Drug Legalization

A lot of great information flowing. Before I go into more of my arguments and refuting my opponent's, I'd like to preface a few misconceptions before I continue. "I'm not arguing about the War on Drugs, just if they should be legalized. I'm sorry if you got confused, but that isn't the point of this whole debate. "You essentially are. If you are arguing all these illicit drugs should remain illegal; you are arguing the current War on Drugs, and the draconian laws concerning penalties to those purchasing and consuming these drugs, should remain intact. "Not about the jail time, that is a whole separate debate there. "It absolutely is about jail time. You even said we're talking about the legalization of drugs. If we continue to keep these drugs illegal, we continue to feed the corrupt prison system at unprecedented rates. I won't go too deep into this right now, that'll be one of my arguments later on. Opponent's ArgumentsMy opponent summarizes his core arguments at the end of his around as following: "Addiction, Death Rates, Comparisons to Alcohol, What it does to you, Foreseeing the future as it pertains to drug legalization". I'll be combining the first 4 as the potency and harm of drugs, and dealing with the last one individually. 1) Potency, Death, Addiction of Illicit DrugsThe core argument of my opponent is that these drugs cause so much short term, long term, and irreversible damage to your body, legalizing them would cause unprecedented damage to society. When I, and many other people that argue what I do, argue about legalizing drugs, the issue isn't about the drugs themselves, but about the effect keeping them illegal is doing to the world. The role of law enforcement in this country is to primarily protect people against the violent and illegal acts of other people. Summarized by LEAP(Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) founder Peter Christ,"Law Enforcement was designed by a guy by the name of Robert Peel over in London, England in the early 1800s. He designed an organization of law enforcement that would protect people from other people doing them harm. When you institute a prohibition like we have with this country, what you are doing is not protecting people from other people, you are attempting to use law enforcement to protect people from themselves. Protecting you from yourself is a function of family, church, education, and the health care system, it never is, and never should of intended to be, a law enforcement function. We are out there enforcing morality, and that is not our job. "[1]When we are protecting people from conscious decisions they made themselves, that is an impossible task our law system was never intended to do. And as you see by the charts and statistics I provided in my previous round, the prohibitions system(War on Drugs) we have instituted in this country has not only failed it's mission, it has exacerbated it. Nobody is arguing drugs are great and should be used, that's a misconception people have about arguments concerning legalizing drugs. What we are arguing is that we should not be spending a trillion dollars on a failed system that is systematically imprisoning hundreds of thousands of people. Yes, cocaine and heroin are terrible drugs that should be taught(not enforced) to not be taken. However, the potency/harmful nature of the drugs are irrelevant to the bigger overall picture. We should be helping these people, not imprisoning them.2) Legalization would increase usersYou seem to make the unfounded claim numerous times that legalizing these drugs would skyrocket use. However, you never once linked a scientific, proven case that the legalization of these drugs would increase the use of them dramatically. Your last sentence even said "As you can see, if we legalized drugs, a ton of people would become dependent on it. ". What evidence do you have for that. I would argue the opposite. Peter Christ summarizes the point perfectly "How many people do you know don't use cocaine because they can't get it? None. Acquiring the drug is not what makes people decide to get it. "[1]Viewing the statistics I linked last round; drugs are so cheap, widespread available, and easy to obtain, the legal status of using them has no impact on whether a person will use it or not. If you are firm in your position to use cocaine or heroin, it being illegal isn't going to change anything. If Heroin becomes illegal tomorrow dtaylor, will you use it? No, because you know the harmful effects and the dangerous toxicity of it, and you will most likely become heavily addicted and dependent on it. That is the case for all people. If you are going to use it, you will find a way to use it, no matter what the legal status of it is. Arguments All of my other previous arguments stand, but I have one more to include, as I didn't want my last round to be too long. The main premise of the argument will be: Legalizing Drugs, with the combined effort of education, prevention, and rehabilitation, will decrease use and repeat use far more efficiently than our current system. The Global Commission on Drug Policy, a 19 member commission made up of former presidents, ministers, drug policy leaders, etc. , concluded that[2]-The factors that influence an individual's decision to start using drugs have more to do with fashion, peer influence, and social/economic context, than with the drug's legal status, risk of detection, or government prevention messages-The factors that contribute to the development of problematic or dependent patterns of use have more to do with childhood trauma or neglect, harsh living conditions, social marginalization, and emotional problems, rather than moral weakness or hedonism. As we see here, the government's approval/disapproval of drug use has nothing to do as to whether or not people want to use them. Instead of wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on failed policy, we should be educating kids on the dangers and effects of the illicit drugs, and parents on how to raise a successful kid in a nurturing, careful environment that stresses the risks of drugs and peer pressure. I would also like to point out the vast differences between rehabilitating drug users, and throwing them in jail. These examples show that jail time for drug users does nothing to deter use, but instead increases it. -The Rockefeller drug law imposes a 15-year-to-life jail sentence for anyone in possession of four or more ounces of narcotics. Since this was equal to second-degree murder, many thought the law would work great, right? Wrong. Not only did drug convictions increase, but recidivism rates(likelihood of someone re-entering jail for the same crime) significantly increased. [3] People who received drug rehabilitation instead of jail time:[3]-Were re-arrested within a 12 month period 18% less of the time-Were convicted of a crime 23% less of the time-Received a new sentence within a 12 month period 21% less of the time-Of 840,000 prisoners needing drug treatment, only about 150,000 actually got the treatment before being released. Joseph Califano, who served under president Jimmy Carter, commented on this statistic[3]Now lets look at several European countries that took different approaches to the drug problem. 1) Switzerland implemented a new set of policies and programs, some of which included heroin substitution programs, which focused on public health rather than criminalization in the 1980s. These programs proved to be tremendously successful: It substantially reduced consumption and demand amongst the heaviest users, reduced property crimes by up to 90% amongst users in the program, and removed local addicts and dealers. [2] 2)The UK found charges brought against 1,500 drug users that entered treatment was reduced by 48%[2]3)The Netherlands implement Large-scale, low-threshold drug treatment and harm reduction programs, and sometimes even prescribe heroin under strict conditions. Because of this, the Netherlands have the lowest amount of heroin users, have no now influx of new or problematic users, and found that medical heroin reduces crime and increases positive effects on the health of people struggling with addiction. [2]4)When Portugal decriminalized drugs, and treated drug users as health patients instead of criminals, problematic users dropped by 50%. Much of this success is also attributable to "confluence of treatment and drug reduction policies". [4]Sorry for the long round, if you cannot respond to it all I understand. Thanks for the opportunity to debate this with me. Sources[1] youtube. com/watch? v=W8yYJ_oV6xk[2] . http://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org...[3] . http://www.rehabinfo.net...[4] . http://www.forbes.com...