Resolved: Just governments ought not persecute victimless crimes.

Thank you for your timely and detailed response. Let's look at my opponents definition of just provided at the top of the speech. My opponent specifically states, "a truly just legal system cannot be punitive." and that "more than three-quarters of released prisoners in a study of hundreds of thousands of them landed back in prison within five years." But is this because they committed actual crimes, or were jailed because these victimless actions are called crimes? I'll go over that when responding to the two contentions. In the first contention, my opponent simply talks about how victimless crimes reduce utility. OK, sure. But how does that correlate to the resolution? I never said that abusing drugs is good, I simply say that the government should not regulate them. Thus, don't compare a world without drug abuse to a world with one - compare a world with drug abuse to one with drug abuse punished by the government. Plus, turn the argument. Harsh laws on drugs create more of the crimes. Look to the CountTheCosts evidence in my first speech - harsh laws create all sorts of backroads of crime. Prohibition banned alcohol and the US realized it made the problem worse. Banning these things causes more harms than keeping them legal. As Forbes says, (http://www.forbes.com...) For the sake of the argument, let"s go ahead and assume that everything you"ve heard about the dangers of drugs is completely true. That probably means that using drugs is a terrible idea. It doesn"t mean, however, that the drug war is a good idea. Prohibition is a textbook example of a policy with negative unintended consequences. Literally: it"s an example in the textbook I use in my introductory economics classes (...) and in the most popular introductory economics textbook in the world (...).The demand curve for drugs is extremely inelastic, meaning that people don"t change their drug consumption very much in response to changes in prices. Therefore, vigorous enforcement means higher prices and higher revenues for drug dealers. (...) prohibition means that drug sellers have more money to buy guns, pay bribes, fund the dealers, and even research and develop new technologies in drug delivery (like crack cocaine). It"s hard to beat an enemy that gets stronger the more you strike against him or her. (...) drug kingpins (...) aren"t caused by the drugs themselves but from the fact that they are illegal. So banning drugs makes the problem far worse. Now to the second contention - the counter plan of prison reformation. First of all, the permutation solves - ending the war on drugs and reforming the prison system is better than either one alone. That would be reason to affirm since it means just governments should not persecute crimes and just government should reform their prison systems, which is affirming the resolved. But even if you don't buy that, making drug crimes not crimes solves for most of recidivism. cbsnews writes, (http://www.cbsnews.com...) Mullane said she was able to determine that 988 convicted murderers were released from prisons in California over a 20 year period. Out of those 988, she said 1 percent were arrested for new crimes, and 10 percent were arrested for violating parole. She found none of the 988 were rearrested for murder, and none went back to prison over the 20 year period she examined. "That's the lowest recidivism rate. That's unheard of," Mullane said. "In 20 years, the chance of you being returned on another murder was zero." "There's a huge disconnect in our sentencing laws," Mullane continued. "There's a higher recidivism rate among non-violent offenders." Making these offenses no longer classified as crimes will reduce recidivism rates massively. And, correlation is not causation. 34% of the Norweigan prison population is foreigners (https://en.wikipedia.org...) while only 15% of the actual population is foreign (http://www.ssb.no...). Perhaps Norweigans just commit crime less often. No true conclusions can be drawn. My arguments stand and I have refuted all of my opponent's arguments in multiple ways. Judge, this is an easy affirmation. Thank you, and I await my opponent's response.