Alcohol and cannabis

== Overview == This debate is not about which drug you think is worse. In fact, I happen to agree with Pro in real life. This debate is about whether Pro has proven based on arguments and evidence in this debate that alcohol is worse than cannabis, as is his burden. I ask for your votes because I did a better job quantifying the impacts of my arguments and because I made more and better sourced arguments. I am going to add up all the impacts I cited last round, so you can see comparatively who has proven more harm. Even if I win only a fraction of my impacts, they still outweigh because they are so much greater than Pro"s. C1 - loss of $193 billion/yr + 38,000 deaths/yr C2 and C3 - loss of $2.3 trillion/yr + $120 billion/yr + $63 billion/yr C4 - loss of $28 billion/yr C6 - loss of $20 billion/yr C7 - 19 million deaths (lifetime) C8 - $62 billion/yr C9 - 30,000 deaths (lifetime) rebuttal - 4,000 deaths/yr -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total = $2.8 trillion/yr + 42,000 deaths/yr + 19.3 million deaths (lifetime) Over an average human lifetime (assume: 70 years), marijuana causes $196 trillion in economic losses and 22.3 million deaths. In addition, C6 also has a large qualitative impact - the collapse of the solvency of Social Security and Medicare. Thus, the impacts on the Con side are enormous. If I win any risk that such big impacts will occur, then I win. Let"s compare Pro"s impacts. Pro says that alcohol causes 40% of violent crime. However, murder accounts for only 1% of violent crime, whereas assault accounts for 62% and robbery comprises 29% percent. [1] While robbery and assault are bad crimes, they do not result in death. It would be hard to weigh robbery (loss of a small amount of property) against a marijuana death from lung cancer. Therefore, only murders (in which the offender was drunk) are relevant for comparison. Alcohol - at most - contributes to 14,000 murders per year. [1] This number is easily outweighed by marijuana deaths from cancer, fatal car crashes, and drug overdoses caused by marijuana being a gateway drug. Over the same 70 year time frame I used above, Pro has only proven 980,000 deaths. I outweigh with 22.3 million deaths and $196 trillion in economic losses. == Rebuttal == I will try to go in the same order Pro goes in during his Round. Education Pro goes on a long rant about how I still fail to grasp correlation and causation. However, I proved a causal element. I showed studies that people who smoke marijuana have lower dopamine levels (which affects motivation) and have a messed up thalamus (in MRI scans). Both these effects on the brain explain why people who smoke marijuana tend to be much worse students. So I do prove causation. Pro never responds to the dopamine or MRI study. Rules of debate Pro claims I cannot change the topic because I"m not instigator. But he never responds to my resolutional analysis which says that he and I can argue any *current* society and the harm that marijuana has on it. It makes no sense to argue future or theoretical societies because these do not exist so there is no evidence to cite about them. My definition is more predictable and thus more fair because it was the topic I thought I was accepting. Prefer my definition for predictability, fairness, and ground to debate (because there is only evidence about the world as it actually exists today). My opponent says that he only wanted to debate about whether marijuana was harmful, not whether its illegality had a negative effect on society. If this was the case, my opponent should have made the topic "marijuana is harmful to the individual." By adding "and to society," my opponent allows arguments about the collateral and broader effects from marijuana. Regardless, only my gateway drugs and Mexican cartels arguments rely on illegality, and these are only a small contribution to the impacts I cited in my overview. Gateway drug My opponent tries to respond to this now by saying that alcohol is just as likely to be a gateway drug because of yes-ladders. However, I have provided a study that proves correlation. My opponent provides a potential causal mechanism without proving that alcohol actually correlates with increased drug usage. In addition, marijuana is more of a gateway because of the other effects. Marijuana smokers are more likely to have other drugs available on-hand than people who drink alcohol [due to peer group effects from illegality]. If someone is out at a bar drinking, he is not one step away from doing LSD because it is unlikely that there is much LSD out at a bar. Anecdotally, when I hung out with friends who smoked marijuana, I was exposed to a lot more use of other illegal substances than when I hung out with friends that drink. A lot of people draw a clear line at drinking. There is something different about marijuana and yes-ladders because people consider smoking marijuana to also be "doing drugs." Couple that effect with the peer group of marijuana smokers being more likely to have other illegal drugs and you have marijuana being a worse gateway. In addition, my opponent doesn"t answer the argument that marijuana leads people to the false inference that they can control their drug habit [when they fail to realize that their control over marijuana does not transfer to other drugs]. My opponent never answer this last mechanism. New Pro argument: alcohol costs us $223 billion First, disregard this. No new arguments in the last round. Last round is for summary of argument. This is completely new. Second, Pro"s source aggregates all the costs of alcohol (health care costs, drunk driving, productivity). My total estimate for marijuana"s cost per year is $2.8 trillion lost per year from marijuana. My number is bigger and outweighs Pro"s. Motivation Pro doesn"t really say anything new here. He still hopes that his one friend refutes my dopamine study. Productivity Pro says that my $120 billion number includes alcohol. This is false. It includes illegal drugs, which marijuana is responsible for as a gateway drug. Cancer My opponent basically just keeps asserting that marijuana smoke is magical and doesn"t cause cancer, which is basically just weed smoker rationalization. Very few long-term marijuana users ingest 100% of their weed. Edibles are usually a rare treat, but most marijuana users smoke their marijuana (using bongs, pipes, and joints). Smoking weed results in 50-70% more carcinogens than cigarette smoke. This means that the 50% estimate I gave before is probably rather low (since it is an estimate based on cigarettes). It is more likely that marijuana will cause cancer in 75% of long-term smokers because it is a lot more carcinogenic. But regardless, Pro fails to refute this. Pro tries to bring up that 100,000 die per year from alcohol. Too bad his source (#5) doesn"t say that. The only mention of death is: "In 2011 there were 8748 deaths directly related to alcohol in UK." That is far short of Pro"s claim. Even if Pro could establish 100,000 deaths, the 22.3 million deaths from marijuana I prove above outweigh. Social-ness Pro"s argument here is somewhat incoherent and doesn"t answer my new argument that alcohol contributes to the economy by facilitating business deals. Alcohol Sexual assault: I don"t really know which numbers my opponent was referencing. I cited a source which said that when alcohol is deemed "responsible" for a sexual assault, it is more likely because the victim was heavily intoxicated than the attacker. This seems to make sense. Blacked out guys are generally too incoherent to be trying to rape anyone and would likely have "whiskey-d!ck." Blacked out girls make easy targets because they have no idea what"s going on. The fact that my opponent claims that alcohol somehow causes armed robbery proves that it"s silly to label alcohol the cause of everything with which it correlates. Bad people rape. Bad people steal. Alcohol"s effects are just a correlation and can be easily replaced by other drugs. RAINN proves that marijuana is actually the #1 drug of choice in inducing sexual assaults. It makes the victim feel silly and docile. Domestic abuse: my opponent cited source 13. I check the source. "Source not found." My opponent has some sketchy statistics. Alcohol causes 40% of violent crime but 80% of domestic abuse? Those statistics don"t add up, unless alcohol causes very few murders and other types of violent crime. Schizophrenia My opponent just questions my knowledge about the brain. Studies show that damage to the thalamus causes schizophrenia. [2] Gish galloping Gish galloping is a fallacious style of debating where you attempt to drown your opponent in statistics and half-truths without offering any real analysis. It should not be accepted. My opponent just cites a bunch of brand new statistics in a list, without explaining them or doing anything with them. I"m not going to go line-by-line through his sources to refute them if he"s not going to even bother doing the work himself to really make these arguments important in the debate. He copies and pastes off some website and I have to do all the work? Just ignore his long wall of text with a bunch of random numbers. Conclusion Let"s looked at all the dropped arguments and the total impacts. In the last round, Pro doesn"t really respond at all to (1) my arguments about marijuana"s negative effects on the brain and therefore its negative impact on people as students and workers, (2) my arguments proving that marijuana use worsens obesity, (3) my arguments that marijuana use will collapse Social Security [due to fewer children] and costs a lot money due to much lower sperm counts among users, (4) my argument that marijuana smoke causes a lot of cancers, (5) my argument that alcohol facilitates business deals, (6) my argument that marijuana funds cartels, which use the money to kill people, (7) my argument that marijuana is implicated in a large number of fatal car crashes. The result of all these dropped arguments is that I win a strong link to all my impacts, which amount to 22.3 million deaths and $196 trillion in economic losses due to marijuana over the next 70 years. Regardless of the time scale you use, the impacts I have offered outweigh Pro"s. Because this debate is about who made better arguments, not which drug is subjectively better, vote Con. [1] http://www.fbi.gov... [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...