The United States should legalize all drugs

. . . == Ethics == Firstly, Pro never actually tells us why we should believe that utility is subjective. Just because there is some epistemic uncertainty surrounding utilitarian calculations doesn't mean utility can't be objective. There are many objective features of reality which we only have imperfect approximations of, yet we rely on such approximations all the time in order to function as a society -- for example, the field of engineering relies on Newtonian physics despite its mild misrepresentations of the way reality actually works (i. e. an unknowable union of quantum theory and general relativity). However that does not inhibit the efficacy of the products of engineering, nor does it imply that the laws of physics are not objective. Similarly, for moral decision-making, we can rely on approximations of utility that are based in our universally-shared rational intuitions. I demonstrated that drug legalization results in vast harms on all levels of society, and that Pro's benefits were minuscule in comparison -- there is no world in which that implies a net positive outcome. I don't need to provide an "objective weighing mechanism" for making utilitarian calculations because practical, intuition-based approximations suffice. Furthermore, epistemic uncertainty is present in *all* ethical theories, including Pro's freedom-based one. Complete liberty implies that I have the freedom to enjoy a quiet evening at home, while my neighbor simultaneously has the freedom to host a monster truck destruction derby in his backyard. Yet these freedoms clearly contradict. Whose should be given priority? The Harm Principle provides no answers because no one is really being "harmed" in this situation. Thus, the result is epistemic uncertainty, and the solution is bound to consequentialist & intuition-based in nature. Most importantly, Pro *dropped* my main justification for preferring utilitarianism over the Harm Principle -- that we are socially-interdependent beings who rely on millions of other people every day in order to survive, and thus we are obligated to value collective interests over individual interests. I'm clearly winning that utilitarianism should be the ethical criterion for this debate, as it is the only one that is really warranted, and Pro's criticisms of it are flawed & non-unique. == Social Contract == Pro actually made a huge concession by admitting that government is justified via a social contract mechanism. The thing social contracts is that they are not bound by any external moral considerations -- literally any type of regime can be justified as long as there is some mechanism for opting-out of the contract (i. e. emigration). There is no maximum amount of freedom that people are allowed to give up in return for protection -- if they gave their implicit consent by continuing to live under the jurisdiction of that government, then they are obligated to live under its laws. In other words, by appealing to the contractual view of government, Pro severs law from ethics, and the legal status quo of the United States (i. e. its "social contract") is the only basis we have for affirming or negating the resolution. As I demonstrated last round, the United States' social contract is certainly *not* libertarian in nature, and thus the Harm Principle should be dropped out of the debate in favor of a pragmatic cost/benefit analysis approach to deciding government policy. == Costs & Benefits == Let's start off by clarifying that no part of anything I said requires drug use to be inherently harmful. My case is based on the very simple idea that drug usage in the status quo has proven to be highly detrimental, and therefore increasing drug usage via legalization is probably going to exacerbate all the harms. Pro's main method of countering this logic is to point out effects associated with legalization which supposedly mitigate these harms. (1) Increased Drug Usage *** The rest got deleted by the site. Not enough time to type it all up again. *** Pretty sure this dooms me to a loss, since I didn't cover pragmatics at all, and doing that in the final round would be unfair.