Excellence in First-Year Writing 2010/2011

tionally, it has been proven that youthful alcohol consumption results in an increased frequency of unsafe and unwanted sexual behaviors. According to research on college students in New York who are under the legal drinking age, “[…] 29 percent of students did something that they later regretted after drinking, 16 percent engaged in unplanned sexual activity, two percent had been the victim of sexual assault, and another two percent had taken sexual advantage of someone else” (Yu 14-15). Consequently, it is apparent that a lowered MLPA would likely only increase these numbers and make matters worse.

Moreover, many of the injuries and unwanted behaviors associated with 18 to 20-year-old drinkers have proven to “spill-over” onto even younger teenagers when the MLPA is set at 18. In 1980, the University of Michigan started conducting a nation-wide annual survey called “Monitoring the Future” that has since reported a significant trend between the legal drinking age and the alcohol consumption behaviors of senior high school students.

Specifically, researchers concluded that drinking in states with a lower MLPA resulted in a 5.6 percent higher use of alcohol among seniors, on average (Yu 17). This is true because high school students are more easily able to obtain alcohol when their peers can purchase it at a young age. Many high school seniors turn 18 before graduating and are then able to purchase alcohol for anyone else in the school.

This problem is intensified by the fact that these youth drinkers are also at high risk of falling victim to a gateway effect from alcohol to other more serious drugs. Drinking alcohol can encourage kids to start experimenting with other more hard-core drugs, especially because their decisionmaking skills are substantially hindered when under the influence of alcohol.

According to Wagenaar, high school seniors were found to significantly decrease their usage of marijuana and other similar drugs with an increase in the MLPA (1981, 220). This provides strong support for the argument that a higher MLPA can curtail the gateway effect associated with alcohol that Excellence in First-Year Writing 2011 21