All drugs should be legal

Thank you for supplying me with intelligent rebuttals. Now for my re-rebuttals! 1. The act of taking drugs does not violate rights The reason civil servants take an oath to protect and defend the country from all enemies is to protect the rights of the citizens. If enemies did not threaten the rights of citizens, there would be nothing to defend or protect the citizens from. Drugs harm the user, but they do not inherently harm other individuals or society. People do that when they are not responsible with their drug use, and drugs are not responsible for what people do. Banning drugs because some people commit crimes while under their influence is like banning cars because some people die in collisions. You claim that as a member of society, it is one's duty to give up rights for the benefit of society. As a member of society, you do have to cooperate for the benefit of yourself and society, but to give up your rights, you get nothing in return, and frankly neither does anybody else. And while it might be good to risk your rights sometimes, forcing someone to just part with their rights is unethical, and not the basis for a moral society. You say that the emergence of a drug economy would destroy society, but what you fail to realize is that a drug economy already exists. It is comprised of gangs, shady dealers, cartels, secret transactions, etc... This is not the basis for a stable economy, which in turn is not the basis for a stable society. If this economy was legal, however, the drug economy would stabilize because it would be run by legitimate businesses, and thus society would stabilize. 2. The failure of prohibition While prohibition may have somewhat helped public health, as evidenced by your numbers, your most important statistic is not all that impressive. Meaning, if alcohol use declined 30-50%, that isn't even half of what prohibition tried to do. This is not a success. Organized crime did exist before prohibition. However, you act as though the prohibition of alcohol was just another little thing the mafia was in charge of. The simple fact is that it wasn't. Prohibition made organized crime much bigger. Al Capone, who I brought up earlier, would certainly not have because as powerful as he did had he not become involved in illegal alcohol. "Capone was earning $60 million a year from alcohol sales alone. Other rackets earned him an extra $45 million a year." Because of his dealings in alcohol, Capone made well over double the profits he would have made otherwise, and even that is generous, as he might not have made those $45 million from other 'services' if he was not known for alcohol. These profits prove that alcohol was much more that just another thing the mafia did. It was huge, accounting for well over half of the most infamous gangster's profit. 3. More power to gangs/cartel It is true that if users stopped buying drugs, the cartels would have no power. Unfortunately, however this is not realistic. You believe that if drugs are kept illegal, the profits of the cartels are at least limited. But their 39 billion dollar profit certain indicates otherwise. You go on to say that legalizing drugs would make more people buy drugs from the cartels. While more people would buy drugs, they would not buy from cartels. They would buy from their local drugstore, or whoever else sells drugs legitimately, and in turn destroy the profits of cartels. In your next section of statistics, you first bring up the exponential decline between 1979 and 1992. My hypothesis for why this is is fear. People were simply afraid to be arrested, faced with severe consequences. The drug war was priority 3 out of 29, after all. While you might say that the lower use of drugs was good, fear is no way to run a society. Societies are built on trust and cooperation. Fear only leads to distrust and betrayal. Your next statistic is the sharp increase in drug use when Clinton made the war on drugs a lower priority, and the slow decline that subsequently followed. My guess is that people initially all experimented with drugs because they would not be as likely to be caught or as severely punished. But after the initial surge, they realized that drugs weren't for them, and stopped. If this logic were applied to full legalization, chances are there would be an initial spike in drug use, which would then get progressively less. Perhaps the rate would even go down beyond the current rate, as the 'cool factor' of doing something illegal is now gone. Finally, I agree that a society of non-users would be better. I would hope that you realize, however, that this is an unrealistic, utopian ideal, and it would never be possible. 4. Users cannot be helped if they are scammed It is clear that my example wasn't good enough, which I suppose I can't deny. Maybe a better example would be safety. A dealer could market his drug as completely safe, but in reality the drug is incredibly dangerous. This would be considered fraud, and any victims of this fraud would not be able to receive legal help, even though they were victims, not offenders. I hope this is better than my last example. What I'm really getting at is that if one is a victim, they cannot testify against their offender as long as drugs are illegal. At the end of your paragraph, though, your argument is actually detrimental to your own case. The core of your argument is that drugs should be banned because they cause health problems, which contribute to societal problems like lack of productivity. By this logic, why not ban McDonalds. McDonalds causes health problems, and on the societal level leads to the obesity epidemic, which in turn leads to lower productivity and higher death rates. Why should one unhealthy product be banned but the other left alone? Source: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk...