The legalization of LSD

Nice job on your argument Vincent. I will start with my reasons for why LSD should not be legalized. 1) LSD causes major damage to the user's emotions. People who reacted to LSD badly were often damaged emotionally. "In their everyday life... Constantly concerned about maintaining perfect control over their feelings and behavior. They are afraid of temporary or permanent unleashing of instinctual energies, especially those of a sexual or aggressive nature, and of involuntary emotional outbursts. There is frequent preoccupation with the issue of loss of control and fear of social embarrassment, blunder and public scandal resulting from the ensuing behavior." (LSD Psychotherapy, Stanislav Grof (Hunter House, 1980) p. 55) 2) The effects of LSD are unpredictable. Short Term Effects: Users of LSD may feel mood swings, alters the sense of time, and "cross over" different senses, such as hearing colors of seeing sounds. These changes frighten and cause panic in the users. Some LSD users experience severe, terrifying thoughts and feelings of despair, or fear of insanity and death. Long Term Effects: LSD also makes users experience flashbacks. They will occur without warning within a few days, or even more than a year after the use of LSD. In some individuals, the flashbacks can persist and cause significant distress or impairment in social or occupational functioning, a condition known as hallucinogen-induced persisting perceptual disorder (HPPD). 3) People can abuse this drug dangerously. Just 30 micrograms for a dose of LSD can cause effects for to 6-12 hours. In the 1960s and 1970s, people would take 100 to more than 200 micrograms. If we legalized LSD, overdoses of this would happen. When overdoses are used, fatal accidents can occur from convulsions, coma, heart/lung failure, or ruptured blood vessels in the brain. Sources: 2) http://www.nida.nih.gov... 2) http://www.drugfree.org... 3)http://www.drug-rehabcenter.com... Now I will provide counter arguments to my opponent's reasons. EVIDENCE 1: LSD is useful for psychotherapy and alcoholism. I think my opponent used wikipedia for this evidence. I looked at it, here's the entire part. "Some studies in the 1950s that used LSD to treat alcoholism professed a 50% success rate, five times higher than estimates near 10% for Alcoholics Anonymous. A 1998 review was inconclusive." This doesn't tell us who the study was administered to. Even if LSD was successful, it has not cured the damage caused by alcoholism. This also results in gaining the effects caused by LSD, the flashbacks, etc. EVIDENCE 2: LSD can cure headaches My opponent uses a quote saying: “ It can be used to cure migraines and cluster headaches, it has a 45% success rate in curing alcoholism versus therapy's 12%, and therapists have had success in giving it to mental patients and taking it themselves to better understand schizophrenia.” In the previous quote from evidence 1, my opponent said that LSD had a 50% success rate of curing alcoholism. My opponent uses another quote saying: “A 2006 study by McLean researchers interviewed 53 cluster-headache sufferers who treated themselves with either LSD or psilocybin, finding that a majority of the users of either drug reported beneficial effects” These statistics may not show the true results, since McLean only researched 53 people. Another thing is that the quote says that the cluster-headache sufferers treated themselves to either LSD or psilocybin. Therefore, we do not know if LSD or psilocybin was the cause of the beneficial effects. EVIDENCE 3: It can release pain My opponent says "Eric Kast—the person who was studying about this reported that patients weren’t feeling less pain—but rather being less distressed by pain." My opponent basically just contradicted himself by saying "that patients weren't feeling less pain..." Sorry for the long argument!!! I hope my following rounds will be less lengthy.