Drug Legalization

I would like to start by thanking my opponent for his well written round. I will address each section in order. But the first thing I'm going to do, is toss out marijuana. Since, as PRO allowed in R1, I can argue for keeping only some drugs illegal while allowing others to be legal. PRO has already stated that he is for all drug legalization. 1)Cost 1.a) Lives and Money My opponent mentions that the cost of the WOD is estimated at $52.3 billion a year, however, 80% of that is just from Marijuana, $41.8 billion [1]. That leaves only $10.5 billion for all other drugs (and only $2 billion is spent money, the rest is claimed lost tax revenue, which will be addressed later in the gangs section). Now, we must also look into the claimed loss of life. Let's dig into PRO's source 1 (repeated here [2]). "…that's 6,487 dead Americans. Throw in overdoses and the cost of this country's paralyzing drug laws is closer to 15,000 lives." Obviously, Overdoses are not a cost of the drug war. Overdoses are caused by taking too much of a particular drug, and the drug war makes people hide their habits and some people fight for their habits, but it doesn't make people take more drugs. So the 8,736 lives that the source just tacks on is illogical. In fact, he even refutes himself. He says that overdose death should count because there is no quality control. However, he admits but dismissed that 61% of all overdoses come from prescription drugs, which do have plenty of quality control. Another thing to look at is where did the 6,487 come from? Well, it came from guessing that 50% of all murders are drug related (no source given to back that number up), and he even admits that it is a guess. He believes that most of it is gang vs gang and innocent people caught in the gang's cross fire. I'll address in the gang section why removing the drug laws will not stop these deaths and so cannot be contributed to the war on drugs. 1.b) Society My opponent says that gangs use drugs as a source of money. This is true, but he seems to suggest that if we legalize drugs, this money will go away. There are two massive flaws with this. First, the nature of free markets. Anyone that has studied supply and demand and macro economics in general, will know that regulations (of which prohibition is an extreme regulation) push markets away from their equilibrium, the point where maximum profit is made. While the profit per unit of drug may go down, the quantities sold will go up, ultimately sending more money into drug cartels. Second, the nature of drug dealers and gangs. Someone may stand up and say that with the introduction of competition, much of the profit of those drugs will leave the cartels and go to mom and pop shops. But how do the current gangs treat competition? They don't lower their prices to try to be competitive in the market, they flat out kill people. If a drug dealer has no qualms against killing another drug dealer, there is no reason that they won't kill another legal drug seller (in both cases it is murder). As such, violence will continue and likely go up, since the drug dealers no longer need to hide. As said with the justice system, The USA made almost 13.7 million arrests in 2009, only 1.66 million (about 12%) are drug arrests, and almost 860 thousand arrests for marijuana alone [3]. Legalizing pot, but not other drugs would cut out over half the drug arrests in the US. PRO says that over 50% of federal prisoners are drug offenders. This is true, but a little misleading, since it only looks at federal prisons and not state prisons or probation. In fact, federal prisons only account for 3.1% of all people in the prison system (state prisons make up 22.5% and probation makes up 74.4%) [4]. All in all, 26% of all inmates of the justice system are for drug related crimes (including federal, state, and probation), the majority of these as marijuana crimes. Which we can ignore for this debate. 2) Success First, my opponent addresses marijuana consumption, this can all be ignored. Moving on to the Netherlands, my opponent has made a major mistake. This can be looked at in different way. But I'm just going to focus on one. Since I'm only caring about hard drugs and not marijuana, it should be pointed out that the Netherlands has one of the highest spending to GDP on their own war on drugs. In Europe, they spend more than any other nation in regards to GDP [5]. The next highest in GDP spending is Sweden, which has a drug usage of about 1/3 the European average [5]. We can also find that Japan has the lowest drug use of the developed world, which more stricter laws than our own [6]. This clearly shows that our two options are not, legalize everything and status quo. We can still fight drugs in a more effective way. 3)Morality My opponent argues that if the government can tell you what you can and can't do with your own body, that makes you a slave. This is a non-sequitur. Someone telling you that you can't put A inside your body does not make you a slave to them. If it did, that would mean that all children are slaves to their parents, and that most employees are slaves to their employers while on the job (can't drink alcohol on the job). PRO can either argue that telling others what to do is not slavery, and go back on his moral point, or he can argue that it is slavery and parents are slaveholders. Then he must either accept slavery, or that parents cannot tell their children what to do. I will now move on with my points. I will argue that only some drugs should remain illegal. This boils down to what is government's role. This, will likely be the center of the debate. I believe that the government's role is to protect people (namely, its citizens) and their rights. I also believe that a proactive approach to prevent harm, rather than a retroactive to punish after it has been done. As such, I agree with drunk driving laws, and conspiracy to commit murder laws. While under an NAP mindset, drinking and driving certainly doesn't violate anyone's rights (not until you crash into them), it has a greatly increased risk of doing so, and so preventing before the violation occurs is ideal. Really, cost in dollars doesn't matter. Surely my opponent wouldn't argue for legalizing homicide and rape even though they represent over 104,000 cases a year [7], and cost billions a year. Though we would surely agree that we should try to find ways to maximize success while minimizing the cost, but flat out legalizing it would never be on the table. Why should drugs be any different? If it should be legal, then it should, regardless of cost. If it should be illegal, then it should, regardless of cost. But in both cases we would want to minimize cost. As with Sweden and the Netherlands, drugs represent a health issue above a criminal issue. Simply locking people up for X number of days and letting them back out is not going to change their behavior by itself. But before we even get to there, we must first argue that drugs are bad. Drug users are more likely to commit other crimes (pretty much across the board) [8]. Now, many will say that they are only committing crimes to feed their drug addiction. This doesn't matter. Legalizing cocaine is not going to make it less addictive. The drugs effect the mind to the point where people think that having the drug is more important than not mugging some guy at knife point, and whether the drug is legal or not, it will cause that same problems. Conclusion - Drug laws are not slavery, there are better, more efficient ways of dealing with drug problems than to flat out legalize them, and legalizing all drugs will not make their problems go away. Thank you All sources - http://www.debate.org...