Resolved: Marijuana should be legalized in the United States.

For the sake of organization and full comprehension of the debate, I'm going to go through my opponent's rebuttals against my case, and then, I'm goingto move on toward the arguments in my opponent's case.[PRO Case]Sub-point 1a: We begin at my first sub-point where my opponent contrasts the evidence from my scientific study with his own (not cited anywhere as far as I'm concerned). We have seemingly reached an impasse: one scientific study versus another. The way out of this confliction is to evaluate the studies themselves through the methodology in order to see if this was a valid and efficient experiment (that is, it follows the guidelines of scientific experiements and controls for lurking variables). The problem is that my opponent doesn't provide the methodology. I explained in my original statement that the experiement controlled for lurking variables, including the other actions such as cigarette smoking which could skew the results. When keeping the marijuana users who only smoke marijuana away from the marijuana users who smoke cigarettes, we found that marijuana users who only used marijuana did not have the same health defects as the ones who also smoked cigarettes. My opponent has no methodology in his citation, meaning that my scientific evidence is more credible as far as this debate is concerned.Sub-point 1b: I probably should've made myself more clear. When I spoke of detrimental mental effects, I spoke about the long-term mental illnesses that are claimed come from the use of marijuana. I provided the medical marijuana evidence in order to explain that marijuana is actually being used to counter those afflicted by depression. My opponent explains that marijuana causes a high and becomes addictive. If you look back into his evidence [2], we can clearly see that the addiction problem isn't that severe considering it explains that it only has a 9% addiction rate in contrast to nicotine (a legal drug), which has a 32% addiction rate. Almost any drug you can think of, even caffeine, can be addictive. The question is if people can get addicted enough in order to suffer problems in their lives and be unable to function, and when there's only a 9% addiction rate, we can clearly see that the evidence points to the contrary of my opponent's position. Even so, if addiction is my opponent's argument, it means that because it can be addictive, it should be banned. This means that caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and perscription drugs should be illegal as well according to his logic. Moving on to the "high" argument, I'd be an idiot to tell you that you can't get high off marijuana. However, my opponent doesn't prove in any way that this high is sufficient enough to be dangerous to the user and surrounding people. He has this evidence that doesn't really speak well to these effects. My opponent talks about a Swedish study correlating schizophrenia to marijuana use even though he once again has no citation for this. The following will take you to links explaining scientific research that explains otherwise: [1] Contention 2: The resolution talks about the legalization of marijuana at a general level, meaning even if there's one state that hasn't legalized marijuana at all, the argument about medical marijuana is still applicable. My opponent talks about the fines that the country would receive as a result of these crimes, even though his calculations seem a tad bit miscalculating because it makes a lot of assumptions and predictions without any knowledge if my opponent is any sort of credible mathematician or economist as well as a person looking into all of the charges in every individual state. These calculations are based on people who would carry 50kg of marijuana, which is ludicrously large amount of mariajuana. Already, we can see that my opponent isn't even looking at the totality of people who use or possess marijuana. Even if this calculation is correct, I have opposing evidence about the cost of the drug war showing that the costs have outweighed. Throughout the years, the country has used hundreds of billions of dollars funding the war on drugs from taxpayer money and losing human lives as a result of a drug war that hasn't produced any sort of benefit whatsoever. [2] [3][CON's Case]Contention 2: My opponent comes up again with the "studies show" argument even though he once again provides no sort of citation for any of these studies. Even if we give credit to these studies, they only show a correlation rather than a causation. My opponent's evidence in no way accounts for lurking variables. This following evidence explains a lurking variable that could explain the "gateway" effect: other life stresses. [4]Contention 1: Again, his citations are nonexistent and methodologies are not here.Contention 3: I've already addressed the addiction issue. [1] http://www.tokeofthetown.com...; [2] http://www.drugpolicy.org... [3] http://www.stanford.edu... [4] http://www.cbsnews.com...