Underage drinking age lowered to 17

George – Don’t you find it annoying that when you get invited to a party you can’t buy your own booze so you have to get your parents to go and get it, or as some of you do get a supplier, we believe this is a pain in the ass. Today Adam and I are here to discuss and show you both sides of a certain idea. This idea we are going to put to you today is of lowering the drinking age to 17. In New Zealand at this current point in time the legal age where a person can buy alcohol from a liquor store and enter a bar (without parent company) is 18. Today, We both wanted to discuss the impacts that lowering the drinking age would cause. I am going to discuss the positive of having this drinking age at seventeen, while Adam will argue the negatives and why this idea should not be put into our society.

Firstly a positive argument of having the drinking age lowered to 17 would be by the age of 17 we as 17 year olds are mature enough to be able to buy alcohol, the majority of 16 year olds start partying, then so by the time they turn 17 they know their drinking habits and know their limit. All of you here in this classroom drink at parties and with friends in weekends and all of you know how practical it would be to buy alcohol. I personally think that if the age was 17 we have time to learn how to drink properly instead of when you turn 18 a lot of people are going straight to university where there is a big drinking culture, this can result in bad decisions due to little drinking experience. Looking at drinking stats from the past few years over 60% of 16 year olds drink alcohol on a regular basis, which means these people are learning their habits at an early age, this can be a good and bad thing becuase people all make bad decsions while drinking but if they learn this early they will be better in the long run. Another reason why the drinking age should be lowered is with a high majority of 16 year olds drinking it means the cops come after us, with us drinking at parties cops can come hover around partys waiting for people to come out holding alcohol then hit us with an instant $200 fine, This happened to you adam in the past week so if the age was 17 you would be $200 richer. That $200 could go towards you buying alcohol Adam imagine how many feijoa long whites that would get you.

Well you see George, I disagree with this statement. Research shows that the adolescent brain hasn’t fully finished maturing until into the 20’s, therefore it could be argued proper mature decisions can not be made until this age bracket. For this reason it could even be argued the drinking age should be raised to the age of 21, which is what it is in the United States of America. Allowing 17 year olds to buy alcohol would cause more carnage on streets with the immaturity of decision making coming from these still young teenagers. I don’t need to talk about the decision making that comes from you george after a few beverages. The numerous times you have gone missing and ended up lost in a bush, running across roofs and even with you arm around 14 year old girls in the middle of town on New Years. These examples of your decisions while drinking reflect on all personal around the age of 16/17 and how they are unable to make mature enough decisions to be able to have full access to alcohol. We could even begin to argue that 18 is too young to have full access to alcohol. 18 being so close to 17 it gives minors an easy access to alcohol if they know peers in that age range. If the drinking age was 21 this would decrease this factor from occurring as the brain is more matured and people are going to be able to tell the right from wrong in order to not supply minors. New Zealand has the biggest drinking culture in the world so if the legal drinking age got increased to 21 that would put a stop to this terrible statistic that our country falls under. If the age was 21 alcohol would be harder to get meaning our age group drinks is not drinking as much. another positive of increasing drinking age would be