Summary

It is time for the summary speech. So, with this speech we will prove you that the prop team has lost the debate completely and we won. We are going to concentrate on 4 main clash points in this debate. 1. Why the proposition has chosen the wrong strategy for winning the debate? 2. Will the legalization of drugs decrease the consumption of them? 3. Does the plan bring more harms or benefits? I.e. how evil are drugs. 4. Is it legitimate for the state to ban the freedom of individuals to do whatever they like? So, let’s start. 1. Why showing analogies with alcohol to argument the plan was a failure? The proposition has chosen a “great” strategy for proving their case. Great for us, but miserable for them. They stated that drugs should be legalized because alcohol and tobacco are legal. Then they showed a lot of similarities between drugs and alcohol and told that is unfair when drugs are illegal being in essence similar to alcohol. However, they have never tried to prove WHY substances similar to alcohol should be legal, expect of that it is unfair. Here we see their failure. We can’t understand how the state could be unfair to evil substances. We believe that the state should protect its citizens from as many harms as it could. We would like to see alcohol banned very much, but the debate is about drugs now, and we wouldn’t like to see them allowed just because they are similar to other legal stuff. Anyway many states fight with alcohol and tobacco. First of all almost all the states impose a huge tax on alcohol and tobacco to prevent people from consuming it (they keep the price artificially high to make the demand low). Secondly, states impose regulations on the sale of alcohol. It is not sold to minors, because the government believes they are too young to make a proper decision concerning the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. The consumption of these brings the benefits now, but high harms later. The government believes that minors are likely to make irrational and myopic decision concerning this choice and won’t understand that significant price of harmed health will have to be paid in the future. Thirdly, states impose other regulations. For example not selling alcohol from 22.00 to 08.00 in the Baltic States. The proposition could doubt its efficiency, but living in Latvia we have witnessed that it helps. People usually prefer to drink in the evening after work. Buying alcohol in advance during the daytime involves inconvenience, and many people simply forget to do it. Thus some of the potential drinkers either don’t drink or have to go to the bar and pay high prices, thus to drink less. This makes all the society to consume less alcohol. Sweden is another example of a state where the sale of alcohol is regulated. There the government owns the monopoly on the sale of alcohol to protect its citizens from consuming too much. Russian government has agreed that alcoholism is one the most important threats they face now, and started huge campaigns to prevent the degradation of the nation. Finally it is worth noting here that drug-liberal Netherlands has stepped back and banned the sale of hallucinogenic mushrooms after several incidents. To sum up this means that almost all countries in the world are trying to prevent people from consuming alcohol, drugs or tobacco. Many states are fighting with alcohol. The Netherlands has stepped back in their liberal policy towards drugs. That’s why just showing similarities of drugs and alcohol is not the way to win the debate. We want alcohol to be banned as well. Please, give me the real reason why should drugs be legalized. Also it is not very clever to ignore the experience of other states such as those that fight with alcohol after it being legal for many years, and the Netherlands that banned hallucinogenic mushrooms. This implies that there have been some reasons for such bills passed all over the world. The only reason we could think of is that the government has understood that allowing people to chose for themselves in some cases won’t do anything good. That’s why they want to fight against all the evil substances now. In the end, just to mention briefly. Drugs are not that similar to alcohol. Drugs are more addictive and harmful, it is true and every doctor will agree on it. It is ridiculous to say that heroin is more harmless than alcohol and showing the statistics in absolute values. Guys go and learn some basic statistics not to humiliate yourselves! To say whether heroin is more or less harmful than alcohol you need to have the average rates of deaths or other incidents on one drug or alcohol user. Otherwise statistics is useless because alcohol is consumed by much more people. If now there are high rates of traffic accidents caused by drunk driver, after the plan is implemented there will a lot more accidents caused by drivers while being “high”. 2. Will the decriminalization of drugs lead to lower consumption? I.e. once again about the forbidden fruit. Dear proposition, quoting the Bible won’t do anything good, since we don’t believe in those stories. We could quote cartoons of Mickey Mouse and in a sense of scientific reliability it will be at the same level with the Bible. The proposition has an interesting idea that things that are illegal are consumed more than if they were legal. May be a feeling of coolness from breaking a law adds a little to the satisfaction from using drugs. However, we see some stronger forces involved in this process. People when making decisions often consider costs and benefits of any particular choice they make. When drugs are illegal buying them involves costs of breaking the law and being prosecuted afterwards. Also potential purchasers have to search for a drug dealer who cannot be found by simply opening the address book. These costs prevent many people from buying drugs we believe. Now the government wants to take away all these costs and somehow they think that this will decrease the consumption. Absurd! By the way the fact that now people consume more alcohol than drugs shows that this argument fails. According to the proposition’s logic people should consume more of banned things rather than legal ones. However, we don’t see this in the reality. The case of the Netherlands doesn’t work very well too. First the lower consumption of drugs there could be advocated by other reasons. One more poor usage of statistics. You need to have time series in the Netherlands before the legalization of drugs and after it to draw any viable conclusions. Secondly, the consumption in the Netherlands is still higher than in other countries, and we see no reason why to compare it with the USA and not to compare it with let’s say Sweden. Unfortunately, we can’t compare the rate in the Netherlands with other countries, because the proposition just stated this absurd statistics and didn’t give us any reference. Thirdly, the Netherlands are now stepping back from drug-liberalization as we already told, which implies the fail of this example once again. On the other hand, with our argument about prescription drugs we have shown that people are very eager on killing themselves with whatever is allowed. Thus legalizing drugs will give a new massive instrument of self-destruction. 3. Will the plan bring benefits or harms? Ok, we have already agreed that the consumption will rise. But maybe there are still benefits from drugs, which could still advocate the legalization of them. Unfortunately, the proposition hasn’t named any single one except of the decreased black market argument. We wonder whether the proposition really believes things they are saying. They advocate the legalization of drugs and thus allowing people to kill themselves with them by saying that this will diminish the organized crime and bring some tax revenues to the state budget. First we believe that the same people that are earning money on this market now will remain in the market. And the plan will make their life significantly easier. They will have to pay only taxes and won’t have to worry about smuggling, drug dealing, paying bribes to the police etc. This will make them to concentrate all their effort on effective drug selling and make them prosper. So if they finance any other illegal activities by their drug revenues, they will continue to do it. We don’t understand how “theft” will disappear. If a person doesn’t have enough money to buy a dose, he will steal no matter whether drugs are legal or illegal. We see enough of alcoholics stealing money to buy vodka, this will be the case with drugs too. Then we also proposed an idea that the black market could remain together with the legal one. There is still a black market for alcohol, tobacco and guns, although these are legal. Why is it so? The proposition has never dealt with this idea. We proposed a reason that the government has to tax things as alcohol and tobacco high to compensate for the loss caused to society by consuming them. This keeps a price on them high. However, on a black market where people don’t pay taxes, these things could be sold for a far lower price. This makes smuggling alcohol and tobacco, and then retailing it on the black market one of the most prosperous businesses crime syndicates could do. If the government will keep the price low, they will increase the consumption of drugs. The basic laws of Economics still work. The lower the price – the higher the demand. Thus more people will kill themselves with drugs. But now there will even be no money collected in the form of taxes to offset these losses. That’s why in both cases when the price is high or when it is low the plan fails. Either the black market remains or the consumption sky rockets. We agree that certain regulations could make drugs safer and purer. If now people are dying from drugs of good quality and of bad quality, after the plan is implemented, people will start dying from just the drugs of good quality, but at a higher rate. This is what’s going to happen. We would like no one to be dying from drugs, and this is the reason why we want them to be banned. Our example of legal medicine overdose deaths showed that people are dying even from something of good quality, pure and relatively harmless. That’s why this argument doesn’t stand. We would like people not to be dying at all. We have shown you many harms from using drugs such as direct harms to physical and mental health and harms to society. We believe that these are legitimate reasons to think that drugs are harmful and thus we could ban them. That leads me to the next point of individual freedom. 4. Why we can ban some of the freedoms? So this point of freedom was defended by the proposition simply by showing us the declaration of human rights. It is absurd to believe that this declaration is binding on all freedoms and that people are really free to do whatever they want. We are not free to walk nude in public in most of the countries. The idea of the state is that people give away some rights to protect the others. People give away the freedom to shout loud in public, since it could harm the others. People give away the freedom not to pay taxes, since they have to pay for public goods and make social contributions to receive their retirement benefit later (by the way this is a classic example of how the state sometimes is legitimate to deal with myopic behavior). So people give away some freedoms, but instead they gain the protection of other rights. For example people gain the protection for their property rights. The state protects their property and it also has an enforcement mechanism so that no one could take over anyone’s property. That’s why the right of freedom is not ultimate and every separate case should be considered separately. Since people are too myopic in their behavior sometimes it is the burden of state to protect them. Drugs are too harmful and they kill a person over a very little period of time. They also cause fast addiction. Moreover, people under the influence of drugs can’t behave adequately. The decision to try a drug involves instant great benefits in forms of better mood and great feeling of pleasure and distant future harms with a certain probability. This is the classical case when people could behave myopic. In such a case it is a burden of state to prevent this from happening. Otherwise, our whole society will deteriorate and collapse. One example of how the state deals with myopic behavior is paying social contributions and receiving a retirement benefit afterwards. People value consumption now much more than in the distant future. That’s why they tend not to save money for their elderly. It is not the best society where all people that stopped working become trumps instantly, since they have no savings. That’s why the state intervenes. In fact, it forces people to save money. Moreover, third party harm exists in the usage of drugs. First the usage of drugs degrades society overall, which harms not only drug users. Secondly, the more people use drugs and more legal they are the higher the pressure on non-drug addict is. Since the state makes them legal, it sends a public message that “drugs are not that bad, so try them”. We see it as a great harm. For all these reasons we are proud to stand in the opposition! Thank you for your attention!