The abuse of illegal drugs ought to be treated as a matter of public health, not of criminal justice

LD format I and likely many others would like some extra practice on this resolution before tournaments. Here's a great opportunity as this is the aff I will be using. The time to post a new argument is 72 hours however this is because I may not be able to post arguments between the 4th and 6th, since that is when my tournament is and my schedule will be pressed. However I will do my best to get arguments in within a day otherwise. Good luck to con. I affirm the resolution resolved: The abuse of illegal drugs ought to be treated as a matter of public health, not of criminal justice. I offer the following definitions: Illegal drug: A class of conciousness-altering drugs that operate at a high efficiency. (Princeton) Treated: To deal with a matter (Merriam Webster) Ought: Indicating desirability (Merriam Webster) Public health: The science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society. Criminal justice: A generic term for the procedure by which criminal conduct is investigated, arrests made, evidence gathered, charges brought, defenses raised, trials conducted, sentences rendered, and punichment carried out. (Legal Dict.) I offer the value of safety, defined as freedom from danger or harm. Safety must be paramount because with no safety there is no life. A public health approach to drug abuse will uphold safety by solving for the harms caused by drug abuse in a criminalized world. My criterion is minimizing drug abuse, since the impact of abuse is obviously undesirable. Minimizing drug abuse will uphold safety by keeping people safe from the harms drug abuse causes. Contention 1: Criminal justice punishes people for something out of their control. Sub point A: Abuse is involuntary. Abuse is defined as to use wrongly or improperly. When people use drugs they dont intend on misusing them. They want drugs to get high. If they end up abusing drugs it is almost always unintentional. Criminalizing punishes people for accidents and mistakes, but it doesnt do anything to actually solve for abuse. Bennet Fletcher explains, "Punishment alone is a futile and ineffective response to drug abuse, failing as a public safety intervention for offenders whose criminal behavior is directly related to drug use". Rather than punish would-be criminals for something that is completely unintentional, we should focus more on actually solving for and preventing drug abuse from happening. Contention 2: Public health solves for abuse by solving for overdose A: Overdose is the primary way drugs are abused. Let us not forget that the definition for abuse is to use wrongly or improperly. Obviously overdose is the main way to misuse not only illegal drugs but drugs in general. William Turnbo reports that on average 5,200 (five-thousand two hundred) people in the US die from illegal drug overdose each year, with many more cases leading to severe sickness. The issue with the current world is that because of their illegality, drug users do not have ready access to information on how much of a substance to take. Joshua Wolf explains, "Virtually all "overdose" deaths from the use of illegal drugs are due to contaminants or the user's ignorance of the drug's potency. " [Joshua Wolf; Freelance Writer; Prohibiting Drugs Has Serious Consequences; 2001; Gale]O Overdose is further caused by by the fact that illegal drug users dont always know what drug they get. The underground drug market is a risky business, DrugScope reports "It is often difficult to know whether a powder, pill, resin, herb or liquid is a particular drug. Even if you think it is a particular drug you may have no idea how strong the dose is, or whether it also contains another drug(s) or other substances." Furthermore, not all drugs require the same dose. So if you expect to get crack but really get cocaine, which have different default levels of dosage, you take the incorrect amount of the substance. Because of this, users become abusers by misusing the drug. BetterHealthChannel reports that illegal drug overdose can cause an excess of dopamine output which causes long term depression, in addition to immediate defects such as vomiting, fatigue, internal bleeding, or death. Sub point B: Public health will solve for overdose. Through decriminalization we will be able to focus less on throwing people in jail and more on solving the problems caused by drug criminalization. This policy would make the specific quantity of a drug that should be taken readily available to everyone. This info should be publicized greatly as to make sure everyone is fully educated on how to use the drugs properly. Furthermore a public health stance would cause the legal pharmaceutical regulation of currently illegal drugs. By doing this we eliminate the chance of acquiring the wrong drug, as corporations have more ready access to chemical identification than do drug dealers. Alan Jones explains, "It could be argued that the likelihood of harm would be reduced even further by a regulated industry which restricts supply, provides warnings to consumers and monitors the content of what is sold." Therefore,a public health stance will all but eliminate the vast majority of illegal overdose cases, thus solving for the main cause of drug abuse. Contention 3: Public health solves for dangers of drug additives. Sub point A: The purity of drugs dealt under a criminalized system cannot be determined. Melanie Gordon explains "Illegal drugs are extremely dangerous. You rarely can know or trust the person who is selling them. You also dont know what other substances have been mixed in with the drug. Often drug dealers mix an illegal drug with another substance so that they can have more product to sell. For example, a dealer might mix cocaine with talcum powder, sugar, or even another cheaper drug. If you use illegal drugs you simply cannot be sure of what substances you are putting into your body." (Drug interactions: protecting yourself from dangerous drug, medication, and Food contaminations page 15) While the additives themselves are usually not dangerous, they indirectly make criminalized drugs very deadly. Drug scope reports that these additives such as adulterants and dilutants make the purity of street drugs vary to a startling degree. Drug Scope continues, reporting that the purity of amphetamines are around 1 to 10 percent. Cocaine purity: 20-90 percent. Crack: 85-100 percent. Heroin: 30-80 percent. LSD: 0-100%. So to the key question, why is this important? Well, purity can be considered synonymous with the drug strength. So when a drug has 30% purity, its potency is the same thing. The problem is, when the drug strength varies so greatly, we once again have no idea how much of it to take to get the desired effect. So if we guess that we should take x amount of the drug, but the purity ends up being much greater than previously thought, then once again it causes overdose and misuse. Also, if somebody takes too little of the drug in regards to its purity, then they take more and more and more which can also lead to overdose. Thus is the flaw in a world where these drug abuse is criminalized. Sub point B: Public health solves for this issue. Under legal regulation, each class of conciousness altering drugs will have similar or identical levels of additives, and thus identical levels of purity. Thus the dangers the vast levels of purity causes are nonexistant in the affirmative world. Because a public health approach solves for drug abuse while criminalization does not, I urge an affirmative ballot. I request my opponent do cross-ex in comments. Max 10 questions please. I will answer asap.