legal drinking age in canada essay

What is the Legal Drinking Age in Canada? List of ID Proofs Accepted to buy Alcohol

In this Living in Canada guide, we are going to cover the legal drinking age in Canada by province and what documents are accepted to buy or drink alcohol.

Every province has their own rules for drinking in terms of liquor sale permission, distribution of alcohol, minimum age restrictions for the person who is consuming it etc. For example, let’s check What’s the legal drinking age in Toronto?

In Toronto, the legal drinking age is 19 years old as in the province of Ontario. However, the minimum age for the salesperson is 18 years old.

If a salesperson has any doubt about the buyer’s age, he has the full right to ask for an acceptable form of identification as proof of age. It would be best if you cooperated with the salesman to identify your age. Identification of age must be current, government-issued ID and include a photo of the person and the birth date. You will find proof of ID lists ahead in this article.

What is the Legal Drinking Age in Canada in 2024?

If we talk generally about the drinking age in Canada, there is no defined age for legal alcohol purchase or consumption by the federal government. Each province and territory has the right to set its own drinking age. The legal age for purchasing alcohol in different provinces of Canada is as follows: 

• 19 years of age in Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia,  Nunavut, Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick,  and Yukon.
• 18 years of age in Alberta, Manitoba, and Quebec

(source: rcmp-grc.gc.ca )

The drinking age was raised to 18 in Alberta, Manitoba, and Quebec in 1985, and 19 in the rest of the country in 1988.

There are a few exceptions to the drinking age laws in Canada. For example, people can drink alcohol on private property with parental consent in Alberta. In Quebec, people can drink alcohol on licensed premises with parental consent if they are accompanied by an adult.

The legal drinking age and the types of alcoholic beverages:

• Legal drinking age: 18
• This includes all alcoholic beverages such as beer, wine, and spirits.
• This age restriction is the same for beer, wine, and spirits.
• The legal drinking age covers beer, wine, and vodka, among other alcoholic drinks.

Can you drink a beer at the age of 18 in Canada?

Yes but in some provinces only, Like in Alberta, Manitoba, and Quebec you can drink a beer at the age of 18 in Canada.

For the rest of the provinces in Canada, the legal drinking age is generally 19, which also applies to beer, wine, and spirits.

Here is the list of provinces:

• British Columbia
• Newfoundland and Labrador
• Nova Scotia
• New Brunswick
• Prince Edward Island
• Saskatchewan
• Northwest Territories

Let me answer some of the most asked questions based on reliable sources and fact-checking:

Can you drink wine at the age of 18 in Canada?

The simple answer is, Yes, But in Alberta, Manitoba, and Quebec, you can legally drink wine at the age of 18. Please remember that you can not drink wine in other provinces under 19, you must be at least 19 years old.

Can I drink vodka under 19 in Canada?

Yes, in Alberta, Manitoba, and Quebec, you can legally drink vodka at 18. But to drink legally in other provinces you must be at least 19 or above.

A fun fact, So if it’s your 19th birthday, you can officially drink after midnight at (00:01). If you carry your official ID with you.

If you have further questions, must check this Alcohol Drinking Ages and Law Source: Drinking laws – RCMP

History of MLDA Changes in Canada

Most of you don’t know about MLDA, For those who do not know, What is MLDA?

MLDA stands for ‘Minimum Legal Drinking Age.

Earlier before the 1970s most of the Canadian provinces and territories had MLDA 20 or 21 years minimum. In the 1970s, all Canadian provinces and territories lowered the ‘ minimum legal drinking age ‘ MLDA from 20 years old or 21 years old to either 18 yr or 19 yr close to the age group which is legally an adult.

Ontario and Saskatchewan specifically increased their MLDA from 18 years old to 19 years old, in the late 1970s. (source: ccsa.ca )

More recently, in 1987, P.E.I. increased their legal drinking age from 18 to 19 years; since this time there have been no further changes to the MLDA in Canada.

As of January 2024, the most recent MLDA is 18 years of age in Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec, and 19 years in the rest of the Canadian provinces and territories.

What is the Legal Drinking Age in Canada by Provinces in 2024?

As of January 2024, In the provinces of Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia,  Nunavut, Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Yukon, the legal drinking age is 19 years old.

In the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Quebec the legal drinking age is 18 years old in the year 2024.

Here is the quick table explaining the legal drinking age in Canada by each province in 2024.

*Source: Wikipedia

Legal Drinking Age in Alberta 2024

As of January 2024, If you are planning to buy alcohol or drink alcohol, you must be aware that the legal drinking age in Calgary, Edmonton, or anywhere in Alberta is 18 years old.

Legal Drinking Age in Manitoba 2024

Make sure you are 18 years old if you are going to buy or drink alcohol in Winnipeg or anywhere in Manitoba.

You must carry your photo ID card (list given below) if you are planning to buy alcohol.

Legal Drinking Age in Quebec  2024

If you are in Montreal or anywhere in Quebec, the legal drinking age in Quebec or the buying age is 18 years old.

Legal Drinking Age in British Columbia  2024

The legal drinking age in Vancouver, Surrey or anywhere in British Columbia is 19 years old. Must carry your photo ID card. eg driving licence if you are going to buy liquor from any store, you will be asked for a photo ID card.

Legal Drinking Age in Ontario   2024

In the financial capital of Canada, the legal drinking age in Toronto or anywhere in Ontario is 19 years old.

Legal Drinking Age in Saskatchewan   2024

In the Prairies, The legal drinking age in Saskatoon, Regina, Moose Jaw or anywhere in Saskatchewan is 19 years old.

Legal Drinking Age in Northwest Territories   2024

In the Northwest Territories, the legal drinking age is 19 years old. A valid photo ID would be required if you plan to buy liquor.

Legal Drinking Age in Nova Scotia   2024

Similar to most of the other provinces the legal drinking age in Nova Scotia is also 19 years old.

Legal Drinking Age in Nunavut   2024

Nunavut also has a legal drinking age of 19 years old minimum.

Legal Drinking Age in Newfoundland and Labrador

19 years old.

Prince Edward Island:  Legal Drinking Age in   2024

Prince Edward Island also has the same legal drinking age of 19 years old.

New Brunswick: Legal Drinking Age   2024

The legal drinking age anywhere in New Brunswick is 19 years old.

Yukon: Legal Drinking Age   2024

Anywhere in Yukon, you must be at least 19 years old to consume alcohol.

Drinking Laws in Canada: by Provinces

If you are a new immigrant or visitor, please make sure to read these drinking laws in Canada and the possible consequences.

Anyone in Canada must be aware of these drinking laws which are important even if you are not drinking or buying alcohol.

How do the drinking laws differ between provinces and cities?

The laws regarding alcohol consumption in Toronto are governed by the Ontario Liquor Control Board (LCBO). The legal drinking age in Toronto is 19. Alcohol may be consumed in public places, such as restaurants, bars, and parks.

There are some exceptions to this rule, however. For example, alcohol can be consumed in certain public places, such as schools, hospitals, and government buildings.

The rules regarding alcohol consumption vary between provinces and cities. For instance, the legal drinking age in Montreal is 18. Additionally, alcohol can be purchased and consumed in public places, such as parks and sidewalks, provided that it is not within view of a school or daycare center.

What are some of the risks of underage drinking?

There are many risks to underage drinking, including:

• Health risks – alcohol can damage the developing brains of young people and lead to problems with learning, memory and behaviour. It can also increase the risk of developing chronic diseases such as cancer.

• Social risks – underage drinking can lead to social problems such as fighting, vandalism and truancy. It can also adversely affect family relationships.

• Economic risks – alcohol consumption can lead to reduced productivity, absenteeism from work or school, and increased healthcare costs.

What ID proofs are required to drink or buy alcohol in Canada?

Here is the list of photo IDs and documents acceptable to purchase or drink legally in Canada as of January 2024:

Canadian Citizenship Card:

A citizenship card is a card that proves your Canadian citizenship and must have your photo on it and your date of birth to confirm.

Driver´s Licence: 

Any province’s driver’s license card is acceptable and has your photo and DOB on it.

If you are a tourist to Canada, you can provide your country driving license which proves your identity and age.

An official document that identifies you as a citizen of a particular country and shows your photo and date of birth to identify your age.

Canadian Armed Forces Identification Card:

This card is for those who are serving or served in the Canadian armed forces and must have their photo on it as well as their DOB.

Status Card:

A Secure Indian Status Card issued by the Government of Canada

Permanent Resident Card:

The Permanent Resident card is an identification document and a travel document for permanent residents of Canada which has your photo and identification of your age on it.

A photo card issued by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario ( LCBO)

(source: agco.ca)

Conclusion: Legal Drinking Age in Canada

Even if you meet the minimum requirement of the drinking age, it is still important to use caution when consuming alcohol. If you are under the influence of alcohol, your judgment and coordination can be impaired, which can lead to accidents or other dangerous situations.

I would request you strictly follow the legal drinking age law in Canada according to your province. If you choose to drink alcohol, it is important to do so responsibly and in moderation.

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Canadian Legal Drinking Age: Laws and Regulations Explained

Frequently asked questions about the canadian legal drinking age, the fascinating world of canadian legal drinking age.

As a law enthusiast, I can`t help but be captivated by the intricacies of the Canadian legal drinking age. It`s a topic that not only sparks debate but also raises important questions about the balance between individual freedoms and public safety.

Understanding the Legal Drinking Age in Canada

The legal drinking age in Canada varies by province and territory. The majority of provinces and territories have set the minimum drinking age at 19, except for Quebec, Alberta, and Manitoba, where it is 18. In some provinces, there are exceptions for consuming alcohol in private residences under parental supervision.

Provincial Territorial Legal Drinking Ages

Impact public health.

Research has shown that setting the legal drinking age at 21, as is the case in the United States, can lead to a reduction in alcohol-related car accidents and fatalities among young people. However, it is also argued that a higher legal drinking age may push underage drinking underground, making it more difficult to regulate and educate young adults about responsible alcohol consumption.

Case Study: Minimum Legal Drinking Age and Youth Alcohol Consumption

A study conducted by the University of Victoria examined the impact of the legal drinking age on youth alcohol consumption in Canada. The findings suggested that a lower drinking age did not significantly increase alcohol consumption among young adults, but rather shifted the age group at which individuals began drinking.

The Canadian legal drinking age is a complex and multi-faceted issue that continues to be the subject of ongoing debate and research. It raises important questions about the role of the government in regulating individual behavior and the effectiveness of age-based restrictions in promoting public safety.

Canadian Legal Drinking Age Contract

This contract outlines the legal drinking age in Canada and the responsibilities of all parties involved.

What you should know about Canada's new alcohol guidelines

Canada has overhauled its alcohol consumption guidance, and the difference between the new and old recommendations is stark.

The latest round of recommendations published by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) is the first update to the guidelines in 11 years. CCSA released a report containing the guidelines on Tuesday.

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While acknowledging that 40 per cent of people living in Canada aged 15 and older consume more than six standard drinks per week, the report warns that no amount of alcohol is safe to consume. It recommends a new cap on weekly alcohol consumption that is significantly lower than the previous one and lays out new guidelines for people who are breastfeeding or trying to conceive.

Here is a summary of what we know about the new guidelines.

WHAT'S BEHIND CANADA'S NEW ALCOHOL GUIDANCE?

The CCSA announced in September 2020 that it would launch an initiative to bring the existing Low-Risk Alcohol Drinking Guidelines – released in 2011 – in line with the latest evidence on alcohol consumption health and safety risks.

The new guidance would also address the specific needs of groups facing a higher risk from the harms associated with alcohol, including youth, women, older adults and people with chronic diseases.

“The current Low-Risk Alcohol Drinking Guidelines are a vital tool to support Canadians in assessing their alcohol consumption," said Rita Notarandrea, CEO of CCSA, in a media release published on Sept. 17, 2020.

"Since they were first developed in 2011, the evidence on the impact of alcohol on health and its contribution to social harms has advanced considerably. This update to the guidelines will reflect the most recent evidence available and put Canada on the leading edge of the research."

Aided by funding from Health Canada, the CCSA spent 20 months updating the guidelines with scientists, researchers and representatives from federal, provincial and territorial governments and national organizations. The new guidelines, titled Canada's Guidance on Alcohol and Health, now officially replace Canada's previous Low-Risk Alcohol Drinking Guidelines.  

WHAT ARE THE NEW GUIDELINES FOR ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION?

Rather than laying out strict rules around drinking, the new CCSA guidance provides a continuum – or scale – of risk associated with various levels of alcohol use to help people make healthier choices.

The new continuum defines the health and safety risks associated with drinking as negligible-to-low for people who have two standard drinks or less per week; moderate for those who have between three and six standard drinks per week; and increasingly high for those who consume more than six standard drinks per week.

In other words, to minimize the risk associated with drinking, the CCSA recommends consuming no more than two alcoholic drinks per week, a dramatic reduction from the previous cap of 15 drinks for men and 10 drinks for women.

The report refutes the popular belief that drinking a small amount of alcohol can provide sleep and health benefits, and warns that as few as three to six drinks per week can increase the risk of developing certain cancers. It warns consuming more than seven drinks per week increases the risk of heart disease and stroke, with the danger increasing with each additional drink.

The new guidelines recommend people who are pregnant, trying to conceive or breastfeeding avoid drinking alcohol entirely, even in small amounts.

The report also warns that a disproportionate number of injuries, violent incidents and deaths result from men's drinking, while women face steeper health risks above low levels of alcohol consumption than men.

The report urges authorities to require drink containers – such as bottles and cans – to include labels that tell people how many standard drinks are contained in each, as well as health warnings and nutrition information.  

WHAT IS A STANDARD DRINK?

According to the CCSA, a standard drink in Canada is defined as:

• A 12-oz. (341 ml) bottle of 5 per cent alcohol beer or cider
• A 5-oz. (142 ml) glass of 12 per cent alcohol wine
• A 1.5-oz. (43 ml) shot glass of 40 per cent alcohol spirits  

IS THE LEGAL DRINKING AGE IN CANADA CHANGING?

In Canada, each province and territory defines the age at which people can legally purchase, possess, consume and supply alcohol; the minimum legal drinking age.

The current minimum legal drinking age in most Canadian provinces and territories is 19, with the exception of Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec, where the minimum legal drinking age is 18.

The CCSA's new guidance does not include a recommendation to change the minimum legal drinking age in Canada.  

WHAT ARE THE CRITERIA FOR ALCOHOLISM?

Canada's Guidance on Alcohol and Health warns that drinking any more than two alcoholic beverages per week can pose a moderate health and safety risk, but does not wade into any criteria for alcohol use disorders.

The report does state that, although most people who engage in binge drinking do not meet the criteria for an alcohol use disorder, virtually all people with an alcohol use disorder engage in binge drinking.

It defines binge drinking as drinking five or more standard drinks in a sitting for men and four or more for women.

To read the guidelines for yourself, visit ccsa.ca.

If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction or mental health matters, the following resources may be available to you:

• Hope for Wellness Helpline for Indigenous Peoples (English, French, Cree, Ojibway and Inuktitut): 1-855-242-3310
• Wellness Together Canada : 1-866-585-0445
• Drug Rehab Services: 1-877-254-3348
• SMART Recovery: meetings.smartrecovery.org/meetings/
• Families for Addiction Recovery: 1-855-377-6677
• Kids Help Phone: 1-800-668-6868  

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• What's The Legal Drinking Age In Canada?

• You can't carry alcohol across a provincial border without permission from the provincial liquor board.
• In Canada, there were around 77,000 hospitalizations entirely caused by alcohol in 2015–2016, compared to 75,000 hospitalizations for heart attacks in the same year.
• Within Canada, over 70 percent of youth and young adults ages 15 to 24 reported using alcohol in 2018.

Legal Drinking Age In Canada 

There is no national legal drinking age in Canada. Instead, rules around alcohol and drug consumption are done by each province individually - including setting a minimum drinking age .

In Alberta, Manitoba, and Quebec, the legal drinking age is 18. But in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.), Ontario, and the Yukon, the limit is 19 years of age.

According to the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse (CCSA), alcohol is the leading psychoactive substance used by youth and young adults (ages 15 to 24) in the country. In addition, the CCSA notes alcohol is the leading cause of mortality in youth and young adults (ages 10 to 24) worldwide.

With evidence of its effects on mental and physical development in adolescents, alcohol use among youth has been the source of much debate in Canada.

Changing The Legal Age 

Some recommend the legal drinking age be bumped back to 21 country-wide, as it was before provinces lowered it in the 1970s, while others would be satisfied to see Alberta, Quebec, and Manitoba follow the lead of other provinces and make 19 the legal drinking age.

The 1970s move was made to align drinking ages with the age of majority (18 years), but Ontario and Saskatchewan were the first to raise limits to 19 years to combat a noticeable increase in alcohol consumption among high school students.

Other provinces followed suit, with P.E.I. being the last to move to a drinking age of 19 in 1987.

Issues Relating To Alcohol Consumption 

Studies have shown as the minimum legal drinking age increases, instances of car crashes and alcohol consumption among youth decreases in turn. Based on the findings of the study, it is estimated if the drinking age was raised to be 19 across the country, about seven 18-year-old males would be prevented from death each year. If the limit was raised to age 21, it is estimated about 32 lives would be saved per year.

In another study, completed at the University of Northern B.C. , evidence showed hospitalizations and injuries due to alcohol would reduce if the legal drinking age was moved to just 19 years old for all provinces. The results of the study revealed a 15 to 20% increase in the number of young people in the hospital at age 18 or 19, depending on the province.

Research shows instances of alcohol abuse, alcohol poisoning, and other related illnesses or issues due to consumption would decrease among youth if the legal drinking age was raised.

In addition, the study points to the potential to save infrastructure and taxpayer dollars, removing some of the burdens from emergency rooms and first responders.

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The Legal Drinking Age in Canada Is Mixed

The legal drinking age in Canada varies by province. The legal drinking age is 18 in Alberta, Manitoba, and Quebec and 19 in the rest of the country (British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador).

The History of the Legal Drinking Age in Canada

The legal drinking age in Canada has evolved over time, varying by province and territory. Here’s a general overview of its history:

• Regional Differences : It’s important to note that Canada’s provinces and territories have the authority to set their own legal drinking ages, leading to the current variations across the country.
• Early 20th Century : Canada, influenced by the temperance movement, had periods of alcohol prohibition during the early 20th century. This movement, which advocated for the reduction or prohibition of alcohol consumption, significantly impacted alcohol laws across North America.
• Post-Prohibition Era : Following the end of prohibition in various provinces, regulations were introduced by the provinces to control alcohol consumption not unlike how the laws were changed after cannabis became legal recently. This included setting legal drinking ages, which were typically higher than today’s standards. In the post-prohibition era in Canada, which varied by province as each lifted prohibition at different times, the legal drinking age was generally set at 21. This was consistent with the age of majority and other legal age limits at the time.
• 1960s-1970s : During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a significant societal shift, and many provinces began lowering the legal drinking age. This was part of a broader movement that also saw the reduction of the voting age and the age of majority. The drinking age was lowered to 18 or 19 in most provinces during this period. These changes were influenced by various social, political, and cultural factors, reflecting a changing societal attitude towards alcohol and adulthood.
• 1980s-Present : Since the 1980s, the drinking age has remained relatively stable in Canada. Currently, the legal drinking age is 18 in Alberta, Manitoba, and Quebec and 19 in the rest of the country. These ages have been in place for several decades and reflect a balance between legal adulthood and public health considerations.

The history of the legal drinking age in Canada reflects changing social attitudes towards alcohol consumption and an ongoing balance between individual freedoms and public health and safety concerns.

The Difference Between Canadian and U.S. & The Drinking Age

In the U.S., the adjustment of the legal drinking age in the late 20th century was significantly influenced by federal legislation, specifically the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 . This act effectively standardized the drinking age to 21 across all states by tying it to federal highway funding, a powerful incentive for states to comply.

In contrast, Canada’s approach to setting the legal drinking age is more decentralized, with each province and territory having the authority to establish its own age limits. Canada has no federal law about the minimum drinking age, nor do they incentivize provinces to lower or raise their minimum drinking age through promises of highway funding as the U.S. does.

This has resulted in variations across the country, with ages set at either 18 or 19. This approach is indeed more aligned with European standards, where the drinking age is typically lower than in the U.S. and often varies based on the type of beverage or the context in which it is consumed.

The United Kingdom’s laws, as you mentioned, offer an even more nuanced approach, allowing for supervised underage drinking in certain contexts like pubs (for those over 16) and at home for children as young as 5.

These differences reflect broader cultural attitudes towards alcohol, legal adulthood, and public health priorities. The U.S. approach is more focused on a uniform legal age as a matter of public policy, while countries like Canada and those in Europe often balance legal restrictions with cultural norms and practices around alcohol consumption.

Jeff is a lawyer in Toronto who works for a technology startup. Jeff is a frequent lecturer on employment law and is the author of an employment law textbook and various trade journal articles. Jeff is interested in Canadian business, technology and law, and this blog is his platform to share his views and tips in those areas.

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What Is the Legal Drinking Age in Canada?

The situation of the legal drinking age in Canada is enormous, encompassing societal norms, criminal duty, and public health. The minimum legal age in Canada is decided through this threshold, at which people are prohibited from purchasing and consuming alcoholic liquids. The primary objective of setting up a prison ingesting age is to guard teens against the capacity adverse consequences that could arise from early alcohol intake, including developmental complications and health dangers.

Key Takeaways

• Across Canada, the minimum legal drinking age is set by each province and territory, ranging from 18 to 19 years, to ensure a balance between protecting young individuals and granting them lawful access to alcohol.
• The establishment of a legal drinking age is designed to shield young people from the adverse developmental and health impacts that early alcohol use can bring.
• Alcohol addiction poses significant personal and social challenges, leading to health complications, economic difficulties, and deteriorating personal relationships.
• Addressing alcohol addiction effectively often necessitates professional help, including detoxification, rehab programs, and support groups.

The determination of the legal age for drinking alcohol is a provincial and territorial government responsibility. As a result of this delineation of strength, the legal age differs nationwide, mirroring nearby perspectives and judgments. Although the federal government exercises some control over the production, distribution, and retail of alcoholic drinks via more than a few laws and rules, the authority to establish the minimal age for alcohol intake is with the provinces and territories.

Legal Drinking Age in Ontario 

The legal drinking age is a vital issue of Canada's alcohol law framework, designed to guard young Canadians from the early onset of alcohol drinking and its associated risks. Across Canada, the legal consuming age is determined through provincial and territorial governments, leading to variations across the country. This age is ready at either 18 or 19 years, depending on the jurisdiction.

Provincial and Territorial Legal Drinking Ages:

• Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec: 18 years
• British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Northwest Territories, Yukon, Nunavut: 19 years

In Ontario, the most populated province, the legal alcohol drinking age is nineteen. This law is a degree to balance the legal admission to alcohol for teenagers with the need to mitigate developmental and health risks related to its intake. The setting of the age restriction at 19 is reflective of a broader healthcare policy geared toward stopping underage consumption and its potential effects.

The Effects of the Legal Drinking Age on Public Health

The legal drinking age in Canada has a significant impact on public health outcomes, particularly when it comes to alcohol consumption among people of extraordinary age. This legislation is a critical component of more significant public health strategies aimed at reducing alcohol-related harm among young Canadians. Understanding the impact of these legal age limits necessitates an examination of alcohol consumption patterns among different age groups, as well as the resulting health outcomes.

Alcohol Drinking Among Different Age Groups

Statistics on alcohol intake reflect impressive patterns throughout different age groups, stimulated substantially by using the criminal consuming age. Generally, younger age organizations, especially those just underneath and just above the prison ingesting age, show varying ranges of alcohol use that can have profound implications for public well-being.

1. Underage Drinking

Despite legal limits, there is proof of alcohol consumption amongst those beneath the legal consuming age. This group is in more serious danger for a number of harmful effects, along with acute harm from accidents or injuries and lengthy-time period outcomes on mind development.

2. Legal Age and Teenagers 

For the ones just above the legal drinking age, there is mostly a spike in alcohol intake. This increase is in part attributed to the newfound legal access to alcohol. While a few teenagers drink alcohol responsibly , others may also engage in volatile consuming behaviors, which include binge consuming, which could cause health issues and alcohol dependence.

In older age groups, alcohol intake styles tend to stabilize. However, health risks remain primarily associated with chronic diseases associated with long-term alcohol use, including liver ailment, cardiovascular problems, and certain forms of most cancers.

Public Health Implications

The legal drinking age affects public health in several ways:

1. Preventing early alcohol exposure

Setting a legal drinking age helps to delay the onset of alcohol consumption among young people, which is critical for brain development. The brain continues to develop until the early twenties, and early alcohol consumption can disrupt this process, resulting in cognitive impairments and an increased susceptibility to addiction.

2. Reduction in Alcohol-related Harm

Higher legal drinking ages are linked to lower alcohol-related harm among youth, including fewer alcohol-related accidents, injuries, and deaths. These regulations are also associated with lower rates of alcohol dependency and abuse later in life.

3. Impact on Healthcare System

Legal drinking age regulations can help to reduce early alcohol exposure and its associated harms, reducing the strain on healthcare systems. Fewer alcohol-related emergencies and chronic conditions lead to less strain on healthcare resources and better overall public health outcomes.

Impacts of Addiction

Alcoholism is a complicated situation that calls for a multifaceted method of treatment and healing. In Ontario, as inside the rest of Canada, the struggle against alcohol addiction is fought on more than one front, from prevention and early intervention to treatment and lengthy-time period recovery aid. For the ones searching for help to forestall consuming alcohol, Ontario offers a wide range of assets and applications designed to address the specific desires of individuals at diverse tiers of their recuperation adventure.

The Domino Effect of Alcohol Addiction

Alcohol addiction can lead to a myriad of terrible outcomes, affecting each component of a man or woman's lifestyle as well as those around them. Alcohol addiction has far-reaching consequences, ranging from poor health, financial instability, and strained relationships to broader societal effects such as increased healthcare costs and productivity losses. Families frequently bear the brunt of these outcomes, dealing with emotional turmoil and financial stress as they navigate the difficult situations of supporting a loved one during recovery.

The Function of Professional Help 

Recovery from alcohol addiction is hardly ever a way that may be undertaken alone. Professional assistance, in the form of alcohol treatment programs and detox services, plays a pivotal role in guiding people through the complicated process of healing. In Ontario, many services are available to help those needing assistance, including:

• Detoxification Services: Medical detox programs offer a safe environment for people to withdraw from alcohol while being monitored by healthcare professionals, thereby managing withdrawal symptoms and lowering the risk of complications.
• Rehabilitation Programs: Both inpatient and outpatient rehab programs provide structured treatment, such as therapy, counseling, and support groups, to address the psychological aspects of addiction and prepare individuals for long-term sobriety.
• Support Groups and Peer Networks: Organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and other peer support networks provide invaluable opportunities for people to share their stories, gain support, and foster a sense of community with others who understand the difficulties of recovery.

Obtaining Help in Ontario

For those in search of help to overcome alcoholism in Ontario, quite a few assets are comfortably available. From authorities-funded programs and community health centers to private clinics providing specialized treatment, the province is geared up to support individuals to every degree in their restoration. The key to gaining access to these offerings is achieving out. Whether it's contacting a helpline, speaking to a healthcare company, or attending a support group session, the first step in the direction of recovery is a request for help.

Challenges mark the course from alcohol addiction to healing ; however, it's also a journey of hope and transformation. In Ontario, complete aid services, including alcohol treatment applications and detox services, provide the foundation for people to rebuild their lives. By addressing the multifaceted nature of alcoholism and offering customized assistance, these services play an essential position in not only most effectively assisting individuals to get better but also in preventing the onset of addiction among future generations.

What is the legal drinking age in Canada?

The legal drinking age in Canada varies by province and territory, ranging from 18 to 19 years old.

Why do different provinces have different legal drinking ages?

Legal drinking ages vary because provincial and territorial governments set their regulations based on local perspectives and public health strategies.

What are the goals of setting a legal drinking age?

The primary goal is to protect young people from the developmental and health risks associated with early alcohol consumption.

What are the consequences of alcohol addiction?

Alcohol addiction can lead to severe health problems, financial instability, strained relationships, and broader societal issues.

How can individuals access help for alcohol addiction in Ontario?

Individuals can access help through government-funded programs, community health centres, private clinics, or by contacting helplines and healthcare providers.

Seth brings many years of professional experience working the front lines of addiction in both the government and privatized sectors.

Dr. Chintan is a Board Certified Family Physician with an interest in holistic and preventative care as well as healthcare systems. Credentialed Physician with both American & Canadian Board of Family Medicine. Adjunct Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry. Telemedicine clinician.

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The Legal Drinking Age in Canada

Updated 25 October 2023

Subject Addiction

Downloads 57

Category Culture ,  Food ,  Health ,  Life

Topic Youth ,  Alcohol ,  Drinking

The legal drinking age can be defined as the age at which someone can buy and consume alcoholic beverages. The age limit set is widely different across the World, while some countries set a different age limit of when a person can purchase and when someone can drink alcoholic beverages. But it is important to note that the legal age drinking limit mostly cover drinking at public places since it is very difficult to monitor behaviors of persons at home. Most of the European countries have set their legal drinking age at 16 while in Canada most of the provinces have set the legal drinking age at 19. This paper will discuss the reasons why the Canadian government should not lower the legal drinking age in her Provinces.

            The drinking age limit should not be lowered in Canada; this is because lowering the legal drinking age will not come with any benefits to the society but more of negative effects. For example, a study conducted in Canada using the national Canadian death data of 1980 to 2009 showed an increase in the number of male deaths resulting from injuries or motor vehicle accidents to have risen. There was also an increase in mortality rate, it is clear that most of those accidents or deaths resulted from alcohol drinking, the persons involved must have been under alcohol influence (considering the legal drinking age in the provinces). Therefore, lowering the legal drinking age limit will do more harm since more accidents, injuries and deaths will be witnessed, and if lowered to 16 then more young people will die. The young people come with a lot of rationale in a country, for instance, serving the country. And it is notable that they cannot serve the country after having one or two beers.

            Lowering the legal drinking age will also lead to many cases of drunk driving; most of the young people are always involved in issues of driving while drunk, and if the age limit is lowered then the country will experience more of such cases. For example, a case where the legal drinking age is lowered to 16, if the cases of drunk driving were mostly reported for ages after 19 then more such cases will also be witnessed for persons under 19. This will harm the society, therefore, a reason of not to lower the drinking age.

            There are also some medical concerns of lowering the drinking age, the young adults are still vulnerable when it comes to emotional regulation, organization and how they plan their activities as compared to the old adults. Thus, lowering the legal drinking age to include them will interfere with the growth of their brain, specifically the frontal lobe; this is what leads to problems associated with emotional regulations, and as well more death due to depression.

            Ethically it is not safe for the young people to go out in night clubs and bars, lowering the legal drinking age will give them a chance of going out to such places, this will only lead to more cases of crimes and assaults in the neighbourhoods.  And also increases the cases of addictions amongst the younger people. This will in turn lead to binge drinking and more cases of alcohol poisoning, and uncontrolled sexual activities amongst the younger population.

            Alcohol drinking and illegal drug abuse come hand in hand. Most of the young people who start drinking early in their lives are more probable to get involved with the use of illegal drugs. Therefore, lowering the drinking age will increase the chances of more young people getting into the use of illegal substances and more deaths at younger ages. This is because most of the young people are fond of trying things to get them high fast, more so when they hold get-together or go out in clubs to drink.

            Another reason for not to lower the drinking age in Canada is to help protect the society. If the drinking age is lowered to 16 then it will expose even a 10 year old to get drunk. It comes with the carelessness of the younger people; a 16 year old would drink and leave the alcohol in her or his room, thus leading to easy access to alcohol to their younger siblings. Lowering the drinking age will also lead to many cases of misbehaviours and violence in high schools, most of the high school students are of the restricted drinking age. Therefore, lowering the legal drinking age will include them thus, more cases of messed schools in the provinces.

            Lowering the legal drinking age will also increase the cases of fake IDs in the country. For example, most of the teenagers of age 16 or even 15 will go looking for the fake IDs so that they join their peers who are 19 into drinking and partying. This will in turn lead to many criminal activities associated with fake identifications and a messed generation. This as well prevents alcohol related deaths amongst the youths. With fake identifications chances of killings will increase amongst the youths, they will believe that if no camera captured the incidence then the identification cannot easily trace back to them.

            It is also important to not lower the legal drinking age in Canada to help protect the youths from long term effects of excessive drinking. For example, if someone starts drinking excessively at 16 then his or her chances of experiencing effects of alcohol drinking will be increased by three years as compared to the 19 year old. An example of a long term effect is cancer.

            In conclusion the Canadian government should not lower the legal drinking age at the provinces. Someone can argue that why limit an 18 year old from drinking but he can go to war and serve the country. But as discussed in the essay, the age limit will save the society from the stated factors such as associated deaths of ages 16-18 involving drunk driving cases, deaths associated with depression/emotion regulations, illegal substance abuse, misbehaviours resulting from binge drinking amongst the youths and also indiscipline cases reported from high schools, being most of the youths of 16, 17 and 18 are still in high school.

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The Minimum Legal Drinking Age and Public Health

In summer 2008, more than 100 college presidents and other higher education officials signed the Amethyst Initiative, which calls for a reexamination of the minimum legal drinking age in the United States. The current age-21 limit in the United States is higher than in Canada (18 or 19, depending on the province), Mexico (18), and most western European countries (typically 16 or 18). A central argument of the Amethyst Initiative is that the U.S. minimum legal drinking age policy results in more dangerous drinking than would occur if the legal drinking age were lower. A companion organization called Choose Responsibility—led in part by Amethyst Initiative founder John McCardell, former Middlebury College president—explicitly proposes “a series of changes that will allow 18–20 year-olds to purchase, possess and consume alcoholic beverages” (see 〈 http://www.choose responsibility.org/proposal/ 〉).

Fueled in part by the high-profile national media attention garnered by the Amethyst Initiative and Choose Responsibility, activists and policymakers in several states, including Kentucky, Wisconsin, South Carolina, Missouri, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Vermont, have put forth various legislative proposals to lower their state's drinking age from 21 to 18, though no state has adopted a lower minimum legal drinking age yet.

Does the age-21 drinking limit in the United States reduce alcohol consumption by young adults and its harms, or as the signatories of the Amethyst Initiative contend, is it “not working”? Alcohol consumption and its harms are extremely common among young adults. According to results from the 2006–2007 National Health Interview Survey, adults age 18–25 report that on average they drank on 36 days in the previous year and typically consumed 5.1 drinks on the days they drank. If consumed at a single sitting, five drinks meets the clinical definition of “binge” or “heavy episodic” drinking. This consumption contributes to a substantial public health problem: five drinks for a 160-pound man with a limited time between drinks leads to a blood alcohol concentration of about 0.12 percent and results in moderate to severe impairments in coordination, concentration, reflexes, reaction time, depth perception, and peripheral vision. For comparison, the legal limit for driving in the United States is generally 0.08 percent blood alcohol content. Not surprisingly, motor vehicle accidents (the leading cause of death and injury in this age group), homicides, suicides, falls, and other accidents are all strongly associated with alcohol consumption ( Bonnie and O'Connell, 2004 ). Because around 80 percent of deaths among young adults are due to these “external” causes (as opposed to cancer, infectious disease, or other “internal” causes), policies that change the ways in and extent to which young people consume alcohol have the potential to affect the mortality rate of this population substantially.

In this paper, we summarize a large and compelling body of empirical evidence which shows that one of the central claims of the signatories of the Amethyst Initiative is incorrect: setting the minimum legal drinking age at 21 clearly reduces alcohol consumption and its major harms. However, this finding alone is not a sufficient justification for the current minimum legal drinking age, in part because it does not take into account the benefits of alcohol consumption. To put it another way, it is likely that restricting the alcohol consumption of people in their late 20s (or even older) would also reduce alcohol-related harms at least modestly. However, given the much lower rate at which adults in this age group experience alcohol-related harms, their utility from drinking likely outweighs the associated costs. Thus, when considering at what age to set the minimum legal drinking age, we need to determine if the reduction in alcohol-related harms justifies the reduction in consumer surplus that results from preventing people from consuming alcohol.

We begin this paper by examining the case for government intervention targeting the alcohol consumption of young adults. We develop an analytic framework to identify the parameters that are required to compare candidate ages at which to set the minimum legal drinking age. Next, we discuss the challenges inherent in estimating the effects of the minimum legal drinking age and describe what we believe are the two most compelling approaches to address these challenges: a panel fixed-effects approach and a regression discontinuity approach. We present estimates of the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on mortality from these two designs, and we also discuss what is known about the relationship between the minimum legal drinking age and other adverse outcomes such as nonfatal injury and crime. We then document the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on alcohol consumption, which lets us estimate the costs of adverse alcohol-related events on a per-drink basis. Finally we return to the analytic framework and use it to determine what the empirical evidence suggests is the correct age at which to set the minimum legal drinking age.

Economic Economic Considerations for Determining the Optimal Minimum Legal Drinking Age

Alcohol consumption by young adults results in numerous harms including deaths, injuries, commission of crime, criminal victimization, risky sexual behavior, and reduced workforce productivity. A substantial portion of these harms are either directly imposed on other individuals (as is the case with crime) or largely transferred to society as a whole through insurance markets as is the case with injuries ( Phelps, 1988 ). In addition, there is the theoretical possibility (supported by laboratory evidence) that youths may discount future utility too heavily, underestimate the future harm of their current behavior, and/or mispredict how they will feel about their choices in the future ( O'Donoghue and Rabin, 2001 ). If this is the case, even risks that are borne directly by the drinker are not being fully taken into account when an individual is deciding how much alcohol to consume. Given that young adults are imposing costs on others and probably not fully taking into account their own cost of alcohol consumption, there is a case for government intervention targeting their alcohol consumption. The minimum legal drinking age represents one approach to reducing drinking by young adults. 1

Determining the optimal age at which to set the minimum legal drinking age requires estimates of the loss in consumer surplus that results from reducing peoples' alcohol consumption. It also requires estimating the benefits to the drinker and to others from reducing alcohol-related harms. Unfortunately, it is not possible to obtain credible estimates of these key parameters at every point in the age distribution. First, there are no credible estimates of the effects of drinking ages lower than 18 or higher than 21 because the minimum legal drinking age has not been set outside this range in a signififi cant portion of the United States since the 1930s, and the countries with current drinking ages outside this range look very different from the United States. In fact, as we describe in detail in the next section, even estimating the effects on adverse outcomes of a drinking age in the 18 to 21 range is challenging. Second, we lack good ways to estimate the consumer surplus loss that results from restricting drinking, a problem that has characterized the entire literature on optimal alcohol control and taxation (see Gruber, 2001 , for a general discussion).

Thus, rather than try to estimate the optimal age at which to set the minimum legal drinking age, we focus on an analysis that is more feasible and useful from a policy perspective. The drinking age in the United States is currently 21, and there is no push to raise it. If it is lowered, there are many reasons to believe it will most likely be lowered to 18. First, the primary effort by activists for a lower drinking age is to lower the age to 18, either on its own or in conjunction with other alcoholcontrol initiatives such as education programs. In fact, 18 was the most commonly chosen age among the states that adopted lower minimum legal drinking ages in the 1970s. Second, 18 is the age of majority for other important activities such as voting, military service, and serving on juries, thus making it a natural focal point (though notably many states set different minimum ages for a variety of other activities such as driving, consenting to sexual activity, gambling, and purchasing handguns). Finally, many other countries have set their minimum legal drinking age at 18.

Because a change in the drinking age is likely to involve lowering it from 21 to 18, we focus on estimating the effect of lowering the drinking age by this amount on alcohol consumption, costs borne by the drinker, and costs borne by other people. Alcohol consumption can result in harms through many different channels. The effects of age-based drinking restrictions on long-term harms are very hard to estimate so we focus on the major acute harms that result from alcohol consumption including: deaths, nonfatal injuries, and crime. We pay particular attention to the effect of the drinking age on mortality because mortality is well-measured, has been the outcome focused on by much of the previous research on this topic, and is arguably the most costly of alcohol-related harms. To avoid the difficulty of trying to estimate the increase in consumer surplus that results from allowing people to drink, we estimate how much drinking is likely to increase if the drinking age is lowered from 21 to 18 and compare this to the likely increase in harms to the drinker and to other people. This allows us to characterize the harms in terms of dollars per drink. Since we are missing some of the acute harms and all of the long-term harms of alcohol consumption, the estimates we present in this paper are lower bounds of the costs associated with each drink.

Adding how much the drinker paid for the drink to the cost per drink borne by the drinker yields a lower bound on how much a person would have to value the drink for its consumption to be the result of a fully informed and rational choice. The per-drink cost borne by people other than the drinker provides a lower bound on the externality cost. If the externality cost is large or if the total cost of a drink (costs imposed on others plus costs the drinker bears privately plus the the price of the drink itself) is larger than what we believe the value of the drink is to the person consuming it, then this would suggest that the higher drinking age is justified.

The Evaluation Problem in the Context of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age

Determining how the minimum legal drinking age affects alcohol consumption and its adverse consequences is challenging. An extensive public health literature documents the strong correlation between alcohol consumption and adverse events, but estimates from these studies are of limited value for determining whether the minimum legal drinking age should be set at 18, 21, or some other age. Their main limitation is that the correlation between alcohol consumption and adverse events is probably due in part to factors other than alcohol consumption, such as variation across individuals in their tolerance for risk. People with a high tolerance for risk may be more likely both to drink heavily and to put themselves in danger in other ways, such as driving recklessly, even when they are sober. If this is the case, then predictions based on these correlations of how much public policy might reduce the harms of alcohol consumption will be biased upwards. Moreover, estimates of the average relationship between alcohol consumption and harms in the population may not be informative about the effects of the minimum legal drinking age, which probably disproportionately reduces drinking among the most law-abiding members of the population. This suggests that direct estimates of the effect of the drinking age on alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harms are needed if we are to compare the effects of different drinking ages.

Estimating the effects of the minimum legal drinking age requires comparing the alcohol consumption patterns and adverse event rates of young adults subject to the law with a similar group of young adults not subject to it. Since all young adults under age 21 in the United States are subject to the minimum legal drinking age, difficult to find a reasonable comparison group for this population. Because of cultural differences and different legal regimes, young adults in countries where the drinking age is lower than 21 are unlikely to constitute a good comparison group.

However, researchers working on this issue have identified two plausible comparison groups for 18 to 21 year-olds subject to the minimum legal drinking age. The first is composed of young people who were born just a few years earlier in the the same state (and who thus grew up in very similar circumstances) but who faced a lower legal drinking age due to changes in state drinking age policies. In the 1970s, 39 states lowered their minimum legal drinking age to 18, 19, or 20. These drinking age reductions were followed by increases in motor vehicle fatalities, which were documented by numerous researchers at the time (for a review, see Wagenaar and Toomey, 2002 ). This evidence led states to reconsider their decisions and encouraged aged Congress to adopt the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, which required states to adopt a minimum drinking age of 21 or risk losing 10 percent of their federal highway funds. By 1990, every state had responded to the federal law by increasing its drinking age to 21. Thus, within the same state some youths were allowed to drink legally when they turned 18, while those born just a short time later had to wait until they turned 21. We use a fixed-effects panel approach to compare the alcohol consumption and adverse event rates of these two groups.

The second approach for identifying a credible comparison group is to consider a period when the minimum legal drinking age is 21 and compare people just under 21 who are still subject to the minimum legal drinking age with those just over 21 who can drink legally. These two groups of people are likely to be very similar, except that the slightly older group is not subject to the minimum legal drinking age. This approach is called a regression discontinuity design ( Thistlewaite and Campbell, 1960 ; Hahn, Todd, and Van der Klaauw, 2001 ). In the next two sections, we describe these two research designs in detail and how we use them to estimate the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on mortality.

Panel Estimates of the Effect of the Drinking Age on Mortality

The panel approach to estimating the effects of the minimum legal drinking age focuses on the changes in the drinking age that occurred in most states in the 1970s and 1980s. We begin by presenting graphical evidence in Figure 1 on the relationship between the drinking age and the incidence of fatal motor vehicle accidents. The data underlying the series in Figure 1 come from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System for 1975–1993 for the 39 states that lowered their drinking age during the 1970s and 1980s. In figure, we present the time series of deaths due to motor vehicle accidents among: 18–20 year-olds during nighttime (solid circles); 18–20 year-olds during daytime (dotted line with hollow squares); and 25–29 year-olds during nighttime (stars). The time series in the figure are centered on the month in which a state took its largest step towards raising its drinking age back to 21. The daytime/nighttime distinction is standard in the literature (for example, Ruhm, 1996 ; Dee, 1999 ) and is useful for understanding the effects of young adult alcohol consumption because the majority (67 percent) of fatal motor vehicle accidents occurring in the evening hours (defined here as between 8:00 p.m. and 5:59 a.m.) involve alcohol, while only about a quarter of fatal motor vehicle accidents occurring in the daytime hours involve alcohol.

Notes : This figure is estimated from the 39 states that lowered their drinking age to below 21 at some point in the 1970s or 1980s. A nighttime accident is one occurring between 8:00 p.m. and 5:59 a.m.; 67 percent of these accidents involved alcohol and 26 percent of daytime accidents involved alcohol. The figure is centered on the year a state took its largest step towards raising its drinking age back to 21.

We also plot the percent of 18–20 year-olds that can drink legally in the 39 states that experimented with a lower minimum legal drinking age. This line does not drop instantly from 100 to 0 percent because some states increased their drinking age from 18 to 19 and then from 19 to 21 a few years later, and other states allowed people who could drink legally when the drinking age was increased to continue drinking legally.

Figure 1 reveals that, in the seven years after the increase in the drinking age, there is a substantial reduction in deaths among 18–20 year-olds due to nighttime motor vehicle accidents and much smaller reductions in deaths of 18–20 year-olds due to daytime accidents and of 25–29 year-olds due to nighttime accidents. That the largest reduction in death rates occurs for the type of accident most likely to drop in response to an increase in the drinking age is consistent with the possibility that the increase in the drinking age reduced the motor vehicle fatality rates of 18–20 year-olds. However, the graphical evidence in favor of the hypothesis that increasing the drinking age reduced deaths is not fully compelling. First, the decline in deaths due to nighttime motor vehicle accidents among 18–20 year-olds is not as abrupt as the decline in the percent of this population that can drink legally. Second, as can be seen in the figure, the number of 18–20 year-olds that die in nighttime accidents was already declining before the drinking age was raised in most states. For this reason turn to a state-level panel data approach that allows us to adjust for trends and time-invariant differences across states and estimate the effect of the minimum legal drinking on mortality rates.

To obtain an estimate of the decline in mortality attributable to the drinking age, we implement a panel regression analysis of the following form:

where ( Y st ) is the number of motor vehicle fatalities per 100,000 person-years for one of four age groups: 15–17 year-olds, 18–20 year-olds (the group directly affected by changes in the drinking age), 21–24 year-olds, and 25–29 year-olds in state ( s ) in time period ( t ). For each age group, we separate daytime and nighttime motor vehicle fatality rates. As noted above, any effects of the minimum legal drinking age on motor vehicle fatalities should be primarily on evening accidents because they are much more likely to involve alcohol. The regressions include a dummy variable for each state (θ s ) to remove time-invariant differences between states and dummy variables for each year (μ t ) to absorb any atypical year-to-year variation. 2 In addition, the regression includes state-specific linear time trends (ψ st ). The inclusion of state-specific dummies in combination with the state-specific time trends mean that the regression will return estimates of how raising the drinking age changes the level of motor vehicle mortality in a typical state, while adjusting for any state-specific trends in outcomes that preceded the change in the drinking age. This approach lets us compare people born in the same state just a few years apart who became eligible to drink legally at different ages. The variable MLDA (an acronym derived from Minimum Legal Drinking Age) is the proportion of 18 to 20 year-olds that can legally drink beer in state s in time t , and the coefficient on this variable is our best estimate of the impact on mortality rates of lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18. 3 The regressions are weighted by the age-specific state-year population, and the standard errors clustered on state are presented in brackets below the parameter estimates ( Bertrand, Duflo, and Mullainathan, 2004 ).

The estimates of the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on mortality for the subgroups described above are presented in Table 1 and are consistent with a large body of previous research showing that the minimum legal drinking age has economically significant effects on the motor vehicle mortality rates of young adults (for example, Dee, 1999 ; Lovenheim and Slemrod, 2010 ; Wagenaar and Toomey, 2002 ). Specifically, we find that going from a regime in which no 18–20 year-olds are legally allowed to drink to one in which all 18–20 year-olds are allowed to drink results in 4.74 more fatal motor vehicle accidents in the evening per 100,000 18–20 year-olds annually. Relative to the base death rate for this age and time of day, this is a 17 percent effect (4.74/28.1 = 0.17), and it is statistically significant. The associated point estimate for daytime fatalities (the majority of which do not involve alcohol) among 18–20 year-olds is much smaller, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the daytime fatality rate, and it is not statistically significant. In addition, the changes in evening fatalities among 15–17 year-olds and 25–29 year-olds (whose behaviors should not be directly affected by the drinking age changes) are not statistically significant, though the 95 percent confidence intervals around the point estimates for these groups cannot rule out meaningfully large proportional effects relative to the low average death rates for individuals in these age groups. Overall, these patterns are consistent with a causal effect of easier alcohol access on motor vehicle fatalities among the 18–20 year-old young adults whose drinking behaviors were directly targeted by the laws. However, the rate of motor vehicle fatalities in the evening for 21–24 year-olds also changes when the minimum legal drinking age changes. While the proportional effect size for 21–24 year-olds (2.61/23.2 = 0.1125, or about 11 percent) is substantially smaller than for 18–20 year-olds (17 percent), this approach does not have sufficient statistical power to reject that the two estimates are equal. The apparent effect of the minimum legal drinking age on fatalities among 21–24 year-olds could reflect the effects of other unobserved anti-drunk driving campaigns that were correlated with drinking-age changes and targeted at young adults, or it may reflect spillovers, as members of these two groups are likely to socialize.

Panel Estimates of the Effect of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age on Motor Vehicle Fatalities (deaths per 100,000)

Source: The mortality rates are estimated using data from the Fatal Accident Reporting System 1975–1993.

Notes: For the regression results presented in this table, the top number is the point estimate and its standard error is directly below in brackets. All the regressions include year fixed effects, and state-specific time trends. The regressions are weighted by the age-specific state-year population. The dependent variable in each regression is the motor vehicle fatality rate per 100,000 person years for a particular age group and time of day. A nighttime accident is one occurring between 8:00 p.m. and 5:59 a.m.; 67 percent of these accidents involve alcohol and 26 percent of daytime accidents involve alcohol. The independent variable in each regression is the proportion of 18–20 year-olds who can drink legally. The "Average mortality rate" is that from motor vehicle accidents for each particular age group and time of day.

In Table 2 , we present estimates of the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on a more comprehensive set of causes of death. The mortality rates for this part of the analysis are estimated from the National Vital Statistics death certificate records. Since these records are a census of deaths and include substantial detail on the cause of death, it is possible to examine causes of death other than motor vehicle accidents. We present estimates of the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on all-cause mortality in Table 2 using the same fixed-effects specification as in Table 1 . Specifically, the dependent variable in each regression in the bold row of Table 2 is the death rate of 18–20 year-olds per 100,000 person-years estimated from the death certificate records. All models in Table 2 include state fixed effects, year fixed effects, and linear state-specific time trends. To increase the precision of the estimates, the regression are weighted by the size of the relevant population in that state and time period.

Panel Estimates of the Effect of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age on Mortality Rates (deaths per 100,000)

Notes: Each of the estimates presented above is from a separate regression, and its standard error is presented directly below it in brackets. The dependent variable in each regression is the mortality rate per 100,000 person years for a particular age group and cause of death. The independent variable of interest is the proportion of 18–20 year-olds that can drink legally. The regressions are weighted by the age-specific state-year population. All regressions have year fixed effects, state fixed effects, and state-specific time trends. The mortality rates are estimated from death certificate records for the 1975–1993 period. Deaths are categorized according to the primary cause of death on the death certificate.

The first estimate for all-cause mortality in Table 2 suggests that when all 18–20 year-olds are allowed to drink, there are 7.8 more deaths of 18–20 year-olds per 100,000 person-years (on a base of 113 deaths) than when no 18–20 year-olds are allowed to drink. This estimate is not statistically significant at conventional levels. Though the table reveals no evidence of a statistically significant increase in deaths due to internal causes (like cancer), it does reveal statistically significant increases in deaths due to motor vehicle accidents (4.15 more deaths on a base of 45.5 deaths, or a 4.15/45.5 = 0.091, or a 9.1 percent effect). This does not exactly match the estimate from Table 1 because the Vital Statistics records do not include the time of day when the accident occurred, so we are unable to split the rates based on the time of the accident as we did with the earlier data. 4 Table 2 also shows that increasing the share of young adults legal to drink leads to a statistically significant 10 percent increase in suicides (1.29/12.8 = 0.10), which is consistent with work by Birckmayer and Hemenway (1999) and Carpenter (2004b) . There is no evidence of statistically significant effects on the other causes of death for 18–20 year-olds. The lack of a discernable impact on deaths directly due to alcohol is surprising, though in this period deaths due to alcohol overdoses appear to have been significantly undercounted ( Hanzlick, 1988 ).

In the remainder of Table 2 , we present estimates of the relationship between the proportion of 18–20 year-olds that can drink legally and the mortality rates of three age groups: 15–17, 21–24, and 25–29 year-olds. Since the proportion of 18–20 year-olds that can drink should not directly affect these groups (except possibly through spillovers), these groups should experience at most modest increases in mortality rates. As can be seen in the table, with the exception of 21–24 year-olds there is no evidence of statistically significant changes in the mortality rates of the three age groups surrounding 18–20 year-olds. This suggests that the changes in mortality rates of 18–20 year-olds are probably not being driven by safety initiatives that may have been implemented at the same time the drinking age was increased as these would have affected the other age groups also. Overall, the patterns in Tables 1 and ​ and2 2 suggest that easing access to alcohol increases the overall death rate of 18–20 year-olds due to increases in two of the leading causes of death for this age group: motor vehicle accidents and suicides.

Regression Discontinuity Estimates of the Effect of the Drinking Age on Mortality

Our other main strategy for identifying a plausible comparison group for people subject to the minimum legal drinking age is to take advantage of the fact that the drinking age “turns off” suddenly when a person turns 21. People slightly younger than 21 are subject to the drinking age law while those slightly older than 21 are not, but otherwise the two groups have very similar characteristics. If nothing other than the legal regime changes discretely at age 21, then a discrete mortality rates at age 21 can plausibly be attributed to the drinking age.

Again, we begin with the graphical approach by presenting the age profile of mortality rates for 19–22 year-olds in Figure 2 . This figure is estimated using Vital Statistics mortality records from 1997–2003. The age profiles are death rates per 100,000 person-years for motor vehicle accidents (dark circles), suicides (cross hatches), and deaths due to internal causes (open squares), by month of age. A best-fit line for ages 19–20 shows a decreasing trend in motor vehicle fatalities. Similarly a best-fit line from age 21 to 22 shows a decreasing trend. However, the two trends show clear evidence of a discontinuity at age 21, when drinking alcohol becomes legal. The visual evidence of an effect of the minimum legal drinking age in the regression discontinuity setting in Figure 2 for motor vehicle accidents is notably stronger than the associated evidence from the annual time-series trends in Figure 1 . There is also evidence of an increase in deaths due to suicide at age 21. In contrast, as can be seen in Figure 2 , there is little evidence of a discontinuous change in deaths due to internal causes at the minimum legal drinking age of 21.

Notes : The death rates are estimated by combining the National Vital Statistics records with population estimates from the U.S. Census.

To estimate the size of the discrete jumps in the outcomes we observe in Figure 2 , we estimate the following regression:

where y is the age-specific mortality rate. MLDA is a dummy variable that takes on a value of 1 for observations 21 and older, and 0 otherwise. The regressions include a quadratic polynomial in age, f( age ), fully interacted with the MLDA dummy. This serves to adjust for age-related changes in outcomes and, as seen in Figure 2 , is sufficiently flexible to fit the age profile of death rates. The Birthday variable is a dummy variable for the month in which the decedent's 21 st birthday falls and is intended to absorb the pronounced effect of birthday celebrations on mortality rates. We have recentered the age variable to take the value zero at age 21. As a result the parameter of interest in this model is β 1 , which measures the size of the discrete increase in mortality that occurs when people turn 21 and are no longer subject to the minimum legal drinking age. The parameter β 1 has the same interpretation as the parameter α from the panel models: it is the effect of going from no one in a population being allowed to drink legally to everyone in a population being allowed to drink legally.

We present regression estimates of the paramete β 1 in Table 3 . The regressions are estimated using mortality rates for the 48 months between ages 19 and 22. As with the state-year panel evidence in Table 2 , we estimate the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on the overall death rate as well as deaths due to various causes. The results in Table 3 are consistent with the graphical evidence and reveal a statistically significant 8.7 percent increase in overall mortality when people turn 21 (8.06 additional deaths per 100,000 person-years from a base of 93.07 deaths corresponds to 8.06/93.07 = 0.087, or an 8.7 percent increase). 5 The increase in overall mortality at age 21 is almost entirely attributable to external causes of mortality. We estimate that deaths due to internal causes increase by just 3.3 percent at age 21 (0.66/20.07 = 0.033), and this estimate is not statistically significant. Among the various external causes of death, deaths due to suicide increase discretely by a statistically significant 20.3 percent at age 21 (2.37/11.7 = 0.203), and motor vehicle mortality rates increase by 12.2 percent (3.65/29.81 = 0.122). We find no statistically significant change in homicide deaths at age 21. Deaths coded as due to alcohol (including some non-vehicular accidents where alcohol is mentioned on the death certificate) increase by about 0.41 deaths at age 21 (a very large effect given the average death rate from alcohol overdose of just 0.99 per 100,000). Overall, the visual evidence in Figure 2 and the corresponding regression estimates in Table 3 provide persuasive evidence that the minimum legal drinking age has a significant effect on mortality from suicides, motor vehicle accidents, and alcohol overdoses at age 21.

Regression Discontinuity Estimates of the Effect of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age on Mortality Rates (deaths per 100,000)

Notes: In the table above, we present estimates of the discrete increase in mortality rates that occurs at age 21 with the associated standard error directly below in brackets. The regression estimates are from a second-order polynomial in age fully interacted with an indicator variable for being over age 21. All models also include an indicator variable for the month the 21 st birthday falls in. Since the age variable has been recentered at 21, the estimate of the parameter on the indicator variable for being over 21, which we present in the table, is a measure of the discrete increase in mortality rates that occurs after people turn 21 and can drink legally. The mortality rates are estimated from death certificates and are per 100,000 person-years. The fitted values from this regression are superimposed over the means in Figure 2 . The mortality rates presented below the standard errors are the rates for people just under 21. Deaths are catgorized slightly differently than for Table 2 . Whereas Table 2 focused on the primary cause of death listed on the death certificate, Table 3 considers all factors mentioned on the death certificate and imposes the following precedence order: homicide, suicide, motor vehicle accident, alcohol, other external, internal.

Effects of the Drinking Age on Nonfatal Injury and Crime

In addition to premature death, alcohol use has been implicated in other adverse events such as nonfatal injury and crime. 6 Surprisingly, however, there is very little research directly linking the minimum legal drinking age to nonfatal injury. This is due, in part, to the lack of precise age-specific measures of injury rates during the 1970s and 1980s, which makes it impossible to estimate the effects of the minimum legal drinking age with precision using the panel approach. In ongoing work, however, we have used the regression discontinuity approach to estimate the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on nonfatal injury rates using administrative data on emergency department visits and inpatient hospital stays ( Carpenter and Dobkin, 2010a ). Although injuries have lower costs per adverse event than deaths, accidents resulting in a nonfatal injury are much more common than fatal accidents. We find that rates of emergency department visits and inpatient hospital stays increase significantly at age 21, by 408 and 77 per 100,000 person-years, respectively. These increases in nonfatal injuries are substantially larger than the increase in death rates of 8 per 100,000 person-years documented in Table 3 . However, estimating the discrete increase in adverse events at age 21 in percentage terms reveals that emergency department visits are increasing by 1 percent, hospital stays by 3 percent, and deaths by 9 percent. This pattern holds even when we restrict the analysis to motor vehicle-related injuries and fatalities, which suggests that alcohol plays a disproportionate role in more serious injuries.

Another costly adverse outcome commonly linked to alcohol is crime, including nuisance, property, and violent crime: we provide a review in Carpenter and Dobkin (forthcoming). Since the pharmacological profile of alcohol includes both disinhibition and increased aggression, a causal effect of minimum legal drinking ages on crime rates is plausible. Three studies have examined the effects of drinking ages on crime. Two have used the state-year panel approach described above to test whether more permissive drinking ages increased arrests for youths age 18–20. Using data from the Uniform Crime Reports, Joksch and Jones (1993) show that states that raised their minimum drinking age reduced nuisance crimes, such as vandalism and disorderly conduct, significantly over the period 1980–1987; these results are confirmed and replicated in fixed-effects models estimated in Carpenter (2005a) . More recently, we have applied the regression discontinuity design design to evaluate the relationship between alcohol access and crime ( Carpenter and and Dobkin, 2010b ). Using data encompassing the universe of arrests in California from 2000–2006, we found an 11 percent increase in arrest rates exactly at age 21. These effects were concentrated among nuisance crimes and violent crimes. Of the crimes for which we find a statistically significant effect, the two with the most substantial social costs are assault and robbery (larceny with force or threat of force) which increase by 63 and 8 arrests per 100,000 person-years, respectively.

Much of the literature on the minimum legal drinking age and the social costs of alcohol has focused on mortality. The evidence on other adverse outcomes suggests that an exclusive focus on mortality will lead one to substantially under-estimate the protective value of the minimum legal drinking age.

Effect of the Drinking Age on Alcohol Consumption

Estimating how a lower minimum legal drinking age would affect alcohol consumption is difficult. In addition to all of the challenges confronting researchers trying to estimate the effect of the drinking age on adverse event rates, there is an additional problem of data quality. While most adverse events are well-measured, alcohol consumption is not. Specifically, surveys of drinking do not generally include objective biological markers of alcohol consumption (such as blood alcohol concentration). Self-reported measures of drinking participation and intensity are subject to underreporting on the order of 40–60 percent ( Rehm, 1998 ). An additional issue is that, despite the usual confidentiality assurances given by survey administrators, 18–20 year-olds probably underreport alcohol consumption even more than the typical survey respondent because it is illegal for them to drink. 7

Recognizing these concerns, we nonetheless present estimates of the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on alcohol consumption from both the panel fixed-effects approach,and the regression discontinuity approach. For the fifi xed-effects approach, we focus on alcohol consumption reported by high school seniors age 18 and over who were surveyed in the Monitoring the Future study between 1976 and 1993. We use the same panel fixed-effects approach used to examine mortality rates with added controls for individual demographic characteristics such as race and gender. We examine three measures of alcohol consumption: whether the person drank at all in the past month, whether the person drank heavily in the past two weeks (defined as five or more drinks consumed at a single sitting), and the number of times the person drank in the last month. The effect of the minimum legal drinking age on these measures of alcohol consumption as estimated using a panel fixed-effects approach are presented in the first three columns of Table 4 . The relevant independent variable in each of the first three columns is the proportion 18–20 year-olds legal to drink in the state. The results indicate that allowing 18–20 year-olds drink increases drinking participation by 6.1 percentage points, heavy episodic drinking by 3.4 percentage points, and instances of past month drinking by 17.4 percent (0.94/5.4 = 0.174). These results are similar to previous estimates of the effect of the minimum legal drinking age that used these same data and a similar approach ( Dee, 1999 ; Carpenter, Kloska, O'Malley, and Johnston, 2007 ; Miron and Tetelbaum, 2009 ).

The Effect of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age on Alcohol Consumption

Notes: The independent variable of interest for the regression results presented in the first three columns is the proportion of 18–20 year-olds who can drink legally. These regressions are estimated using responses of high school seniors age 18 and older at the time they completed the Monitoring the Future survey. The regressions include state fixed effects, year fixed effects, state-specific time trends, and dummies for male, Hispanic, black, or other race. The regressions are estimated using a sample of 121,279 high school students from 1976–2003. The estimates in the last three columns are regression discontinuity estimates of the discrete increase in each drinking behavior that occurs after people turn 21. These are estimated using responses of 16,107 19–22 year-olds in the 1997–2005 National Health Interview Survey. These regressions include a quadratic polynomial in age interacted with a dummy for being over 21 at the time of the interview and the following covariates: indicator variables for census region, race, gender, health insurance, employment status, 21 st birthday, 21 st birthday + 1 day, and looking for work. People can report their drinking for the last week, month, or year, and 71 percent reported on their drinking in the past week or month. All the regressions include population weights. Standard errors for the panel fixed-effects analysis are clustered on state and reported in brackets below the point estimates in the first three columns. Robust standard errors for the regression discontinuity analysis are reported in brackets below the point estimates in the last three columns.

We also estimated the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on alcohol consumption using the regression discontinuity design. Since this approach required detailed information on alcohol consumption for people very close to age 21, we used the National Health Interview Survey which includes questions on drinking participation heavy episodic drinking, and the number of days in the last month on which the person consumed alcohol. We estimated the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on these measures of alcohol consumption using a version of the regression discontinuity design used earlier enriched with controls for individual demographic characteristics such as gender, race, region, and employment status. The estimates of β 1 are reported in the last three columns of Table 4 . Given that the regression model includes a polynomial in age fully interacted with a dummy variable for being over 21 and that the age variable has been recentered at 21, these are estimates of the discrete change in drinking that occurs at exactly age 21. We find that the probability an individual reports having consumed 12 or more drinks in the past year increases at age 21 by about 6.1 percentage points, and the estimate is statistically significant. We find a 4.9 percentage point increase in the probability an individual reports heavy drinking (five or more drinks on a single day at least once in the previous year), and we estimate that the number of drinking days in the previous month increase by 19.6 percent (0.55/2.8 = 0.196) at age 21, though only the second of these estimates is statisically significant at the conventional level. These estimates are quite similar to the estimates from the panel approach and have also been replicated using other datasets including the California Health Interview Surveys ( Carpenter and Dobkin, 2010b ) and the National Surveys on Drug Use and Health ( SAMHSA/OAS, 2009 ).

Below, we require an estimate of the number of additional drinks consumed if the drinking age were lowered from 21 to 18, in order to appropriately scale the cost estimates on a per-drink basis. In Column 3 of Table 4 , with the panel design, we estimated that moving from a situation in which no 18–20 year-olds can drink legally to one in which all 18–20 year-olds can drink would increase the number of times a youth reported drinking in the past month by about 0.94 instances. In Column 6 of Table 4 , using the regression discontinuity design, we estimated that the minimum legal drinking age increases the number of days the individual drank in the past 30 by about 0.55 days. Assuming instances are similar to days, the average of these two estimates implies that the minimum legal drinking age reduces alcohol consumption by about 0.745 drinking days per month. To put this on the same scale as the adverse event estimates (which are per 100,000 personyears), we calculate 0.745 × 12(months) × 100,000(persons) = 894,000 drinking days averted per 100,000 person-years. Young adults consume about 5.1 drinks on average each time they drink, so 894,000 drinking days corresponds to about 4.56 million drinks.

How Credible are the Estimates of the Effects of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age?

We have presented estimates of the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on alcohol consumption, mortality, and a variety of other adverse events from panel fixed-effects models and regression discontinuity models. Before using these estimates to compare drinking age regimes, it is important to examine how credible the evidence from each of these research designs is. The two approaches have different strengths and limitations, which can be roughly grouped into two categories: “internal validity” and “external validity.” In the context of this paper, internal validity refers to how well a research design estimates the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on a particular population in a particular place and time. External validity refers to how well estimates from a research design are likely to predict the effect of the policy under consideration. External validity is a function of both the internal validity of the estimates and how similar the regime (population, policy, and environment) in which each of the research designs was estimated is to the regime in which the policy is being proposed.

We examine internal validity first, because the internal validity of an estimation strategy directly affects its external validity. The panel approach is subject to the concern that some states raised the drinking age at the same time that they implemented other policies targeting both alcohol consumption and its adverse consequences. If this were the case, estimates from the panel approach would likely overstate the true effect of the minimum legal drinking age because the estimates would reflect the benefits of both the minimum legal drinking age and the other policies. 8 By contrast, estimates from the regression discontinuity design are less likely to be biased by policy changes, because to cause bias the policies would have to go into effect at exactly age 21. Another possible problem with the panel approach is that enforcement of the higher drinking age was plausibly less stringent in states that were compelled to raise their drinking age by the 1984 federal National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which could impart downward bias to our panel estimates. Here again the regression discontinuity approach is unlikely to suffer from this bias because the age-21 drinking limit was a long-standing policy by the late 1990s, which is the period on which the regression discontinuity analysis is focused. A threat to the internal validity of both designs is that part of the increase in adverse events that occurs when people are first allowed to drink is probably due to people having to learn to drink responsibly. As a result, there may be an increase in mortality in the first few months after people are first allowed to drink whether the drinking age is set at 18, 21, or higher. As a result, computations that treat the reduction in deaths due to learning effects as saved lives would overstate the effect of the minimum legal drinking age. However, Tables 2 and ​ and3 3 reveal that the panel and the regression discontinuity estimates of the impact of the minimum legal drinking age are quite similar, which would not be the case if learning effects were substantial, because learning effects would result in much more bias to the regression discontinuity estimates than to the panel estimates.

Yet another threat to the internal validity of the panel design is that there is likely slippage in the assignment of the treatment regime for young adults in a given state and year. These errors may arise due to border effects, as neighboring states sometimes had different drinking ages (as discussed in Lovenheim and Slemrod, 2010 ). Errors could also arise from grandfathering policies, in which some states allowed youths who could drink legally before the minimum legal drinking age was raised to continue drinking after the new drinking age was instituted, even if they were younger than the new legal age. This will result in imperfect assignment of treatment status due to the fact that exact age is not available in the datasets used in the panel analyses. These kinds of measurement errors would generally bias the estimated effects of the minimum legal drinking age downward.

Regarding external validity, the major advantage of the state-year panel approach is that it directly examines the effect of allowing 18–20 year-olds to buy and consume alcohol legally, which is the type of policy change that is being debated. Its primary disadvantage is that it examines changes in drinking ages that occurred 30 years ago, and many things have changed since then. For example, the minimum legal drinking age is probably more rigorously enforced now than it was in the 1970s. Public sentiment and legal sanctions against drunk driving have both increased greatly since the 1970s and 1980s. There have been numerous improvements in medicine and automobile safety in the last 30 years, including trauma centers and air bags. These changes would bias the results from the panel studies in opposing directions. The main issue with the external validity of estimates from the regression discontinuity approach is that the estimates are valid for people very near their 21 st birthday, and the proposed policy change would be to move the drinking age of 21 to 18. This is a problem for the external validity of the regression discontinuity estimates if the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on an 18 or 19 year-old are substantially different than the effects on a 21 year-old.

It is not possible to assess the effect of each of the threats to the internal and external validity on our estimates. However, we have some evidence that despite these concerns the estimates still may be of substantial use for predicting the likely effect of a policy change. A comparison of Tables 2 and ​ and3 3 reveal that the two research designs give very similar estimates of the effects of the minimum legal drinking age on all-cause and cause-specific mortality. 9 An examination of Table 4 reveals that the two designs generate fairly similar estimates of the impact of the minimum legal drinking age on alcohol consumption. Most of the sources of bias described above affect the two research designs to different degrees so they should be moving the estimates from the two designs away from each other. We interpret the similarity in the estimated effects as suggesting that the various biases are either not very large or that they are at least partially canceling out.

When considering whether it makes sense to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18 the critical issue is determining whether the increase in consumer surplus that results from allowing 18–20 year-olds to drink is large enough to justify the increase in alcohol-related harms. The most direct way to make this comparison is to estimate the change in consumer surplus and compare it to the increase in harms as measured in dollars. However, it is very challenging to credibly estimate the consumer surplus associated with the additional drinks that 18–20 year-olds would consume if the drinking age were lowered to 18. For this reason we implement an alternative approach of estimating the harm per drink to the person consuming the drink and the harm per drink imposed on other people.

The greatest immediate cost to the individual of an additional drink is that it increases their risk of dying. The estimates in Table 3 suggest that if the drinking age were lowered to 18, there would be an additional 8 deaths per 100,000 person-years for the 18–20 age group. A common estimate of the value of a statistical life is $8.72 million ( Viscusi and Aldi, 2003 , converted to 2009 U.S. dollars). This suggests that for every 100,000 young adults allowed to drink legally for a year, the cost in terms of increased mortality is about $70 million (8 × $8.72 million). Given that we estimate an increase of 4.56 million drinks for every 100,000 person-years, this suggests that the hidden cost of each drink due to the increased mortality risk is over $15 (70/4.56). 10 Given that each drink potentially has other adverse impacts on the individual, such as injuries, reduced productivity, and reduced health, this estimate is a lower bound.

The costs of the reduction in the minimum legal drinking age borne by people other than those consuming the drink come from many sources: we focus on three of the major ones. The first external cost includes the risk that an individual will be killed by a drinker in a motor vehicle accident. Our best estimate is that the typical young adult killed while driving drunk kills another person 21 percent of the time ( Carpenter and Dobkin, 2009 ). This suggests that lowering the drinking age will kill at least an additional 0.77 people (3.65 drivers killed in motor vehicle accidents from Table 3 × 0.21) annually for every 100,000 18–20 year-olds allowed to drink. Using the value of a statistical life from above, this is a cost of $6.7 million (8.72 × 0.77 = 6.7) for every 100,000 people allowed to drink after the drinking age is lowered. This estimate is a lower bound, because it does not include the people killed where the drunk driver survives. The second external cost is due to the increased risk that a drinker will commit robbery or assault. The best available estimate suggests that lowering the drinking age will result in 63 additional arrests for assault and 8 additional arrests for robbery annually for every 100,000 newly legal drinkers ( Carpenter and Dobkin, 2010b ). Given that not every crime results in an arrest, these two estimates need to be rescaled by the proportion of reported assaults and robberies that are cleared by an arrest, which are 54 and 25 percent, respectively ( U.S. Department of Justice, 2007 ). At an estimated cost of $20,500 per assault and $17,800 per robbery ( Miller, Cohen, and Wiersema, 1996 , converted to 2009 U.S. dollars), the crime cost imposed on others is $2,400,000 ($20,500 × 63/0.54 ≈ $2,400,000) for assaults and $656,000 ($17,800 × 8/0.25 ≈ $570,000) for robberies. A third external cost is that the drinker will injure themselves and require medical treatment. If the medical care is covered by insurance or if the costs are absorbed by the hospital, these costs are effectively borne by people other than the drinker. The 408 additional emergency department visits and 77 additional hospital stays per 100,000 person-years that would likely occur and 77 additional hospital stays per 100,000 person-years that would likely occur if the drinking age were lowered (estimated in Carpenter and Dobkin 2010a ) impose a substantial cost: the average cost of an alcohol-related emergency department visit is $3,387, and the average cost of an alcohol-related inpatient hospital stay is $12,562 for a total cost per 100,000 person-years of $2.35 million [(3,387 × 408) + (12,562 × 77)]. 11 Summing these externality costs gives a total cost of about $12.02 million per 100,000 person-years (that is, $6.7 million + $2.4 million + $0.57 million + $2.35 million = $12.02 million). Dividing this estimate by the change in the number of drinks yields an externality cost of $2.63 ($12.02/4.56) per drink. Given that there are numerous alcohol-related harms not included in this calculation, this is a downward-biased estimate of the cost that the drinker imposes on others.

The estimates above suggest that the total cost of a drink to the person drinking it is at least $15 plus what the person paid for the drink. It is unlikely that the average drinker values a drink this highly. This finding suggests that the drinker is not fully aware of the personal costs of their behavior and there is a role for government intervention. Moreover, with each drink there are costs imposed on others of at least $2.63, which again suggests a role for government intervention to deal with this externality. These estimates clearly suggest that lowering the drinking age will lead to an increase in harms that is very likely larger than the value that people put on the additional drinking.

Our focus here has been on predicting the effects of lowering the minimum drinking age, but of course, a lower drinking age might be combined with other age, but of course, a lower drinking age might be combined with other policies like mandatory alcohol licensing (similar to driver licensing) and relevant, reality-based alcohol education, both of which are advocated by the Choose Responsibility group. Although the research summarized here convinces us that an earlier drinking age alone would increase alcohol-related harms, we do not think there is enough evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of alcohol education and alcohol licensing, either in isolation or in combination with a lower minimum drinking age. While we are certainly not opposed to experimentation with alternative policies for encouraging responsible alcohol consumption, the evidence strongly suggests that setting the minimum legal drinking age at 21 is better from a cost and benefit perspective than setting it at 18 and that any proposal to reduce the drinking age should face a very high burden of proof.

Acknowledgments

We thank David Autor, Chad Jones, John List, Justin Marion, and Timothy Taylor for very useful comments and suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge grant funding from NIHNIAAA R01 AA017302-01.

1 Other possible interventions have received attention in the economics literature. For example, age-targeted drunk driving laws and graduated licensing programs set very low legal blood alcohol content limits for young adult drivers and have been shown to reduce youth drinking and related harms (for example, Carpenter, 2004a ; Voas, Tippetts, and Fell, 2003 ). Increases in sanctions and/or enforcement of age-targeted drunk driving laws might further reduce youth alcohol consumption and its related harms ( Kenkel, 1993a ). Kenkel (1993b) explores the theoretical possibility of a “teen tax” that could be levied only on young adults, though there is no consensus on the effectiveness of state beer excise taxes on youth drinking and related harms (for example, Dee, 1999 ; Cook and Moore, 2001 ). Finally, public health education about the risks of alcohol use has been widely mentioned as an alternative strategy to reduce alcohol-related harms among youths, although we are not aware of economic evaluations of such policies. We focus here on the minimum legal drinking age due to recent high-profile attention garnered by the Amethyst Initiative and related organizations such as Choose Responsibility.

2 This fixed effects panel approach was introduced to this literature by Cook and Tauchen (1982) , who examined the effects of alcohol taxes on death rates from liver cirrhosis; it has now become standard in evaluations of this type. Note that this model cannot support inclusion of a full set of state-by-time fixed effects, because these would also absorb almost all of the variation in the minimum legal drinking age variable.

3 Our parameterization of the minimum legal drinking age variable—that is, the proportion of 18–20 year-olds in the state who are legal to drink beer—is slightly different from most previous work on this topic, which often includes separate controls for age-18, age-19, and age-20 state drinking ages. This choice has no substantive effect on the results and is only done to facilitate a more natural comparison with the regression discontinuity approach we describe below.

4 We assign deaths in the Vital Statistics data to the state of residence of the decedent. In the Fatality Analysis Reporting System analyses we assigned deaths to the state of occurrence because of incomplete information on state of residence. We also calculated Vital Statistics panel estimates by state of occurrence, and these models returned larger effects of the minimum legal drinking age. This is consistent with the idea that different drinking ages across states created “blood borders” ( Lovenheim and Slemrod, 2010 ).

5 For consistency with the panel regression evidence presented above, we estimate the regression discontinuity models of the effect of the minimum legal drinking age on mortality rates as opposed to mortality counts, though the latter are preferred as the population estimates used to create the rates reduces the precision of the estimates. This is the cause of the slight difference in the magnitude of the estimates from our previously published work ( Carpenter and Dobkin, 2009 ).

6 Some research has examined the relationship between the minimum legal drinking age and risky sexual behavior, though we are not aware of any that uses the regression discontinuity approach. Note that the pharmacological effects of alcohol on sociability and disinhibition could lead drinkers to engage in unplanned sexual behavior or riskier sex than they would have had in the absence of alcohol. Dee (2001) estimates panel regressions of teen childbearing for youths in the age groups affected by the changes in the minimum legal drinking age. He finds that the drinking age is related to childbearing rates among black teens, suggesting a causal effect of alcohol use on sexual activity leading to childbirth. Fertig and Watson (2009) also study state drinking-age policies and fertility outcomes in a fixed-effects framework, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youths and Vital Statistics birth records. They find that exposure to more permissive drinking ages increased poor birth outcomes for young women, especially black mothers, and they find suggestive evidence that this is due to an increase in unplanned pregnancies. Finally, Carpenter (2005b) uses a similar panel approach to examine an alternative risky sexual outcome: rates of sexually transmitted infections. He finds suggestive evidence that a higher drinking age reduced gonorrhea rates for whites, but not for blacks.

7 In Carpenter and Dobkin (2009) , we examine the possibility that there is a discrete change in the probability of underreporting alcohol consumption at age 21, and we do not find much evidence that this change is large in magnitude.

8 Miron and Tetelbaum (2009) make this type of argument by showing that there is heterogeneity in the effects of the minimum legal drinking age according to when states raised their drinking age. Specifically, they document that earlier adopters saw larger reductions in youth fatalities than late adopters and argue that factors other than the drinking age were responsible for the reductions in youth fatalities when drinking ages increased back to 21. These types of biases are not likely to affect regression discontinuity estimates of the minimum legal drinking age, which (as we show above) provided estimates very similar to the panel fixed-effects design, which in turn suggests that other unobserved policies and preferences are unlikely to account for the robust relationship between drinking ages and youth fatalities repeatedly documented in the fixed-effects approach (including in Miron and Tetelbaum, 2009 ). Of course, other types of heterogeneity may be important, such as variation across states in enforcement of the minimum legal drinking age. This is an important area for future research.

9 The panel analysis finds a very low rate of death due to alcohol overdose and no evidence of an increase; the regression discontinuity design, however, finds a much higher rate of alcohol overdoses and a large increase. Given that the alcohol consumption among 18–20 year-olds has dropped rather than increased in the last 30 years, these difference are probably due to coding changes for International Classification of Diseases and for death certificates, as well as a slight difference in our own coding of the information on death certificates between Tables 2 and ​ and3 3 (see notes under these tables).

10 There is, of course, a plausible range of estimates if one were to use different figures for the value of a statistical life, and indeed recent studies have returned lower estimates (see, for example, Ashenfelter and Greenstone, 2004 ). Viscusi and Aldi's (2003) study reports that most credible studies return estimates for the value of a statistical life of between 3.8 and 9 million in 2000 U.S. dollars (or 4.73 to 11.2 million in 2009 U.S. dollars), and the 8.72 million figure we report above is the median reported across 32 studies. Using 4.73 million as the value of a statistical life, for example, reduces the per-drink estimate to $8.30 ($4.73 million * 8 deaths / 4.56 million drinks). If self-reported alcohol consumption is underreported by 50 percent on average (i.e., within the range as suggested by Rehm, 1998 ) then we are overestimating the cost per drink by a factor of two (i.e., the correct per-drink estimate is closer to $7.65 (8.72 million * 8 deaths / 9.12 million drinks).

11 The list charges for a hospital admission by a 21 year-old with a mention of alcohol on the medical record are $33,059, and the list charges for an emergency department visit with a mention of alcohol on the medical record are $8,912 (both measured in 2009 U.S. dollars). Given that hospitals are typically only paid 38 percent of list charges, the costs passed on to consumers are $12,562 and $3,387 for hospital admissions and emergency department visits, respectively ( Reinhardt, 2006 ).

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What Is the Legal Drinking Age in Toronto? Here’s What You Need to Know!

Everyone in Toronto is always talking about drinking. The city’s vibrant nightlife is always an exciting conversation topic, whether at an outdoor patio, a cozy pub, or a bustling club. But while the conversation may be lively, a severe issue lurks in the background: what’s the legal drinking age in Toronto?

It’s an important question, as the legal drinking age in Toronto significantly impacts the city’s culture. 

In this blog post, we’ll dive deep into the drinking age in Toronto, exploring its legal implications, why it’s set at 19, and what the consequences might be if raised. 

We’ll also offer some advice for minors looking to drink responsibly. So, let’s raise the roof and look closely at Toronto’s drinking age.

Introduction to Toronto’s Drinking Age Law

As the capital of Ontario, Toronto is subject to the province’s liquor laws. According to the Ontario Liquor Licence Act, it’s illegal for anyone under the age of 19 to purchase, possess, or consume alcohol. This law applies to all licensed establishments, including bars, pubs, clubs, and restaurants.

It’s important to remember that the drinking age laws aren’t strictly enforced. But although it’s illegal for minors to buy or drink alcohol, that doesn’t mean they can’t. That said, it’s still important to know and abide by the legal drinking age in Toronto and abide by it.

What is the Legal Drinking Age in Toronto?

The legal drinking age in Toronto is 19, meaning anyone under 19 is not legally allowed to buy, possess, or consume alcohol. A minor is also illegal to be in a licensed establishment if alcohol is served or consumed.

In addition, it’s illegal for a minor to purchase alcohol on behalf of someone else. So, if you’re under 19 and buy a drink for someone else, you can be charged with supplying alcohol to a minor.

Understanding Toronto’s Liquor Laws

Toronto’s drinking age laws don’t just apply to buying and drinking alcohol. The laws also apply to the possession of alcohol. It’s illegal for anyone under 19 to possess alcohol, even without drinking it.

The laws also apply to adults who are supervising minors. It’s illegal for adults to provide alcohol to children, even if they supervise them. So, if you’re an adult and deliver alcohol to a child, you can be charged with supplying alcohol to a child.

Why is the Drinking Age in Toronto Set at 19?

The legal drinking age in Toronto is set at 19 for a few different reasons. 

First, it’s important to remember that the drinking age in Toronto is the same as the legal drinking age in all of Ontario. This means that Toronto is subject to the same drinking age laws as the rest of the province.

Second, the drinking age in Toronto is set at 19 to protect minors from the potential risks associated with alcohol consumption. 

Underage drinking can have serious consequences, including impaired judgment, physical injury, and death. By setting the drinking age at 19, the law is attempting to protect minors from the risks associated with alcohol consumption.

Is the Drinking Age in Toronto Likely to Change?

Toronto’s drinking age will likely stay the same for a while. While the drinking age could be raised in the future, it’s unlikely to be lowered. 

This is because the current drinking age in Toronto is in line with Ontario’s liquor laws and is also in line with the drinking ages of other provinces.

However, it’s important to remember that the legal drinking age isn’t the only factor in underage drinking. Other factors, such as peer pressure, parental influence, and access to alcohol, can also play a role in underage drinking.

The Impact of Raising the Drinking Age in Toronto

Raising the drinking age in Toronto would have several impacts on the city. For starters, it would likely reduce underage drinking. This is because minors would have a more challenging time accessing alcohol and would be less likely to drink in public.

However, it’s important to remember that raising the drinking age isn’t a cure-all for underage drinking. Other measures like education and prevention programs can also help reduce underage drinking.

Raising the drinking age would also impact the city’s nightlife. Bars and clubs tend to draw younger crowds, and increasing the drinking age could lead to a decline in business. This, in turn, could lead to a decline in the city’s vibrant nightlife culture.

Strategies for Minors to Drink Responsibly

It’s important to remember that the legal drinking age in Toronto is 19. But if you’re a minor and choose to drink, a few strategies can help you do so responsibly.

First, it’s important to remember the legal drinking age in Toronto. You should never purchase or consume alcohol if you’re under 19. You should also never be in a licensed establishment if alcohol is being served or consumed.

Second, it’s essential to know your limits. Drinking too much can have serious consequences, so you must be aware of how much you’re drinking and stay within your limits.

Finally, it’s important to drink responsibly. Ensure you eat before you drink, alternate alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, and never drink and drive.

The legal drinking age in Toronto is 19, and it’s important to remember that minors are not allowed to buy, possess, or consume alcohol. 

But while the legal drinking age in Toronto is unlikely to change anytime soon, there are still strategies that minors can use to drink responsibly.

If you’re a minor and you choose to drink, it’s important to remember the legal drinking age, know your limits, and drink responsibly. 

With these tips in mind, you can enjoy Toronto’s nightlife without putting yourself in danger. So, go out and enjoy a night on the town – but do it responsibly.

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Drinking Age in the United States Essay

The United States legal drinking age of twenty one years has been the subject of discussion for a long time based on the fact that some people are for it, while others are against it. The act which was established in 1984 prohibits drinking below the age of twenty one as it states that any state which allows teenagers under the age of twenty one to purchase alcohol would not receive any revenue.

Before 1984, the minimum drinking age varied from state to state such that some states would allow teenagers to consume alcohol publicly while others would not allow it to happen. However, although it is believed that all states go by that law, some states still allow teenagers to drink in private settings.

Consequently, different agencies and scholars have come up with their proposals concerning the same issue. As much as both sides have got their own reasons, based on several factors, the legal drinking age should be lowered to eighteen years. In addition, since America recognizes an adult after attaining eighteen years, it is illogical to prevent such a person from enjoying rights being enjoyed by other adults.

Therefore, bent on that, this essay argues for the idea that the drinking age should be lowered to eighteen years since the current law does not make much sense.

Majority who propose the drinking age to remain at twenty one argue that teenagers drink irresponsibly and end up getting involved in irresponsible and risky behaviors like careless driving. However, in the same country, a person can be taken to court and be tried at the age of eighteen years and above.

Therefore, even if someone commits such a crime, there is usually a way to deal with such incidences. In addition, the court is supposed to maintain law and order and therefore, teenagers under the age of twenty one ought not to be prevented from drinking in order to prevents accidents and other unlawful behaviors (Engs, 1998).

In United States, a person is allowed to join the military after attaining eighteen years of age. Therefore, it means that in legal terms, a person aged eighteen years can be considered as an adult and more to that, such a person can be trusted with very sensitive and important responsibilities like protecting the country from military attacks.

On the same note, such a person is also allowed to make decisions that affect the future of a country like voting. Bent on that, it is clear that in legal terms, a person who has attained eighteen years is mature and should be allowed to enjoy other rights that are being enjoyed by the rest of the population (ICAP, 2002).

Before making major conclusions, it is important to compare the problems of alcohol that existed before the establishment of the law and after the establishment of the law. According to Engs (1998), even after the establishment of the alcohol law in the year 1987, teenagers below the age of twenty one were still involved in irresponsible drinking which is characterized by behaviors such as missing classes, poor performance and other forms of violence.

The same study illustrates that the main cause of such behaviors is as a result of prohibiting teenagers from drinking in the company of adults who can teach them responsible drinking behaviors. Therefore, even though consumption of alcohol has reduced, other problems that emanate from the same have increased.

Since the main aim of rising alcohol drinking age is to lower such problems, a critical evaluation indicates that that the law does not entirely serve the intended purpose. It would then be more logical to lower the drinking age and allow teenagers to drink in public places; together with the older members of the society so that they can be taught how to drink in a responsible manner.

A study conducted by ICAP (2002) indicated that although United States is among the countries that have the highest drinking age; it has more problems with alcohol than other countries which have a lower minimum drinking age. For instance, in a country like Netherlands, the minimum drinking age of teenagers is eighteen although at sixteen; one is still allowed to buy alcohol from premises which are licensed.

Nevertheless, any one below the age of eighteen is not allowed to purchase and consume spirits. Similarly, in a country like New Zealand, the minimum legal drinking age is eighteen years meaning that all teenagers above the age of eighteen can purchase and drink alcohol at all licensed premises like bars and restaurants.

In consequence, since more countries have a legal drinking age of eighteen years, the minimum drinking age of United states is not is only strange but also impractical. Although countries like Britain and United Kingdom still record deaths that result from road accidents caused by driving under the influence of alcohol, U.S still records higher death rates than such countries (Engs 1998).

United States is characterized by many violent activities that require the attention of police officers and other law enforcement agencies. With such a high minimum drinking age, the police officers usually have a lot of work in monitoring the drinking age of teenagers below the age of twenty one.

Worse still, research that has been conducted indicated that teenagers below the age of twenty one drink more than even the people above that age. If the minimum age was lowered, the police and other agencies that enforce law and order would concentrate on other activities instead of focusing on college and high school students.

As much as anyone may want to argue that increasing the drinking age is helpful, the available research and evidence illustrates otherwise. The main problem emanates from the fact that rising the drinking age has little if any impact on behavior. To confirm this, Hanson (n. d.) records that in a study which was conducted among teenagers aged sixteen to nineteen years, the daily intake of alcohol did not change even after minimum drinking age was raised.

In addition, in yet another study which was conducted in the District of Columbia, results illustrated that there were more accidents in states which had a high minimum drinking age. Studies conducted illustrated that once the drinking age was raised, teenagers below the drinking age developed a habit of borrowing alcoholic drinks form their older colleagues and that is the main reason why the consumption rate remained high.

A critical review of the alcoholic related issues prior to the increasing of the minimum drinking age and after clearly illustrates that the law does not solve the intended problem. The main reason is due to the fact that it targets a certain age group and not the alcohol problem at hand. Although no one negates the fact that alcohol is a major problem to teenagers, it is important to come up with a law that can solve the problem instead of aggravating it.

Even if alcohol abuse is serious since it carries serious consequences, it is possible to come up with a law that can mitigate the problem. For example, even without much struggle, studies have indicated that in societies where alcohol is not prohibited like in the Jewish society, young people have less problems than in a place like United States where there is a law prohibiting anyone below the age of twenty one from taking and buying alcohol.

Engs, R. C. (1998). Why the drinking age should be lowered: An opinion based upon research . Web.

Hanson, D. J. (n.d.). The Legal Drinking Age: Science vs. Ideology . Web.

Internartional Center For Alcohol Policies (ICAP). (2002). Drinking Age Limits . Web.

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IvyPanda . 2018. "Drinking Age in the United States." July 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/drinking-age-in-the-united-states/.

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IvyPanda . "Drinking Age in the United States." July 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/drinking-age-in-the-united-states/.