All drugs should be legalized and regulated

"The fact you can't win a war is not a reason to give up..." I disagree entirely. If it is clear that you cannot win a war, giving up on the war is the only logical choice. Why continue to waste lives and resources on an unwinnable war when the resources could be put to better use rebuilding the damage done by the war? The wasted lives I refer to are not merely rhetorical either. How many lives have been ruined not by the effects of drugs, but by the simple fact that people (the majority of them adults in a "free" society) got caught in possession of drugs that were not on the government's list of accepted mind-altering substances? The message seems to be, "Misuse of drugs can ruin your life, so if we catch you with them we are going to ruin your life." Legal sanctions have proven to be little incentive to keep people from using or participating in the production and distribution of drugs. There are several countries in which drug offenses carry a mandatory death sentence. This does not stop the drug trade in these countries. Iran executed over 10.000 people for drug offenses between 1979 and 2011 (http://www.ihra.net...). That's an average of over 300 people per year. In Viet Nam and Malaysia, more than half of all executions performed every year are for drug offenses (same source as above). With the astonishing numbers of lives wasted or lost, not due to drugs, but directly attributable to the war on drugs, we must ask ourselves as a society...Is this the best we can do? Is putting users, addicts, dealers, and producers in cages (or worse) the BEST solution to the drug problem that we can come up with? According to my opponent, eliminating legal sanctions against drug use would "drastically increase drug use." Drug use would "become mainstream," the number of new users (including children), addicts, and overdoses would increase "massively," and drug related crime would increase. Thankfully, we have a couple of real-world examples of drug reform that we can look at to see of these fears are justified. I will focus on the drug reforms that Portugal enacted in 2001. In that year, Portugal decriminalized simple possession of all drugs, including cocaine, heroin, MDMA, and amphetamines for personal use. The drug trade itself has remained illegal. While possession is not "legal," it is simply a finable offense, not unlike a traffic ticket, that carries no criminal charges. Instead of a criminal record and a possible jail sentence, those caught with small amounts of drugs (about 10 days worth) are ordered to a 3-person commission that decides whether the offender should be offered drug treatment, fined, or given no penalty at all. In the vast majority of cases, no penalty is given. SOURCE--(http://mic.com...) The changes seen in Portugal since these reforms took effect are astonishing, and certainly counter-intuitive to those who believe that the illegality of drugs is a deterrent to their use. Five years after drug reform, the percentage of people 15 years and older that had ever tried marijuana was 10%, a decrease in pre-reform numbers. In the U.S., the percentage of people 12 and older who have tried marijuana is 39.8%. From 2001-2006, the percentage of 7th-9th graders who had tried any illegal drug dropped from 14.1% to 10.6%. Percentage of 16-18 year olds who had tried heroin dropped from 2.5% to 1.8% (a small increase in marijuana use was noted in this age group). SOURCE--(http://content.time.com...) In 2001 there were 1,016 new cases of HIV among intravenous drug users. In 2012 there were 56. New cases of AIDS in this group dropped from 568 to 38. At treatment centres, similar decreases were seen in the rates of Hep C and B. Deaths due to drug use decreased from 80 in 2001 to 16 in 2012. Due to decriminalization, Portugal went from trying 14,000 people per year of drug offenses to 5,500-6,000 per year. Not only is that approximately 8,000 people every year whose lives are not negatively affected by drug charges, it is a huge reduction in court costs, which benefits the entire country. In 1999 the percentage of people in Portuguese prisons who committed crimes under the influence of drugs, or for the purpose of supporting their drug addictions was 44%. In 2012 that number had dropped to 21%. The only increases in drug use that have been noted have been a small increase in the percentage of 16-18 year olds who have tried marijuana (although the percentage in this age group that have tried any drug has decreased), and, initially after reform, a small increase in the number of people who used a drug recreationally for a while, then stopped. After a couple of years, this rate of increase in new users declined to match those of other EU countries. The rate of past-year and past-month use (the best indicator of drug trends), as well as the rate of continuation of drug use (people who have used a drug and continue to do so) have both decreased. What this indicates is that people initially took advantage of their new-found freedom (freedom that any adult in a "free" society should enjoy), tried drugs once or a few times, then stopped using. SOURCE--(http://www.tdpf.org.uk...) Decriminalization of all drugs in Portugal has been an amazing success. Casual users need not fear criminal convictions, addicts have easy (and stigma-free) access to treatment, court costs and incarceration costs are dramatically decreased, crime is down, health problems related to drug use is down, and, perhaps most surprising, overall use of drugs is down, especially among young people.