The abuse of illegal drugs ought to be treated as a matter of public health, not of criminal justice

Awesome, because my case is very policy oriented anyway. Good luck. I affirm. For clarity I offer the following definitions: Abuse: improper, incorrect, or excessive use; misuse (World English Dict.) Illegal drug: A habit forming stimulant or narcotic substance (such as alcohol, cannabis, nicotine) which produces a state of arousal, contentment, or euphoria. (Business Dictionary) Treat - to deal with a matter (Merriam Webster) Ought: Indicating desirability (Merriam Webster) Public health: One of the efforts organized by society to protect, promote, and/or restore the people's health (Austrailian Health Dictionary) Criminal justice: A generic term for the procedure by which criminal conduct is investigated, arrests made, evidence gathered, charges brought, defenses raised, trials conducted, sentences rendered, and punishment carried out. (Legal Dict.) I offer the value of safety, defined as freedom from danger or harm. Safety must be paramount because with no safety there is no life. Many risks of drugs in the status quo stem from the fact that drug dealers are the primary distributors of drugs. This leads to instability in our current drug market because actions by illegal drug dealers amplify the damage caused by the drugs. Therefore the best way to maximize safety in our resolution is through the criterion of the pharmaceutical regulation of illegal drugs. Regulation creates the ability to acquire drugs legally without the dangers of a criminalized system. Contention 1: Public health solves for overdose A: Overdose accounts for the vast majority of all drug related deaths. The definition for abuse is to use wrongly or improperly. Obviously overdose is the main way to misuse not only illegal drugs but drugs in general. Because drugs are illegal, use of them is forced underground. In this environment drug users do not have ready access to information on how much substance to take, and so, often resort to a guessing game as to how much substance to put into their body. American Centers for Disease Control reports "Of the 44,727 deaths attributed to illegal drug use, 22,735 were caused by accidental heroin overdose..., while another 15,551 died from accidental cocaine overdose. That is a total of 38,286 over 86 percent of all deaths due to illegal drugs. One has to wonder how greatly this number of accidental deaths could be reduced if the people using the drugs had products of known quality and dosage to work with. " http://www.briancbennett.com... This causes users to become abusers by misusing the drug. BetterHealthChannel reports that illegal drug overdose causes long term depression and weakened immune system, in addition to immediate defects such as vomiting, fatigue, internal bleeding, or death. http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au... Sub point B: Public health solves for overdose. Through decriminalization we will be able to focus less on throwing people in jail and more on solving the harms of drugs. My criterion makes the specific quantity of a drug that should be taken readily available to everyone. This info would be publicized greatly as to make sure everyone is fully educated on dosage amounts. Alan Jones explains, "It could be argued that the likelihood of harm would be reduced even further by a regulated industry which restricts supply, provides warnings to consumers and monitors the content of what is sold." In short, a public health stance will all but eliminate the vast majority of illegal overdose cases, thus solving for the main cause of drug abuse. Contention 2: Public health solves for drug additives Sub point A is adulterants. Drugs in a criminalized market are often adulterated which yield dangerous results, Melanie Gordon explains "You also dont know what other substances have been mixed in with the drug. Often drug dealers mix an illegal drug with another substance so that they can have more product to sell. For example, a dealer might mix cocaine with talcum powder, sugar, or even another cheaper drug. If you use illegal drugs you simply cannot be sure of what substances you are putting into your body." (Drug interactions: protecting yourself from dangerous drug, medication, and Food contamination page 15) Drug scope reports that these adulterants make the purity of street drugs vary to a startling degree, causing the purity of street drugs to average between 34 and 78%. http://www.drugscope.org.uk... Impact: When the drug purity varies so greatly, we once again run a high risk of taking the incorrect amount. If we guess that we should take x amount of the drug, but the purity ends up being much greater than previously thought, then once again it causes overdose and misuse. If somebody takes too little of the drug in regards to purity, then they take more and more and more which also leads to overdose. Thus, the impurity of drugs in an illegal market is one of the things thats causing them to be so deadly. Sub point B is Contaminants. Drugs in a criminalized world are susceptible to poisonous additives. Elisabet Kaa explains, "Identification of potentially dangerous substances contaminating illicit drugs is important because these substances might be more toxic than the drug itself. For example, cocaine adulterated with atropine [6] or phenytoin [7] are examples of dangerous mixtures sold on the drug market." Another example is paracetamol toxicity, Paracetamol, more commonly known as acetaminophen, is a popular over-the-counter painkiller, but it is also a commonly used adulterant by drug dealers. However, it reacts very strongly with other powerful substances such as illegal drugs. Its also very easy to overdose on it because drug dealers do not regulate the amount they put into their substances. Even a slight overdose as a result of this causes low blood pressure, low blood sugar, internal bleeding, and most commonly, liver failure. Link: Christian Lindholst continues. "Our study concluded that paracetamol was the third most common adulterant used in illegal street drugs, being present in 62% of the substances and 97% of heroin" (The Open Forensic Science Journal, 2009, Study of European drug market). Thus is the problem of illegal drugs in a criminalized market. Sub point C: Public health solves these issues. Under my regulation policy, each class of drugs have similar or identical levels of additives, and thus identical levels of purity. Poisonous additives will not be added, in contrast to the way they are in our criminalized world. Thus the dangers the vast levels of purity and contaminants causes are nonexistent in the affirmative world. In short, overdose is the cause for 86% of all illegal drug related deaths, and adulterants account for another nine percent. This means that 95% of all deaths from illegal drugs are preventable through a public health approach. Its for these reason I urge an affirmative ballot.