Do you remember your first taste of alcohol? How old were you? Twenty-one? All 50 states currently demand that their citizens reach age 21 before they can legally drink. But there's a growing movement that says mandatory minimum laws may do more harm than good. When determining the right date when a young person can take one of their final steps towards personal responsibility and freedom, what's the right answer?
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A Neuroscientist's Response
- From Choose Responsibility
By Choose Responsibility - Balance, Maturity, Common Sense
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I fail to see how this is an effective objection.
The above neuroscientist's view is a study on how alcohol affects an adolescent's brain vs. how it affects an adult's brain.
The incomplete development of the frontal lobe in an adolescent's brain mainly has to do with judgment and analysis, so the argument isn't: "gee I wonder if an adolescent is affected as much as an adult if they have the same amount of alcohol in their system?"
The argument is that teens are not capable of making rational decisions about alcohol consumption BEFORE they get any in their system. I don't think anyone honestly thinks that because teens have minutely smaller brains than adults that alcohol intake is going to affect them more. What many people do think is that teenagers tend to take unnecessary risks (like downing a fifth of Bacardi in one sitting) because they think "nothing bad will ever happen to me."
Ask any developmental psychologist and they will likely tell you that most teenagers believe in "the personal fable" - a belief which consists of the idea that they are somehow unique; that they are going to change the world; that everyone is watching them; (and most dangerous of all) that bad things just don't happen to them. This is directly due to the fact that their frontal lobe (judgment and analytical thinking) is not fully developed.
Yes, there are some kids out there who are capable of making rational decisions at a younger than average age. They COULD be allowed to drink if it were not for the other 98% or teenagers who fall into the "average" category. So they'll have to wait an extra three whole years to drink. The horror.
- Livvy
February 25, 2009 9:47PM
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