1st DDO Census Debate: Drug Legalization

BurdensTo win this debate, I must show that the United States should legalize all drugs, while Con must show that the United States should prohibit at least one drug. The issue, however, isn't whether drugs are bad. Rather, the debate turns on a comparision of worlds, one in which all drugs are legal, the other in which not all drugs are legal. Since this is a normative topic, the burdens of persuasion are equal on both sides. Con says that I have a greater burden because I'm arguing for change. But that argument is hogwash. First, Con’s assertion that he defends the status quo is laughable. In the status quo, smoking cigarettes is legal. Yet Con advocates prohibiting cigarettes under the logic that smoking has unavoidable secondhand impacts. So Con isn’t defending the status quo. And that means Con doesn’t get any presumption related to the status quo.Second, even if Con were defending the status quo, that doesn’t mean my burden is greater than Con’s. The status quo isn’t self-justifying. And this is a normative topic, an opinion topic. So placing a greater burden on my side is unfair, because it would create, in effect, an arbitrary bias towards Con’s side at my expense. Burdens of persuasion are therefore equal on both sides.What is my advocacy?The case for drug legalization consists of two arguments: (1) drug use is beyond legitimate government control because it is self-regarding; and (2) the benefits of drug legalization outweigh the costs. Each of these arguments is sufficient to affirm the resolution on its own.(1) Harm PrincipleCon dropped the harm principle, which shows that our government should not prohibit self-regarding acts. Luckily for me, and luckily for voters, this concession makes the debate very easy to judge. Nothing Con argued shows that using drugs inherently harms others. The only person who drugs impact directly is the person consuming drugs; any other effects are caused by the circumstances in which drugs are consumed. Even secondhand impacts are avoidable if drugs are used in private, or in designated zones where all parties consent to drug use. So any drug, if used properly, is entirely self-regarding. At the very least, then, the government should legalize all drugs for use in private or designated drug zones, where the drug has no effect on anyone but its user or parties who consent. Vote Pro for that reason alone.(2) Cost/Benefit AnalysisThe benefits of drug legalization outweigh the costs twice over. In short, drug prohibition causes significant harms, including crime, gang violence, terrorism, overbloated prisons, health harms, safety issues, erosion of fundamental liberties, unpredictable harms associated with unpredictable markets, and so on. Legalization solves or minimizes these problems, while boosting the economy, increasing responsible (read: positive) drug usage, increasing high school graduation rates (i.e. increasing productivity), and allowing state experimentation. Con's responses are nonsense. First, Con says he can't address all the harms of prohibition. Sucks for him. If the harms are relevant to legalization, they need to be taken into account in a cost/benefit analysis. And nothing in Con's rules or DDO puts a limit on the number of harms or benefits I'm allowed to discuss. The only limit on discussion is established by space. And I stayed well within the character limit.Second, Con says legalization won't stop the cartels. Maybe not. I don't know. But it'll certainly limit their operation, take away their primary source of profit, and make continued existence nearly impossible. Where will cartels turn if drugs aren't profitable? Con offers no answer.Instead, Con argues that cartels will keep profiting off drugs. That argument is absurd. It's not what Con's sources say. Look at Con's 8, 10, and 11 -- they explicitly admit that they're about marijuana legalization, not drug legalization. And they show that marijuana legalization alone isn't sufficient to stop the cartels, because cartels still reap huge profits from other drugs (e.g. meth, cocaine, etc.). So these sources are completely inapplicable to my plan.Also: Con's reference to New York's black market in cigarettes is hilarious... I'm lmao because it literally has nothing to do with drug legalization. The problem is that New York has ridiculously high taxes compared with neighboring states, so there's some savvy dudes making a buck moving cigs across state lines. Economists call that arbitrage. I call it entreperneurship. Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with legalization, cartels, or gang violence. It's an easily-fixed implementation problem (e.g. tax drugs uniformly).Third, crime didn't increase in Colorado after marijuana legalization. It fell dramatically. I looked it up on google. See the following sources, showing a massive drop in crime after legalization:http://www.mintpressnews.com...https://www.drugpolicy.org...http://www.msnbc.com...http://www.thestar.com...'And these sources also show that teen drug usage hasn't increased; on the contrary, teen usage has dropped. In fact, even conservative sources noticed the drop in teen usage:http://www.usnews.com...So what are the harms of legalization? None. What are the benefits? Huge.Rebuttal(1) Increased Drug UseAll of Con's arguments rest on an implicit assumption that legalization will increase drug use. But Con never argued that legalization will increase drug usage. At most, it's Con's assertion, nothing more. And it is 100% speculation, approaching nothing close to a clear probability. The reality is that most people who will do drugs already do drugs. Most hard drugs have limited market appeal, so legalizing them isn't going to suddenly create a demand for them. For instance, millions of people don't smoke or drink alcohol even though it's legal. And these people aren't suddenly going to start doing hard drugs just because they're legalized. The use of drugs might even decrease in a legalized regime, as forbidden fruit effects are a major factor in creating demand for drugs.Of course, even if drug use increases, new users will be folks who didn't do drugs when drugs were illegal. In other words, responsible, law-abiding folks, folks who care about their health, and so on. These are the sorts of people who won't abuse drugs, won't become addicts, and won't commit violent crimes. Meanwhile, these new users still receive all the benefits of drug use (intense pleasure, happiness, meaning, fulfillment). So if legalization increases drug use, it means there's likely to be increased benefits, not increased harm.(2) Secondhand ImpactsIrrelevant -- because you solve it through proper regulation (e.g. in Colorado, you can't smoke marijuana in public). In effect, secondhand impacts are no different than guns or cars or anything else that's dangerous to others. And Con's flimsy distinctions aren't compelling. When you drive a car, there's a risk that you'll crash into someone or something, causing secondary harm. When you shoot a gun, there's a risk you'll hit something or someone, causing secondary harm. In effect, driving a car or shooting a gun is no different than smoking: sometimes you won't hurt anyone else, sometimes you will.Also: secondhand smoke is irrelevant because Con hasn't shown that legalization increases smoking. It'll probably decrease because legalization means more availability of edibles.(3) EconomicsLet's talk about the facts. Con's 8 doesn't say what Con says it says. And Con's 8 isn't relevant because it contains estimated costs, somewhere back in 2013 or 2014. We're almost at the end of 2015. And the facts are much different than these estimates.The facts are the following:In the first 7 months of 2015, Colorado collected $70 million in tax revenue from marijuana, which almost doubled the $42 million collected on alcohol. The projected revenue for 2015 is slated to be $125 million. The source for this information is Colorado's Department of Revenue, cited below, and a detailed budget outline for 2016 from the Office of the Governor, also cited below:https://www.colorado.gov...https://www.cpr.org...How much is spent on regulating marijuana in Colorado? $33 million. That includes reserves for a potential shortfall, robust regulatory oversight, public health and public safety costs, law enforcement costs, deterrence of youth costs, and so on. In fact, Colorado's Marijuana Enforcement Division (the administrative agency that regulates marijuana) only costs around $7 million per year. The other $26 million is mostly for law enforcement and youth prevention programs.The rest of the revenue is going to education. Ironically, Colorado has made so much money on marijuana legalization that they even had to vote on whether to refund taxpayers $66 million, because of a weird law in Colorado requiring excess revenue beyond a certain threshold to go to a vote.These are the facts. They show indisputably that marijuana legalization has been hugely beneficial to Colorado's economy. No wonder Colorado is the fastest growing state in the country.Con cites a bunch of other economic harms from drug use -- stuff like healthcare costs, productivity costs, and so on. These costs are related to prohibition, not legalization. And nothing Con argued shows that these costs will increase in a legalized regime. On the contrary, I showed they will go down, as legalization minimizes these harms. For instance, lower drug prices means more money to take care of health prophylactically, to eat well, afford shelter, and so on.