The legal drinking age in the U.S.A. ought to be lowered to 18.

Refutations to my opponent's caseReduced Alcohol Related Driving FatalitiesI would like to first point to the fact that my opponent's source link does not actually take us to a specific article, just to mentalfloss.com, making it so we have to manually search for the information.Now that that's been said, it is important to address how misleading the statistics my opponent has cited are. Yes, traffic reports show a decrease in alcohol fatalities among teen drivers since 1982. However, what wasn't mentioned is that that trend started in the early 1970's, years before the legislative changes to make the legal drinking age 21, suggesting no causal relationship between increasing the drinking age and decreasing alcohol fatalities. Additionally, there are other factors that played into this other than the drinking age, like lower blood-alcohol content limits, mandatory seatbelts, increased public awareness of the problems with drunk driving, airbags, so one cannot buy into my opponent's claims that alcohol fatalities among drivers has dropped as a result of the 21 year old drinking age (1).Additionally, it is important to note what is being spoken of when speaking about alcohol fatalities and alcohol-related traffic fatalities. Those refer to any fatalities where someone who has been drinking (no matter how little they have drunk) is involved. If a pedestrian with a blood alcohol content as low as .01 is walking across the street and gets hit by a car with a sober driver, that counts as an alcohol related fatality. So based on the numbers given, we can't even determine that teen drunk driving ending in fatalities has decreased (2).Also, in other countries where the drinking age was 18, like Canada, the alcohol-related traffic fatalities have gone down at an even faster rate than it did over the same time period that my opponent cited, once again making it clear that there is no likely causal relationship between a 21 year old drinking age and lowering alcohol-related traffic fatalities (3).Medically IrresponsibleHere is where it is important to once again draw the distinction between alcohol use and alcohol abuse. The claims that alcohol impairs brain development through a person's twenties comes from a few sources- one is that of giving rats extremely high levels of alcohol, and the second is from studying alcohol and/or drug dependent individuals. It's not surprising that alcoholics do worse at mental tasks than those who don't abuse alcohol. To address the lab rats, these studies gave huge amounts of alcohol to the lab rats. This would be roughly equivalent to forcing a teen to binge drink daily for weeks or months, and then seeing what would happen. At lower levels of consumption, however, adolescent rats tended to be "less susceptible to motor impairment and also less easily sedated than are older rats." This would suggest that for rat's brains and alcohol, these studies don't produce reliable conclusions. Add to this that rat's function fundamentally differently than humans (for example, many disease cures that work on rats don't work on humans), and you get that this simply doesn't work as a reliable source.To address the studies that deal with humans, it is not exactly surprising that large amounts of alcohol can impair brain development. That being said, those studies never deal with moderate or light drinking, so we do not know at this point if that impairs brain development. This being said, it would seem logically sound to assume that, in the very least, moderate or light drinking harms brain development less than alcohol abuse. I have already shown in my previous round how lowering the drinking age would lower alcohol abuse. This means that, by voting for my side, by voting to lower the drinking age to 18, it is actually reducing the problems cited by con with regards to brain development. I am actually creating solvency by lowering the drinking age to 18, while my opponent is defending a culture where underage drinking is done behind closed doors and binge drinking is rampant. It is clear that I have the better impacts.If anything, it would be medically irresponsible to keep the drinking age at 21, as that results in higher alcohol abuse, which causes more harms than lowering the drinking age to 18 would.(4)Age of InitiationThis directly clashes with my third contention, which was about maturity. My opponent neglects to mention that we can join the military and vote at 18, which both obviously require more responsibility to self and others than drinking does. This means that the law is currently representing an inconsistent and unfair standard by having the drinking age at 21. It would be more logical to simply support the fact that people have ownership over themselves and say that, once they are an adult, once they are 18, they should be able to choose what goes into their own bodies. If the voters would like, they can re-read my first and third contention, as they both refute my opponent's age of initiation point quite nicely.ConclusionI have shown how lowering the drinking age would reduce binge drinking, how a person has sovereignty over themselves, and how the law currently shows inconsistency and unfairness with respect to maturity and legality. All of those contentions, on their own, could support my burden of proof, so if any of them remain standing at the end of the debate, then I have won. As my opponent has neglected to respond, they are still standing as of now. I have shown how all of my opponents points are false, baseless, work for my side, or are illogical/inconsistent, so none of his contentions currently stand.Thank you for reading thus far, and I hope that my opponent decides to respond in this coming round.Sources:1. http://www.chooseresponsibility.org...2. http://www2.potsdam.edu...3. http://dailycaller.com...4. http://www2.potsdam.edu...