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The Legal Minimum Drinking Age: What Good Does It Do?, Andrea Mulock
The Legal Minimum Drinking Age: What Good Does It Do?, Andrea Mulock
The Journal of Undergraduate Research
Underage drinking is a huge problem in the United States. Rational choice and deterrence theories suggest that the best way to deal with the problem is to create and enforce strict laws against underage drinking. However, are these truly effective mechanisms in this regard? This paper explores these issues by analyzing underage alcohol consumption patterns in three sets of states classified as “lax”, “strict” and “typical” in terms of their underage drinking laws using data from the 2012 National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). T-tests did not show significant differences between underage alcohol use and binge drinking in …