The United States should legalize all drugs

Thanks to FourTrouble for his delightfully unique case. I'm going to start by noting that my advocacy is not necessarily bound to the status quo. In addition to advocating that illegal drugs should remain illegal, I am also allowed to advocate that the US should reform its approach to the "War on Drugs" and pursue bans on other drugs like tobacco and alcohol. That said, let's move on to my case. --------------- Con Case --------------- Pro seems to concede that legalization will increase drug use, but just to be safe, let's examine why this is the case. Legalization does three things -- it removes all the criminal penalties which typically deter people from using drugs (or at least limit how often they use them), it allows for drugs to be produced & sold domestically at a fraction [1] of their current black market prices, and it enables drug producers to market their products to targeted audiences. This entails *enormous* positive shocks on both the demand-side and supply-side of the drug market, thereby resulting in vastly increased drug consumption rates. With that established, I'm gonna go over the harms of drug consumption in the status quo. (1) Individual Health It is pretty uncontroversial that drug use is unhealthy. Firstly, there is the danger of irresponsible drug abuse. More than 37,500 people die of drug overdoses every year, approximately 1.1 million emergency room trips are made annually as a direct result of drug poisoning, and 18% of all drivers killed in car accidents test positive for at least one type of drug [2, 3, 4]. Perhaps my opponent is prudent enough to avoid these immediate repercussions of drug use, but no amount of prudence can save drug users from the long term consequences: regular drug use has been scientifically proven to weaken the immune system, increase risk for cardiovascular disease, and cause liver & brain damage [5]. Simply browsing through this exhaustive report compiled by the UK's Center for Public Health reveals innumerable serious health complications arising from drug use [6]. It is obvious that illegal drugs generate substantial harm on the individual level. (2) Violent Crime Again, this isn't really controversial. The fact is that doing drugs severely impairs judgment, and therefore drug users are far more likely to commit violent crimes than other people. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that among male arrestees from 24 different cities, "the percentage testing positive for any drug ranged from 42% to 79% across the cities... those who use cannabis (marijuana) or cocaine were much more likely to commit crimes of all types than those who did not use these substances... arrestees and inmates were often under the influence of a drug at the time they committed their offense" [7]. Moreover, the resolution supports legalizing *all* drugs, including ones which are explicitly designed to help commit violent crimes (e.g. lethal drugs, date rape drugs, etc). Date rape drugs are involved in 25% of all rape cases, and that number is probably significantly understated because most cases of drug-related sexual assault are never even reported to the police [8]. Illegal drugs are illegal for a reason -- they inflict huge amounts of harm on society by facilitating violent crime. (3) Economic Harm It has been calculated that illicit drug use costs the economy roughly $193 billion via healthcare expenses, loss of work productivity (i.e. premature deaths, addiction-related unemployment, etc), and damage from violent crime. That's 1% of the GDP, which is quite significant considering that economists get excited over mere half-percent increases in the GDP growth rate. We can further put that number into perspective by comparing it to the economic costs of alcohol and tobacco consumption. Controlling for the number of users, illegal drugs cost society 4 times more than alcohol, and only slightly less than tobacco. Illegal drugs are decidedly detrimental to the economy. >>> Conclusion <<< The logic of my case is very simple. All the harms described above are the result of drug use in the status quo, where only about 12% of the adolescent/adult populace regularly uses drugs [10]. Drug legalization is expected to cause that number to sky-rocket, which greatly exacerbates all of the described harms -- we would see thousands more fatalities from overdoses per annum, huge spikes in violent crime rates (especially for rape), and hundreds of billions of dollars being lost from the economy. Therefore, it is clearly a detrimental policy which should not be implemented. Vote Con! -------------- Pro Case -------------- (1) Drugs are Awesome I have little doubt that my opponent and many others have had positive experiences with limited drug use. However, one cannot perform a utilitarian calculation by only considering the positive side of things -- we must weigh the positives against the negatives. Pro waxes poetic about the benefits of drug use, but he doesn't ever demonstrate that the population of benefactors is particularly large, nor does he show that the degree of positive utility from drug use is even close to the degree of negative utility associated with the harms of drug legalization. We can extend my entire case to affirm that the immense harm caused by legalization definitively outweighs Pro's vague and questionable benefits. Pro briefly mentions the possibility of forming a sort of "drug culture" in the United States which would facilitate the safe use of drugs. The biggest problem with this idea is that such a culture is exceedingly unlikely to form in the US. The vast majority of Americans want most drugs to stay illegal, with approval ratings for drug legalization generally being below 10%, so good luck getting them to go for a complete overhaul of the way society views & treats drugs [13]. Moreover, there is no guarantee that such a culture would actually succeed in curbing the harms of drug use. In 2001, Portugal implemented a drug decriminalization policy which involved efforts to educate drug users on safety & moderation, yet a UC Berkeley study found that the policy still led to "an approximately 25% increase in homicide rates and an increase of over 150% in drug mortality rates." [14]. The harms of drug legalization which I described are inevitable. (2) Role of Government Firstly, Pro's argument is based on an is/ought fallacy. Just because humans *are* autonomous creatures doesn't mean they *ought* to have full autonomy. Secondly, we don't live in the "State of Nature" -- we live in a civilized, interdependent society where we must rely on other human beings to survive, and where we constantly enjoy the benefits of government (an inherently unnatural entity). Thus, we have no obligation to abide by the Harm Principle. In fact, our social interdependence requires us to value the interests of everyone in society just as much as we value our own; in other words, collective welfare must be valued over individual welfare, thus giving preference to a utilitarian approach to ethics. More importantly, by appealing to the status quo, Pro automatically concedes this argument because the United States quite regularly interferes with personal liberty in order to prevent harm on both the individual and societal levels. For example, consider seat-belt laws, mandatory education, criminalized prostitution, and marriage regulations. All of those laws are incompatible with the Harm Principle, yet they have been enforced in the US for long periods of time with little resistance from anyone. Suicide's legality is not because of the Harm Principle... it is because a ban on suicide is practically impossible to enforce. Our country is very far from being libertarian -- in the status quo, the government makes policy decisions via pragmatic cost/benefit analysis, thus lending further credibility to my utilitarian framework. - 1. http://money.howstuffworks.com... 2. http://www.drugabuse.gov... 3. http://www.cdc.gov... 4. http://www.drugabuse.gov... 5. http://recovergateway.org... 6. https://www.gov.uk... 7. http://www.bjs.gov... 8. http://www.sexualityandu.ca... 9. http://www.drugabuse.gov... 10. http://www.cdc.gov... 11. http://www.niaaa.nih.gov... 12. http://www.cdc.gov... 13. http://www.huffingtonpost.com... 14. https://www.econ.berkeley.edu...