Daphne Hall

1. 0:00 Okay, the topic I want to talk about today is whether the drinking age should be lowered to 18 in the United States.
2. 0:06 Um, and my standpoint is yes.
3. 0:09 Right now, um, adults can vote, they can join the military, they can get married, um, they can live on their own, sign contracts, everything like that when they're 18.
4. 0:21 Um, but they're prohibited from drinking alcohol, which seems a little confusing.
5. 0:26 Um because there's kind of this contradiction.
6. 0:29 You're 18, so you're old enough to live on your own and be an adult.
7. 0:33 You're also old enough to be tried as an adult in court, but you're not old enough to consume alcohol.
8. 0:41 Doesn't quite make sense to me.
9. 0:43 Um lowering the drinking age um is or the drinking age of being 18 is pretty common in nations across the world.
10. 0:51 Um, and I also think that it could potentially encourage safer behavior um along the lines of because it's not a banned substance, people would be able to experiment and kind of understand their limits instead of you know, and like learn and grow.
11. 1:08 Um and then also if an 18-year-old were to be able to drink, you could educate them better um through school and stuff like that.
12. 1:19 Um I think safety is obviously a concern, but I think that the other things the 18-year-olds can do and also are expected to do, um, are more is more res like they're more responsible for other things.
13. 1:37 Um, so they should be allowed to drink if they if they're responsible for all those other things.
14. 1:42 Um then also I think to a certain extent this has to do with when children graduate high school.
15. 1:49 I think not making the age 18, it really doesn't do anything about people drinking.
16. 1:54 It just has people do it in an unsafe way.
17. 1:57 Um people are using fake IDs to get drinks, um, people are kind of like they're not drinking in public and you know, and they're drinking too much, or they aren't really learning and growing and understanding how to drink properly and safely.
18. 2:13 Um, and so I think given all of those things lowering the drinking age to 18 would align with laws that already exist on the responsibilities for 18 year olds, and it would also kind of encourage um education surrounding drinking um and making the drinking culture safer.