For most, July 17 is a pretty anti-climactic day. (Unless you happen to claim this date as a birthday, in which case, woo! Cue the confetti and streamers.)Unbeknownst to many, however, something did happen back in 1984 that affects a lot of us: The National Minimum Drinking Age Act was passed, establishing the legal drinking age at 21.
Although that age might seem sort of random (maybe even arbitrary) since you’re a legal adult at 18, Congress didn’t just pick the number out of a hat. There’s a long and storied history about alcohol in America, and why the legal drinking age is set at 21.
Before 1984, some states had the legal drinking age set at 18, 19, or 20.
At the end of Prohibition in the 1930s, the legal drinking age was 21. This benchmark held steady until 1971, when the minimum voting age was dropped to 18 and buzz began to build for a reduction in the minimum legal drinking age, as well. Between 1970 and 1975, nearly half the states dropped the drinking age to 18, 19, and 20.
But the legal drinking age wasn’t set over medical reasons.
“None of this had any medical or psychological basis, but had to do with rights and responsibilities afforded to people defined as ‘adults,’” Alix Caster, MD, a pediatric doctor with Orlando Health Associates, tells Teen Vogue. “Specifically, it was believed by most that if an 18-year-old was old enough to be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, he was old enough to vote and to drink.”
However, as the legal drinking age fell across the country in the ‘70s, alarm bells started to go off, notes licensed clinical psychologist Suzette Glasner-Edwards, PhD, an adjunct associate professor at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. “Research evidence after that time strongly suggested that an increase in traffic accidents among young people was linked with this downward shift in the minimum legal drinking age,” she explains to Teen Vogue. “As a result, a citizens’ effort began prompting states to re-establish 21 as the minimum legal age.”
The drinking age was raised back to 21 over federal highway funding.
In 1984, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act passed, which stated federal highway funds would be withheld from U.S. states that failed to set the minimum legal drinking age back at 21. By 1988, all the states had adopted the age minimum.
The United States has one of the highest minimum legal drinking ages in the world.
Along with Iceland, Japan, and South Korea, the U.S. is one of just a few developed countries to have a minimum legal drinking age over 18, according to the World Health Organization. In fact, in some countries like Belgium and Germany, 16-year-olds are allowed to purchase alcohol. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests there’s been a 16% decline in annual traffic fatalities as a result of setting the minimum legal drinking age back to 21 — amounting to roughly 800 saved lives per year, according to the American Journal of Public Health. Interestingly, keeping alcohol further from young people also seems to affect class attendance; compared with states that had a legal drinking age of 18, students were 13 times more likely to stay in school when the legal drinking age in the state was 21.
