Drinking Age

Christopher Carpenter and Carlos Dobkin produce a great figure in their article "The Minimum Legal Drinking Age and Public Health" in this Spring's Journal of Economic Perspectives.  The figure reconstructs causes of death by age (in months).  It then runs a best fit line before and after individuals are twenty-one (click to enlarge).

Whether or not you support lowering the legal minimum drinking age, as Corrections does, this graph powerfully the idea behind what being able to drink entails.