All drugs should be legalized

C1: The Marginal Drug User While legalization would increase drug users, the new users wouldn’t be the same type of people that current users are. To see why, imagine a continuum, with hardcore users at the left end, people that would continue to use even if police went around executing all drug users, and at the right end, people that wouldn’t use no matter what. The drug users legalization would create wouldn’t be like left end users—they’d be somewhere in the middle. They are the marginal users (that is, marginal in the economic sense, not marginal as insignificant), the people who wouldn’t use drugs while they’re illegal, but would if they became legal. It’s hard to believe that these people would be problem users. The left-end people are the problem users, the violent criminals—someone that will only consider doing drugs if they’re legal probably won’t isn’t the type of person that commits violent crime or is otherwise a detriment to society. There probably aren’t many of these marginal users anyway. Con provides statistics showing the decline of drug use during the drug war—but alcohol and tobacco use have declined substantially during that time too, without the criminalization of either cigarettes or alcohol. There’s no reason to think the drug war caused the decline, rather than whatever caused the decline in tobacco and alcohol use. [1] [2] If you look at Portugal, which decriminalized drugs in 2001, has slightly increased, but not to the extent that one would expect looking at Con’s C3. [3] The concern is, perhaps, that drugs would transform these otherwise normal, law-abiding people into addicts and violent criminals. But there is little evidence for this position. Even PCP, despite its reputation, is not actually associated with violence. [4] Even meth isn’t as addictive as most imagine it is—only 6% of the 10 million people who have ever used meth used it in the past month. [5] Con provides some sources showing that drug use is associated with criminality, but has the correlation backwards—it’s not that drug users tend to be violent criminals, it’s that criminals tend to be drug users. Con cites Portugal as an example of drug legalization increasing murders, but his source is out of date—the homicide rate in Portugal rose initially after decriminalization, but sharply dropped off after 2007, going down to near pre-decriminalization levels. [6] C2: Drugs are fun Discussions of drug policy tend to focus only on harms. It’s taken for granted that increased drug use is a bad thing—something that needs to be outweighed by other things, such as reducing prison populations or gang violence. But there are benefits to drug use. Drugs are often extremely fun—that’s why people do them. Sure, for someone that becomes an addict, the harms surely outweigh the benefits—but that only happens to a small minority of users. The benefits of drug use are more obvious for soft drugs like LSD [7] and ecstasy [8], but even heroin [9] and meth [10] users often have positive experiences without much downside. Considering only the harms of drugs when evaluating them is like concluding sex is bad because of AIDS. This is obvious for a drug most of us have experience with—alcohol. There are some problem users, but most people can use it recreationally without destroying their lives. C3: Prohibition and current users The drug war is unquestionably harmful to current drug users. Because drugs are sold on the black market, their quality and safety is often poor. After decriminalization in Portugal, drug use became much safer. [3] Hundreds of thousands of drug offenders are currently in prison, and hundreds of thousands more used to be. [11] In addition to the obvious harm of being locked up in a cage for several years, prisoners are often raped, with more than 200,000 cases in 2008 alone, according to the Department of Justice. [12] C4: Gangs and Cartels Because drugs are illegal, they are supplied by criminal gangs. Violence between these gangs has killed 55,000 people in Mexico alone, with 1.6 million more displaced by the violence. [13] Many more have been harmed by gang violence in the United States, Columbia, and other countries connected to the drug war. Of course, legalizing drugs wouldn’t eliminate organized crime completely, but it would certainly significantly reduce it—look at the Mafia after Prohibition was ended. It didn’t disappear, but once alcohol was supplied legally, rather than by criminals, it lost a main source of revenue and its power declined. C5: Morality of Prohibition The first question we face is whether it’s permissible to forcibly protect people from themselves. We usually don’t think so—if someone wants to eat nothing but McDonalds, we don’t stop them. We don’t need to weigh the costs and the benefits of their actions, because even if we know for sure that their habits are harmful, we realize that what other people want to put in their own bodies is none of our business. And even if one is a paternalist, the case for prohibition is weak. Why try to protect marginal users, but not be paternalist toward the hundreds of thousands of other users that would be thrown in prison, or the tens of thousands that would die in gang violence? [1] http://www2.potsdam.edu... [2] http://www.webmd.com... [3] http://www.cato.org... [4] Martin Brecher et al., "Phencyclidine and Violence: Clinical and Legal Issues," Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology 8:6 (December 1988): 397-401 [5] John A. Newmeyer, "The Epidemiology of Amphetamine Use," in David E. Smith, ed., Amphetamine Use, Misuse, and Abuse (Boston : G.K. Hall, 1979), 55-72. SAMHSA (2002), tables H.1 and H.2. NIDA, 81-85. Monitoring the Future Study, tables 5 and 7. [6] http://www.indexmundi.com... [7] http://erowid.org... [8] http://erowid.org... [9] http://erowid.org... [10] http://erowid.org... [11] http://www.drugwarfacts.org... [12] http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov... [13] http://en.wikipedia.org...