Hundreds of young people die from drinking alcohol or alcohol related accidents and diseases everyday. Could you be next? You could if you start of continue drinking alcoholic beverages. Over fifteen thousand people die form drinking alcohol or alcohol related diseases every year. In two thousand five 1,889 people died from alcohol related cancer#. Over six hundred woman died from breast cancer and over one thousand two hundred men died from mouth cancer last year from causes directly linked to alcohol. We have two Amendments to the Constitution about drinking (the eighteenth and the twenty-first). If people cared enough to change the Constitution and they had that much to say about drinking, it must have been important. America is not the only country with laws on drinking, Japan and Iceland have a alcoholic drinking age of twenty#. South Korea has a drinking age of 19. Forty-three different countries have the drinking age of eighteen#. Those include Argentina, Hong Kong, Mexico, some of Canada’s provinces, and Russia. Italy, France, Germany, and Greece, along with nine others set their drinking age at sixteen. Only ten countries have no drinking age, three of them are, China, Viet Nam, and Thailand. But, out of all those, the United States is one of the only countries with a drinking age of twenty-one#. In my paper I am going to use terms people might not fully understand. One of those words is intoxicated. Intoxicated means, under the influence of alcohol and you have to have eight hundredths of a percent alcohol in your body. A B.A.C.#. stands for blood alcohol concentration#. D.U.I is driving under the influence. Toasted means extremely intoxicated#. NHTSA means National Highway Traffic Safety Administration#. Drinking more than the appropriate amount of alcohol for your body is a big problem. People all over the world drink and die from alcohol related problems. If we keep drinking, we will all have problems. It ruins people’s health and slows people’s reaction times#. As I said before, over fifteen thousand people die from drinking every year. Approximately sixteen thousand, eight hundred eighty-five Americans die from drunk driving. This means one American is killed every thirty one minutes from alcohol related events#. From teens to adults, people drink to relax, or just get away from things. This is a world wide problem. People have been drinking for over ten thousand years. Historians have found beer jugs from the late Neolithic period#. Almost every culture has their own form of worship including sacrificing wine or beer. Even the Romans, Egyptians, and Babylonians gave alcohol to the gods#. There are two nearly opposite sides to this problem; those who want the drinking age to go up; and those who want the drinking age to go down. The first position is to increase the legal drinking age. This position is mostly the mothers, friends and family of people who have died from drinking related diseases or an accident while drinking or drunk. These people also think drinking is very bad for your health and you can hurt not only yourself, but also people around you by making foolish decisions while under the influence of alcohol#. The opposing view thinks it’s your own decision to drink, you should just choose to be safe, and the government should have nothing to do people drinking. I think the drinking age should be raised to twenty-five because boys and girls start drinking regularly at about fifteen or almost sixteen#. If you raise the drinking age you will lower the amount of people drinking at a young age; or at least you will raise the lowest age of drinking by a couple years. I think the government should either raise the alcohol drinking age or eliminate the alcohol drinking age limit#. I think this because if you didn’t have a drinking age people would not be so eager to get completely toasted when they turn twenty-one. A reason I think people should raise the drinking age is forty-one percent of youth has had at least one big drink by the age of fourteen#. The leading three reasons for death between fifteen to twenty-four year old are automobile crashes, homicides and suicides, in all three of those alcohol is the leading cause#. I’ve been telling you about the issue of alcoholic drinking, but I haven’t told you when or where it came from. The issue goes all the way back to the beginning of fruit. It spread faster than religions spread By the time religion was everywhere, drinking had been there for a long time. It may have preceded bread as a main food source#. In ancient Egypt most gods were just in individual city’s, but Osiris, the god of wine, was worshiped throughout the whole county#. The Egyptians also thought Osiris invented beer and it was considered a necessary item#. The Egyptians had at least seventeen varieties of beer and twenty-four different types of wine#. Alcohol was used for many things, from pleasure to nutrition, to medicine, to rituals#. One of the things the Egyptians did was put alcohol in the tombs of the deceased so they would have it in the afterlife. Even though the Egyptians loved drinking alcohol, they warned against taverns and excessive drinking#. The Babylonians had wine and beer offerings to their gods, too#. The Code of Hammrabi# was about drinking alcohol. But even though the Code was against drinking alcohol too much, there were no penalties for drinking#. In China people thought of alcohol as a spiritual food, not a material food#. The Chinese also thought alcohol was “to be prescribed by heaven”#. The United States of America has two amendments to the constitution that are about drinking, the eighteenth and the twenty-first. On December 18, 1917, the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution of America was proposed. January 16, 1919, the eighteenth amendment was signed and put into our Constitution#. The twenty-first amendment repealed the eighteenth amendment on December 5, 1933#. But the twenty-first amendment was proposed on February 20, 1933#. Every state and nation has some type of law or laws regarding alcohol. In China, you cannot drink in restaurants if you’re a minor, under 18, but you can drink at home if you’re a minor. In India the drinking age is twenty-one#. The locations and populations affected by drinking is every one and everywhere. If you have a government or a system of laws you have a law regulating or allowing alcohol. Almost every nation on every continent has been introduced to liquor. All Muslim countries have laws banning liquor, but they have all still heard of it. Throughout history people have drank and died from drinking alcohol. Hear is some information that is just extra. One thing is drinking can make you gain weight, feel sick or dizzy, give you bad breath, make you clumsy, slur your speech, and make your skin break out#. Another thing is people used beer and other alcoholic beverages in a hope of not getting the plague. They thought beer could clean your system if you drank it. And for a long time before the plague they used alcohol a lot. In Jesus’ time they drank alcohol a lot, they drank it as much, if not more than water#. Beer has only about three to five percent of alcohol in it, wine has nine to sixteen percent, and hard liquor has about fifty percent or more. That’s a lot! That means if your one hundred thirty seven pounds you can only drink one drink every hour to be considered intoxicated#. In 2003 the average age people started drinking was fourteen, in 1965 the average age was seventeen and a half#. The alcohol drinking age has gone down, but it would have gone down even more if it weren’t for the laws the United States Government had established. They established a Federal law, the Eighteenth Amendment, saying you could not drink at all. Then came along the Twenty-First Amendment, it repealed the eighteenth amendment and said the states could set their own drinking ages. The states set their dinking age at any age between eighteen and twenty one#. The ones who set their drinking age at eighteen eventually changed theirs to twenty-one, so now all of the states have a drinking age of twenty-one#. The Executive Branch enforces the legal drinking age through the police, NHTSA and the police tests. The police can take a breathe test. To do this they make you blow into a tube until you move a ball or other little object, if you move the object, the breath goes through to an analyzer, if it has alcohol content is 0.08 percent or higher, and you have to be taken in to custody. The police also have a series of other tests that they make you do, like walk in a straight line, or touch your finger to your nose. The police are part (a big part) of the laws enforcing the Twenty-First Amendment. But the NHTSA also helps the police find drunk people by making sure the highways are safe and secure. The solution for increasing the drinking age, is to increase the drinking age. People on this side of the issue think you should not be allowed to drink around children# and you should not be aloud to drink in bars#. people who want the drinking age raised think alcohol will kill you faster by killing your liver and other important organs, which is a proven fact and position one also thinks people should be educated against drinking through the public school system#. The argument against position one is it’s your body, do what you want with it, if your stupid and go wreck you body or mind by getting drunk it was your fault for giving in to pure pressure, which is a big reason people start drinking, and getting intoxicated. They also think you can drink in bars, most of the people on that side want their businesses to succeed and succeed well. The position to keep drinking the way it is, or lower the drinking age. Is held by most people who drink or own bars or wineries. They think, if you want to drink, drink. Some of the people want the drinking age lowered so they can have more people in their businesses. And the people who want the drinking age lowered also think it is your future and if you want to spend it drunken go ahead. The counter argument to it’s your life and do what you want with it, is people are stupid, some of them are uneducated and don’t realize the huge effects of drinking on your body and the effect of drinking on your children#. If you drink you set such a horrible example for your children how can you expect them to not set the same example for their children? Then your whole family is drinking and it all started so far back you can’t remember#, but it all started with one person drinking. Those who want to raise the drinking age also think and know drinking weakens peoples senses of wrong and write, so people who are drunk can hurt people and say things they do not mean. Intoxicated people also have a higher risk of getting in car crashes, that means innocent bystanders get hurt or hit because of others drinking. They think if you get rid of a drinking age more people will get drunk and more innocent people will die. My interviews went well. I got two different positions. But they had some things in common, they didn’t want people to die from drinking or drink so much they pass out. They want people to be safe, but one also wants people to bye their products. I interviewed Becky Woods from MADD and Michael Fallman from The British Beer Company. They were both nice, but Michael Fallman had less to say about the matter than Becky Woods. I think the two positions were easy to portray. One is make the drinking age go up, the other is make the drinking age go down or stay the same. Most people want other people to be safe, Drink in moderation, and not to harm others. Most people also wanted people to not get completely toasted, just to get a little buzz. My opinion before I started my research was bump the drinking age up to twenty-five. I thought it should be bumped up to twenty-five because if it was higher the brain would have more time to develop and you wouldn’t mess up your brain’s development. I still think it is important for the brain to develop. But all the chaos that would erupt from all the people against the drinking age going up and all the people celebrating the raise in the drinking age would be to much for the government to handle. iIf you tried to lower the drinking age again, people against drinking would through riots and people for the lower age would be celebrating the lowering of the drinking age would celebrate. So their roles would be reversed. My opinion now is we should keep the drinking age where it is, at twenty-one. I think we should keep the drinking age where it is because if the government tries to raise the drinking age people will rebel, get mad, start riots, and destroy things. If the government lowers the drinking age, more people will get drunk and destroy more things, which is almost the same as if they raised it. If the government makes all liquor illegal, people will constantly break the law and sneak in alcohol into the country. Then we will have so many people breaking the law the government will not be able to enforce the law. It will eventually go away just like the Eighteenth Amendment. And if they try to enforce the law, they will just end up with too many people in jail, then they will not be able to hold any more of them. So history would repeat itself like the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Amendments did. I also think people should start talking about drinking and the effects it can have on people earlier in schools, we still haven’t had a serious talk about the affects of drinking on people and I think all the youth should have an alcohol seminar. We should try harder to stop people from drinking by letting them see what your liver will look like after you drink and before you drink. I also think there should be more punishment for under aged drinking. I think you should have two chances with minimal punishment, like picking up trash on the highway. If your still drinking after the two chances, you should be punished more severely. I think we should inform people, help them out if they become alcoholics and guide their children towards making the right decisions. And if they will not stop drinking we should take their children away and not let the children go back to their parents until their parents stop drinking and go through therapy to help them stop. I hope I told you some things you didn’t know and helped you strengthen your opinion or changed your opinion.