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, and endorphins. Dopamine helps control for pleasure and reward, glutamate plays a role in brain development, an inhibitory neurotransmitter necessary for motor control is GABA, serotonin outs your body to rest, and endorphins are pain killers. Valenzuela describes the process of these neurotransmitters being mimicked by alcohol. For example, when alcohol crossed the blood barrier, it attaches to the adjacent protein receptor. If it is impersonating serotonin, then your action potential will continue to fire up, preventing you from sleeping. Another example is dopamine, which is your “happy” neurotransmitter. Alcohol can cause abnormality by imitating the effects of dopamine keeping you in a stage of pleasure or reward that you don’t want to get out of. Scientists believe that this is partially a reason for most addictions when it comes to alcohol, drugs or smoking. An adult's body is not ready for this sort of unusual activity in the brain, especially before the age of …show more content…
This means when the amount of drinking increases, hypertension goes up as well. Xin Xue experiments on the “Effects of Alcohol Reduction on Blood Pressure-Hypertension”. He gathers 15 trials from the years before 1999 to use as a control trial, and compares them with active treatment groups. This study was conducted on humans, it included a random allocation of volunteers to alcohol reduction, exercise and sodium intake was required to be equal among all groups, duration was about a week, and alteration of systolic and diastolic blood pressure were recorded. The results show that the when alcohol was reduced, there was also a reduction in significant blood pressure 95% of the time. The investigators on this study demonstrate that in order to prevent and treat hypertension, alcohol reduction is

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The Pros And Cons Of Lowering The Drinking Age