Drug Legalization

I will give my points then attack his. Point 1: Increased drug use. If drugs are made legal, a new influx of users would be created as people would no longer fear punishment for using drugs. Whether people have done drugs or not, they are aware that they are generally considered enjoyable and addicting, thus people will be drawn into their destructive spectrum. I wont go too in detail on this because, looking at my opponent's arguments, he doesn't seem to disagree that there will be more drug users, rather just says that it wont be a bad thing. Point 2: Hospital overcrowding Using drugs causes severe health damages. From source 1, you see that using illegal drugs causes heart attacks, respiratory failure, strokes, vomiting, and/or brain damage, just to name a few. With more people taking drugs in light of their legalization, you will experience a drastically increased number of people harming themselves with these legalized drugs. And when people get sick, where do they go? The hospital. Source 2 details how in 2006, over 958,000 people were hospitalized for illegal drug use. So we recognize that people are indeed hospitalized. But with hundreds of thousands of new drug users destroying their health, these numbers will only increase. Hospitals everywhere will become flooded with new patients. With hospitals already struggling with overcrowding now, who knows what would happen if there were so many more sick people that there simply wasn't room for them. Overcrowding has several impacts, described in source 3, such as delayed treatment or service, patient's symptoms, weakened physician effectiveness, or even violence. This is why we should keep drugs illegal, to stop this new wave of drug users from coming to fruition and flooding our hospitals with more sick people. Point 3: Work productivity With more people using drugs it will inevitably lead to increased people coming to work high. Source 4 explains that using drugs at work leads to decreased productivity, increased insurance costs, harms to the company's profits, and increased risk for accidents. Again, with thousands of more people using drugs in light of legalizing, this becomes a severe national issue due to the sheer number of people working while high. Onto his arguments. He says legalizing solves for drug cartels and inner city gangs. First lets realize, criminalizing any crime causes an underground market to be created of it. That doesn't mean we should legalize. For instance, under my opponent's logic, we should legalize rape to solve for underground human trafficking markets. Or we should legalize theft to prevent the formation of Ocean's 11 type of organizations. Or we could legalize murder, so terrorist groups wouldn't be secretly convening as to how to kill more Americans. His second point is that drugs do not cause crime. I agree. There's really no scientifically way to link drug use to it. I also agree with the stealing point brought up. I do not believe these are good arguments as to why drugs should stay illegal, there are other stronger ones. Then he brings up how citizens are hurt by drug investigations. Again, people are also hurt by murder investigations and false rape allegations. Innocents are charged for murder in some cases, that doesn't warrant legalization of it. Further, the article he cited does provide a rather sad story. However this is more against corrupt police officers then the drug war. Assuming drugs were legal, you're going to tell me that the police weren't going to find another way to search the house? They would surely find some other false allegation to get a warrant. And again, it is the police at fault and not the law. Then he gets ready to talk about the harms of drugs (mainly heroin) itself, but he doesn't actually say anything about it being medically unhealthy. His main point was that heroin is not truly addictive. Whether or not heroin or drugs in general have a physical dependency to them, people still use them repeatedly. The result is still the same whether the addiction be physical or psychological. People use the drug over and over, and this leads to the severe health damages described in my second point. So to prevent hundreds of thousands of new drug users from coming to fruition, flooding hospitals, and harming companies they work for, we must keep them criminalized. 1.http://www.drug-alcohol-addiction-recovery.com... 2. http://drugabuse.gov... 3. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... 4. http://www.acde.org...