All drugs should be legal

Since this is my closing statement, my rebuttals will be shorter than usual. I will just touch on a few points that my opponent makes. 1. The act of taking drugs does not violate rights My opponent discusses collective rights and individual rights, but what are collective rights without individual rights? They are nothing. A collective merely a sum of individuals. Collective rights are merely the sum of everyone's individual rights. If anyone's individual rights are violated for the collective, collective rights are violated just as much as individual rights. The Federal government should never have handed out drugs to addicts. My whole point is that the government needs to step away from the drug issue, and using taxpayer money to hand out free drugs is just the opposite. The property crimes were done by people. Not drugs. Why should innocent drug users be punished for the actions of true criminals? They shouldn't and it is ridiculous that they would. Later on, you go to say that poverty and crime go hand in hand. By the logic you use here, we should therefore ban poverty, whatever that means. And that would of course be ridiculous and stupid. 2. The Failure of Prohibition Al Capone may have been one man, but he ran a giant operation. Thus, the people he 'employed' also were made wealthier through prohibition. And since Capone's organization was made so powerful by alcohol trading, logically the other mobs would have seen this and followed suit. 3. More power to gangs/cartel If the drugs were legalized, the gangs would no longer have to work in the black market, and would become legitimate very quickly. A legitimate business will always do better than a black market business because it can put its name into the public without risking any trouble with the law. Basically, business doesn't have to appear overnight, because it is already there. And if drugs were legal, much of the illegal trade would simply shift into legitimacy. These deterrents only work on small-time recreational users. They don't work on people who commit crimes for the crimes for the challenge, they encourage. They don't deter addicts, because all that matters to an addict is drugs. Nothing else matters. Since crime is a huge problem, especially in major cities, perhaps the basis for the criminal justice system is broken. Deterrents have shown to be ineffective against the real targets. While a society of non-users would be better than a society of users, a society of rights"individual and collective"is better than an unrealistic utopia. 4. Users cannot be helped if they are scammed You don't see advertisements for cocaine because cocaine is illegal, and anyone marketing it publicly would be arrested. The drug dealer would take the path for the same reason as anyone else who commits fraud: stealing money from the people who couldn't know any better. What contradiction? I'm not saying drug users are victims. I'm saying people who are scammed are victims. The argument does make sense because the government shouldn't prioritize what unhealthy products are illegal. It opens up a ton of philosophical questions. Where should the line be drawn between healthy and not healthy enough for legality? When can exceptions be made? And if you want to talk about lost productivity, the police could be a lot more productive if they didn't waste their time on drugs. 5. Nobody cares about New Jersey My U. S. history teacher likes to talk about how nobody cares about New Jersey. Considering this, why would you make so many references in your argument to Trenton and Newark? NOBODY CARES ABOUT NEW JERSEY! !! In conclusion, I thought this was an excellent debate. My opponent was able to provide me with real, intellectual, valid arguments, as opposed the over-emotional, illogical garbage that a part of me was expecting. However, he did say some stuff didn't make a whole lot of sense, such as the cocaine advertisement argument.