The state should not pass legislation regarding drugs.

He has made a more sophisticated case than I anticipated. I will address the most relevant subset of his points, not all of them, given the limitations of space. Descriptive vs. normative ethicsBy all defininitions of "normative ethics," the resolution is fully a statement of normative ethics, not merely descriptive ethics. Any advocacy or counteradvocacy of a political position is normative. Cody_Franklin advocates the political position of "The state should not pass legislation regarding drugs. " He claims to be supporting merely descriptive ethics, but he is not merely describing the political position. As he himself has stated, ". .. this debate also requires me to defend the position of liberty. " See this page for clarification of the distinction between descriptive and normative ehics: . http://faculty.stedwards.edu.... The reason why this distinction is important is because the Instigator should not dress up his moral arguments as non-moral arguments and demand that I should use only non-moral arguments. Morality can not be avoided in this debate. One value vs. many valuesPro claims that I used a slippery slope argument and a strawman argument. I intended neither an argument of slippery consequences nor a representation of Pro. In the relevant context, I merely intended to present and justify my position that "We set limits to freedom, the same as all other values, according to a perceived maximization of our combined set of values. " Since Pro is seemingly arguing from only one single value (freedom from government), then I would like to know if Pro shares with me the advocacy of a plurality of values. If so, then he should argue by weighing more than one value. Self-ownership vs. addictionRegardless, I will argue my position from this point and onward using the seeming value system of Pro: self-ownership is the only relevant value. Pro rightly claims that, "By arguing, my opponent and I both acknowledge each others' right to control exclusively our own bodies. " Therefore, he wrongly argues, I can not make arguments that undercut this implicit acknowledgment of self-ownership. I share with Pro a general support for self-ownership. However, it does not follow that it is contradictory to claim that a state's force should be applied to prevent substance addiction, because the argument is neglecting the established reality that addicts lose part of their self-control (or their ability to act according to self-ownership) when they become addicted to a substance. It is naive to think that the only relevant loss of an individual's self-ownership happens through the application of physical force. It should be an obvious reality that the loss of self-ownership also happens very frequently through designed neurological methods. If the actions of a first party are controlled by a second party against the will of the first party, then such a relationship contains the essence of enslavement. As a most relevant example, according to a 2008 report from Gallup (titled, "Most Smokers in U. S. Want to Quit" from . http://www.gallup.com...), "Among the 21% of Americans who say they smoke, 74% say they would like to give up smoking, and 67% say they are addicted to cigarettes. " This social reality is no accident. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health, November 2007, titled, "Pharmacological and Chemical Effects of Cigarette Additives," (at . http://ajph.aphapublications.org...) the conclusions are as follows:Modern cigarettes have been extensively engineered and optimized as nicotine delivery devices developed through major national and international research and development programs. The average smoker has been unaware of these efforts by the tobacco industry and of the extensive manipulation of cigarette chemistry. Our results indicate that more than 100 of 599 documented cigarette additives have pharmacological actions. Previous research18,21,22 has documented extensive efforts by the tobacco industry to use additives to mask the presence of ETS by reducing the visibility, odor, and irritability of tobacco smoke. Similar to the findings of previous studies, our results show that the tobacco industry used additives (1) that enhance or maintain nicotine delivery and could increase the addictiveness of cigarettes and (2) that mask symptoms and illnesses associated with smoking behavior. To our knowledge, there has been no systematic evaluation of the public health effects of cigarette additives or their combustion products. The tobacco industry has actively manipulated cigarette content by using potentially hazardous chemical and phytochemical additives that should be regulated. Unregulated use of additives in tobacco products subjects billions of smokers and nonsmokers alike to an uncontrolled experiment with potentially devastating health effects. If these methods of marketing are made available to entrepreneural producers of newly-legal dangerous drugs, then I challenge Pro to make his case for why this will not be a problem of enslavement well beyond the problem of proportional law enforcement power intended to prevent it. Proposed libertarian solutionTo his credit, Pro made a brief argument for the betterment of society in his closing paragraph:Fifth, you can get the advantages of restorative justice/rehab through private intermediaries, like contracts with insurance companies and employers to refrain from drug use, and mandatory rehab and probation (like higher premiums or routine drug tests) as a stipulation for breaking the terms, which means we don't need coercion. There are two problems with this solution: (1) Such a method is still coercion on the part of civil courts, merely distancing the involvement of law enforcement by one step, not removing it per Pro's postion of "a total lack of involvement on the part of the state," and (2) this method would require either a penalty of mere monetary damages or the overhaul of the current legal principles of contract law. To explain the second problem, the greatest penalty that may be incurred for a breach of contract is monetary debt, and monetary debt has been proven to be a vastly insufficient method of coercion, because the power of addiction overwhelms an addict's fear of debt in favor of immediate reward. An experiment published in Neuropsychologia, 2002, "Decision-making and addiction (part II): myopia for the future or hypersensitivity to reward? " (at . http://ahealthymind.org...) found that substance addicts persistently made decisions far more in favor of immediate reward than the control group. States the study:This behavior resembles that of patients with bilateral lesions of the ventromedial (VM) prefrontal cortex. It also reflects the behavior of SDI [substance dependent individuals] in real-life in that they prefer choices that bring immediate benefit (i. e. drug reward), at the risk of negative future consequences (e. g. loss of jobs, home, family and friends). The failure of progressive delayed punishment to deter SDI from seeking immediate reward is consistent with their "myopia" for the future in real-life, which persists in the face of rising negative consequences. ConclusionThough my opponent has made a valient attempt to justify his position strictly in terms of high-minded ethical theory, I encourage my opponent to think less in terms of theory and more in terms of practical expectations of proposed law based on scientific examinations and tested knowledge of human psychology and society. The most justifiable political position very typically depends on the latter, not the former.