BeIR/webis-touche2020 huggingface dataset:
Treatment cuts drug-use far better than incarceration

William F Buckley Statement to New York Bar Association. July 1st, 1996: "Pursuing utilitarian analysis, we ask: What are the relative costs, on the one hand, of medical and psychological treatment for addicts and, on the other, incarceration for drug offenses? It transpires that treatment is seven times more cost-effective. By this is meant that one dollar spent on the treatment of an addict reduces the probability of continued addiction seven times more than one dollar spent on incarceration. Looked at another way: Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and psychological treatment."
War on Drugs increases price of drugs

This is seen as a sign of success because it suggests that the supply of drugs has diminished as a result of such things as coca field eradication in Columbia. In general, the diminished supply of a good makes the good more scarce and more valuable or expensive on the market. Since the price of cocaine has increased, therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that a decrease in supply is the result. This scarcity, along with higher prices and the mere illegality of drugs, helps discourage many users from trying drugs in the first place.
Drugs are very harmful; War on Drugs is justified

The U.S. government has argued that illegal drugs are 'far more deadly than alcohol' saying 'although alcohol is used by seven times as many people as drugs, the number of deaths induced by those substances is not far apart. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), during 2000, there were 15,852 drug-induced deaths; only slightly less than the 18,539 alcohol-induced deaths.'
Harm reduction is better approach than War on Drugs

Ethan A. Nadelmann. National Review Online.: "Th[e] concept [of harm reduction] holds that drug policies need to focus on reducing crime, whether engendered by drugs or by the prohibition of drugs. And it holds that disease and death can be diminished even among people who can't, or won't, stop taking drugs. This pragmatic approach is followed in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, and parts of Germany, Austria, Britain, and a growing number of other countries."
More people die from Drug War than overdosing

William F Buckley Statement to New York Bar Association. July 1st, 1996: "more people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing. These fatalities include, perhaps most prominently, drug merchants who compete for commercial territory, but include also people who are robbed and killed by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become addicted."
Harms of many illicit drugs have been exaggerated.

There is evidence that many illicit drugs pose comparatively fewer health dangers than certain legal drugs. The health risks of MDMA (Ecstasy) have been exaggerated for instance,[15] the risks from cannabis use also overstated,[16] and health problems from the use of legal substances, particularly alcohol and tobacco, are greater, even than from cocaine use for example (occasional cocaine use does not typically lead to severe or even minor physical or social problems).[17]
Drug prohibition does not correlate with decreased use

"How to stop the drug wars." The Economist. Mar 5th 2009: "fear [of legalisation] is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates."
Most try drugs only a handful of times; little harm

Ethan A. Nadelmann. National Review Online.: "1. Most people can use most drugs without doing much harm to themselves or anyone else, as Mr. Buckley reminds us, citing Professor Duke. Only a tiny percentage of the 70 million Americans who have tried marijuana have gone on to have problems with that or any other drug. The same is true of the tens of millions of Americans who have used cocaine or hallucinogens. Most of those who did have a problem at one time or another don't any more. That a few million Americans have serious problems with illicit drugs today is an issue meriting responsible national attention, but it is no reason to demonize those drugs and the people who use them."
War on Drugs imprisons too many people

Between 1983 and 1998, annual drug admissions to state and federal prisons increased approximately 16-fold to about 170,000.[10] Mike Gravel. 2006 - "The United States incarcerates more people and at a higher rate than any other peacetime nation in the world. According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics the number of US residents behind bars has now reached more than 2.3 million. We are losing an entire generation of young men and women to our prisons. Our nation's ineffective and wasteful 'war on drugs' plays a major role in this. We must place a greater emphasis on rehabilitation and prevention. We must de-criminalize minor drug offenses and increase the availability and visibility of substance abuse treatment and prevention in our communities as well as in jails and prisons."
Legalizing drugs to tax them is a perverse idea

John Hawkins. "In defense of the drug war." Human Events. January 25th, 2007: "If we legalized drugs, we'd be able to tax them and bring in more revenue for the state. But, how is that working out with alcohol and cigarettes? In 2004 and 2005, 39% of all traffic-related deaths was related to alcohol consumption and 36% of convicted offenders 'had been drinking alcohol when they committed their conviction offense." When it comes to cigarettes, adult smokers 'die 14 years earlier than nonsmokers." But, will we ever get rid of tobacco or alcohol? No, both products are too societally accepted for that and perhaps more importantly, the government makes enormous amounts of revenue from their sale. Do we really want to be sitting around 10 or 15 years from now saying, 'Gee, we'd like to get rid of heroin, but how could we replace the revenue we make from taxing it at an exorbitant rate?'"
Many illegal drugs have medicinal qualities.

Most of the psychoactive drugs now prohibited in modern industrial societies have had medical uses in other places and times. In the case of natural plant drugs like opium, coca, cannabis, mescaline, and psilocybin, this medical history usually reaches back thousands of years and through a variety of cultures.[18] Psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin (the compound in magic mushrooms) are the subject of renewed research interest because of their therapeutic potential. They could ease a variety of difficult-to-treat mental illnesses, such as chronic depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and alcohol dependency.[19] MDMA (Ecstasy) has been used for cognitive enhancement in people with Parkinson's Disease.[20]
Enforcing drug laws would mean mass imprisonment

Terry Michael. "The War on Drugs is No Laughing Matter." Reason. March 27, 2009: "Our government's own research (a 2006 survey by the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services) reveals that over half of the adult population of America has, at one time, used a controlled substance. Which means—if our drug laws were equally applied—that over 125 million of us would have spent time in jail, as Barack Obama and George W. Bush themselves would have done for what we euphemistically and absurdly call 'youthful indiscretions.' Obama has admitted using marijuana and cocaine. Bush, who was less candid, simply refused to deny it."
War on Drugs is too ineffective to justify costs

Andres Oppenheimer. "Commentary: What has the 'War on Drugs' truly accomplished?" Miami Herald. March 11, 2010: "after spending more than $14 billion from U.S. taxpayers over the past four decades in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico and other countries in the region, Latin America continues to be the largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana to the United States. [...] As it is now, the U.S. war on drugs in Latin America is not working. All we are doing is chasing the drug cartels from one country to another without making much of a dent on drug trafficking."
Legalizing drugs would improve quality control

Many of the health dangers associated with recreational drugs exist or are made worse precisely because they are illegal. The government cannot enforce quality control on products sold and manufactured illegally. Examples include: the easier to make derivative MDA being sold as MDMA, heroin users unintentionally injecting brick dust, quinine, or fentanyl with which their heroin had been cut; and heroin/cocaine overdoses occurring as a result of users not knowing exactly how much they are taking.
War on Drugs is simply too expensive

The United States efforts at drug prohibition started out with a US$ 350 million budget in 1971, and is currently (in 2006) a US$ 30 billion campaign.[2] These numbers only include direct prohibition enforcement expenditures, and as such only represent part of the total cost of prohibition. This $ 30 billion figure rises dramatically once other issues, such as the economic impact of holding 400,000 prisoners on prohibition violations, are factored in.[3]
Eradication-focused Drug War is counterproductive

"Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs." Brookings Institute. March 17, 2010: "Many policymakers see counterinsurgency and counternarcotics policy as two sides of the same coin. Stop the flow of drug money, the logic goes, and the insurgency that relies on the drug trade for financing will wither away. However, eradication-focused counternarcotics campaigns typically fail to bankrupt belligerent groups and worse, they may strengthen insurgents by allowing them to pose as the population’s protectors."
Legalizing drugs is the least bad option

"How to stop the drug wars." The Economist. Mar 5th 2009: "the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs. 'Least bad' does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain."
The US has actually had success at arming rebels.

Fareed Zakaria. "The Libyan Conundrum. Time. March 10th, 2011: "Over the past five decades, the U.S. has had very mixed results when it has intervened, by air or land, in other people's wars. But it has done pretty well when it has helped one side of the struggle. Arming rebels in Afghanistan, Central America and Africa has proved to be a relatively low-cost policy with high rates of success. Giving arms, food, logistical help, intelligence and other such tools to the Libyan opposition would boost its strength and give it staying power."
Humanitarian mission needn't involve arming Libyan rebels.

"Libya: Don't arm the rebels." The New Yorker. March 31st, 2011: "It might be justifiable to arm the rebels if that were only way to achieve the humanitarian objectives of the intervention. Yet there isn’t any evidence that it would be necessary to do so to defend Benghazi as a sanctuary. It seems clear that Benghazi can be defended from the air by NATO, even if that requires enforcing “no-drive” zones occasionally."
Arming rebels has led to long-lasting instability

Roger Cohen. "Arabs will be free." New York Times. March 28, 2011: "The most common outcome of U.S.-funded rebellions has been to create instability and violence that, whether in the form of intractable insurgencies or low-level sectarian fighting, tends to last far longer than whatever political conflict they were meant to resolve. The flood of arms -- particularly the easy-to-use, impossible-to-destroy, grimly effective Kalashnikov rifle variants -- make weapons so prolific and so cheap that terrorism, criminal gangs better armed than the police, and militias of every political and religious stripe are all but impossible to stamp out."
Arming rebels and ousting Gaddafi aids regional stability.

Chris Strohm. "5 Reasons to Arm Libya's Rebels ... and Another 5 Reasons Not to." National Journal. March 22, 2011: "Regional Stability is at Stake. Helping the rebels overthrow Qaddafi could also help bring stability to a region experiencing great turmoil. The Obama administration maintains that Qaddafi has lost the legitimacy to rule Libya. If he remains in power, that would send the wrong signal to other countries."
Gaddafi will recalculate if against endless weapons/money.

Fareed Zakaria. "The Libyan Conundrum. Time. March 10th, 2011: "Once Gaddafi realizes that he is up against an endless supply of arms and ammunition, he will surely recalibrate his decisions. There have been reports that he floated the idea of leaving office as long as he is guaranteed safe passage. At a weak moment, he made a plea that he be treated like Britain's Queen or the King of Thailand, a figurehead with no powers."
Arming Libyan rebels could stir-up hornets nest.

Chris Strohm. "5 Reasons to Arm Libya's Rebels ... and Another 5 Reasons Not to." National Journal. March 22, 2011: "It May Stir up a Hornet’s Nest. Some critics fear that arms intended for the rebels could fall into the wrong hands or be used as a recruiting tool by terrorists in the North African region. For example, the group al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which is active in the region, issued a statement in February calling on all Muslims to support the revolt against Qaddafi in order to install an Islamic regime in Libya."
Arming Libyan rebels may be unnecessary

"Libya: Don't arm the rebels." The New Yorker. March 31st, 2011: "There is time to try to force out Qaddafi by enforcing the no-fly, no-drive zone; enforcing sanctions; and increasing the political pressure on his regime. If it is really necessary to do something more ruthless in order to overthrow him in a timely way, then it would be better to use the elasticity of the U.N. resolution, and the cover of air strikes, to target precisely culpable regime commanders or facilities the Libyan leader values, while quietly communicating ultimatums to Qaddafi and his sons. Precise NATO bombing in Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict persuaded Slobodan Milosevic to give up a lot faster than the operations of the Kosovo Liberation Army ever would have—and the K.L.A. looked like the Wehrmacht in comparison to the rebels who have been racing up and down Libya’s highways in recent days. It might not be illegal to arm the Libyan rebels at this stage, but it would be wrong, unnecessary, impractical, and self-defeating."
A couple of failures in arming insurgents shouldn't dissuade.

Barry Farber. "Arm Libya's rebels now!" World Net Daily. March 9th, 2011: "Now let's get ready for the 'historian' who reminds us how enthusiastic we were in 1979 to re-supply a valiant anti-Communist fighter in Afghanistan named Osama bin Laden. Sure, painful. But do you abandon sports after one loss, food after one bad meal or romance after one bad date?"
UN resolution authorized "all necessary measures."

Chris Strohm. "5 Reasons to Arm Libya's Rebels ... and Another 5 Reasons Not to." National Journal. March 22, 2011: "2. U.N. Resolution Authorizes All Necessary Measures. Supporters argue that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 on Libya already recognizes that additional measures may be needed beyond a no-fly zone. The resolution authorizes member nations 'to take all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi.'"
Arms will go to rebels no matter if West provides them.

Blake Hounshell. "Should the U.S. arm the Libyan rebels?" Foreign Policy. March 26th, 2011: "there are strong arguments for providing at least small arms. One reason is that weapons are probably going to pour in anyway, perhaps from Egyptian stockpiles or factories and perhaps paid for by Gulf Arab states (indeed, the Wall Street Journal has reported that this is already happening, though Egypt denies it)."
Arming Libyan rebels could cost too much.

Chris Strohm. "5 Reasons to Arm Libya's Rebels ... and Another 5 Reasons Not to." National Journal. March 22, 2011: "5. It May Cost Too Much. Little has been said about what the cost of arming the rebels might be. The costs of enforcing the no-fly zone already are piling up for the U.S. military and could surpass $1 billion. Supplying weapons might push the price tag too high."
Legality matters little to arming Libyan rebels.

Glenn Greewald. "The wisdom and legality of arming Libyan rebels." Salon. March 30th, 2011: "Ultimately, though, does anyone really think these legal niceties will matter at all if the U.S. decides it wants to arm the Libyan rebels (and yesterday on Democracy Now, University of Trinity Professor Vijay Prashad claimed that one of the key rebel leaders lived in the U.S. -- in Vienna, Virgina -- for the past 30 years, 'a 10-minute drive from Langley, and returned to Benghazi to, in a sense, I think, hijack the rebellion on behalf of the forces of reaction')? If the U.S. wants to arm the rebels, it will do so regardless of whether it violates any U.N. arms embargo, and few supporters of this war -- most of whom justify it by pointing to these U.N. Resolutions -- will care very much, if at all. Once wars begin, and positions harden, nothing matters less than legalities."
US has strong interests in arming Libyan rebels

Fareed Zakaria. "The Libyan Conundrum. Time. March 10th, 2011: "Libya is burning. Its people rose, and the tyrant gunned them down. Unless something changes, Muammar Gaddafi and his sons will be able to reassert control over the country amid a mass slaughter of its civilians. This would be a terrible outcome. President Obama has made it unambiguously clear that he wants Gaddafi to step down. The U.S. is actively seeking his ouster. To have him survive would be a humiliation for Washington at a moment and in a region where its words still have great impact. It would also send a disastrous signal to the other rulers of the region — in Syria, Algeria, Iran — that Mubarak made a mistake and that the way to stay in office is to engage in mass slaughter, scare the U.S. away and wait out the sanctions and isolation. America would lose its opportunity to align with the rising forces of the Arab world."
Now involved, West should arm Libyan rebels.

Roger Cohen. "Arabs will be free." New York Times. March 28, 2011: "Three months later the genie is not only out of the bottle, it’s shattered the bottle. I said of Libya in an earlier column: Be ruthless or stay out. So now the West is in, be ruthless. Arm the resurgent rebels. Incapacitate Qaddafi. Do everything short of putting troops on the ground. Qaddafi, as President Obama has said, “must leave.” So that Libya can be an Arab country that is imperfect but open."
Arming Libyan rebels helps deter other dictators

Blake Hounshell. "Should the U.S. arm the Libyan rebels?" Foreign Policy. March 26th, 2011: "what was the alternative? To sit back and watch as Qaddafi butchered his own people and re-imposed control over eastern Libya? Then what? And what kind of impact would that have on democratic uprisings elsewhere in the Middle East? Dictators everywhere would learn the lesson that brutality works, and that -- once again -- the words of the international community mean nothing. An early end to the "Arab Spring" could stoke resentment and bitterness for years, with dangerous consequences not only for the region but for Americans and Europeans as well."
Arming rebels fosters enemies and wars of the future.

Glenn Greewald. "The wisdom and legality of arming Libyan rebels." Salon. March 30th, 2011: "The real question is the wisdom of this escalated involvement. How many times do we have to arm one side of a civil war -- only for that side to then become our Enemy five or ten or fifteen years later -- before we learn not to do that any more? I wrote earlier on Twitter, ironically, that one good outcome from arming the Libyan rebels is that it will lay the foundation for our new war 10 years from now -- when Commander-in-Chief George Prescott Bush or Chelsea Clinton announce that we must wage war to stop the Libyan faction from threatening its neighbors and supporting Terrorism (with the weapons we provided them back in 2011). One of the most reliable ways that the posture of Endless War has been sustained is by our flooding the world with our weapons, only to then identify various recipients as our new (well-armed) enemy. Whether this is a feature or a bug, it is a very destructive outcome of our endless and always-escalating involvement in military conflicts around the world."
No controls on how Libyan rebels use West's weapons

"Libya: Don't arm the rebels." The New Yorker. March 31st, 2011: "Now the Administration’s policy may be migrating toward the idea of supplying the rebels with weapons. Yet the rebels have as yet no command and control; they serve a political entity (if that is not too generous a way to describe the councils that have been set up in eastern Libya) that is recognized as legitimate by France alone. There is no way to police the rebels’ conduct or to hold them accountable for their actions on the battlefield."
The history of the US arming rebels is grim

Max Fisher. "In Arming Libyan Rebels, the U.S. Would Follow an Old, Dark Path." The Atlantic. March 25th, 2011: "The U.S. has a long, complicated, and dark history of arming rebel groups around the world. Our support for the anti-communist militias in Argentina and Honduras led us to directly train some of the fighters that later evolved into outright death squads. Nixon-era CIA operations in Chile helped Augusto Pinochet's takeover by military coup, which later ended with Pinochet's arrest as a war criminal for the mass murder and torture. The Nicaraguan contras, whom we armed in the 1980s to terrorize the Marxist government, instead terrorized civilians, whom they tortured and killed in large numbers."
Prevent extremism/terror in Libya by ending conflict quickly

Fareed Zakaria. "The Libyan Conundrum. Time. March 10th, 2011: "Some worry that if we arm the rebels, things might turn out the way they did in Afghanistan, where the freedom fighters became Islamic jihadists and turned their sights on us. But that's not really what happened. After the Soviet defeat, the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan, leaving it open to Islamic jihadists backed by the Pakistani military. The better analogy is to Chechnya, where as the civil war continued, the rebels became more radical and Islamic fundamentalists jumped into the fight and soon became its leaders. The best way to prevent al-Qaeda from turning Libya into an area of strength would be to have the fighting end — with Gaddafi's defeat. So let's help the Libyan opposition do it."
Arming Libyan rebels violates UN resolution and i-law

"Arming Libyan Rebels. Stupidity Unchained." Red State. March 25th: "as Libya is under an arms embargo, this would be a technical violation of UNSCR 1973 but as we’re already trying to bring down the regime in violation of UNSCR 1973 violating an arms embargo seems like small beer to me. The real question is how would supplying the rebels with weapons achieve the goals of UNSCR 1973, which is to reach a political settlement between the rebels and the government. Fortunately, there is an easy answer. It can’t."