illicit drugs should be legalised

Rebuttals: O1. Users of drugs harm other people involuntarily a. My opponent dares me to prove that legalizing drugs will make people stop doing drugs, and says that that is my claim. This is not my claim. My claim is that legalizing drugs will protect people's rights and prevent gang violence. My opponent declines to respond to my argument about texting-while-driving bans. Instead, he uses flawed logic to restate a point I have already refuted. b. I said in my original rebuttal that "fetuses are not truly living people with legal standing, so a pregnant parent doing drugs violates no rights." My opponent has not addressed this at all. When I proposed abandoning the point, I was not saying the point was invalid, but that my rebuttal might lead to a micro-debate on abortion instead. c. My opponent seems to think that drugs are the cause of all evil, and without drugs there would be no problems. This is simply not true. As my opponent likes to do to me, I dare him to show that ALL ruined families are the result of drugs. In saying that drugs are the sole cause of incidents like this, my opponent groups an ordinary user into the same category as a violent user. They are not the same, and the former should not suffer for the crimes of the latter. People are responsible for their own actions. They are not controlled by drugs because it was their decision to take the drugs in the first place. O2. Users of drugs harm themselves involuntarily My opponent attempts to make a distinction between significant and insignificant decisions. However, his criteria are strange and arbitrary. If a significant decision must be life changing and life threatening. By his logic, buying a house is insignificant because it is not life threatening. So is getting married. My opponent thinks that if somebody regrets their decision, we are obliged to prevent them from making it. We aren't people have the right and the responsibility to learn from their own mistakes. My opponent says that we are trying to please the majority in a democracy. Wrong. Democracy is about everybody, not a group of people that happens to be in the majority. Back in the day, the majority of people owned slaves. Was it right, then to have slavery legal? The majority of people today actually support the legalization of marijuana (1). Helping the majority at the expense of the minority is not democracy. O3. People take drugs thinking it will make them happy My opponent basically that drugs guarantee the destruction of life, but cars don't. However, the amount of drug deaths is only slightly higher than the amount of car deaths (2). Thus, this claim is invalid. Making it harder for people to get drugs is not a good thing. While it may discourage some, many others will just resort to more drastic measures to acquire drugs. O4. Teenagers Saying my rebuttal is "frankly amusing" does not counter anything I said. Defense: C1. The act of taking drugs does not violate rights While drug users can cause their family to feel emotional harm, this is not a violation of rights. People are not entitled to happiness. They are entitled to the PURSUIT of happiness. My argument is not that taxpayer money should go to rehabilitate drug users. I want the government to play no part in drugs, and setting up tax based rehabilitation programs is just the opposite. C2. The failure of prohibition My opponent's point here is that that criminalization leads to scarcity, which leads to price increases, which lead to less drug consumption. This is logical thinking, but fails to take something into account: addiction. As a user goes down the path to addiction, drugs become more important in their head, and the rest of the world becomes less important. These people crave drugs, and do not care what the price is. Thus, their drug consumption will not go down. As this continues, the user will start going broke, and have less money to get their drugs. They will start to steal to pay for their problem. A Kentucky couple went on an interstate burglary spree to pay for their drugs, and made a total of $80,000 (3). Increasing drug prices through criminalization does not lead to less drug consumption. It leads to poverty and crime. While some drugs may be harder to make than alcoholic beverages, There is one drug notable for its addictiveness, danger, and easiness to make: methamphetamine. The active ingredient is ephedrine or pseudo-ephedrine"cold medicine. There is no correlation between the danger of a substance and how easy it is to make. C3. More power to gangs/cartel Mexico does not have light law enforcement. There is an all-out war between the cartels and the Mexican Federal Police. Even the military has gotten involved. Gangs will still exist, but they will have much less money. Thus, they will not be able to afford weapons or recruit new members as well as before. Gangs will lose power, and violence will go down. If the gangs or cartels turn into massive retail/manufacturing empires, with no violence, then there is no problem. My opponent argues for my case by showing that legitimate business is more effective than underground business. C4. Users cannot be helped if they were scammed In saying that scam victims will have a reason not to buy drugs, my opponent argues for my case. He shows that drugs being illegal is unnecessary, because people will be able to choose not to do drugs Next, my opponent says that a drug user who was scammed has received some sort of justice. Justice must be done through the legal system. Vigilante justice leads to anarchy. But even if vigilante justice was somehow noble and fair, the fact is the dealer in our scenario wasn't a vigilante. He was a con man, who committed fraud and got away with it. Sources: 1. http://stopthedrugwar.org... 2. http://rt.com... 3. http://www.wlwt.com...