Legalization of Illicit Drugs

Pro's position: legalize illicit drugs, i.e. "if a drug is illicit, then it should be legalized" or simply "no drug should be illicit." I disprove by counterexample.My position: the US federal government should not remove or reduce any of its restrictions on the production or importation of heroin. (It should still be "illicit" to some extent, which contradicts Pro.)I take no position on other drugs, nor on the legality of possession, use, or trade of heroin within the US. My counterexample alone refutes Pro's position. Pro's preceding arguments do not refute my counterexample. Nor do popular arguments like "but alcohol causes more harm than heroin, so why not ban alcohol?" (Me: "Why not?" Pro: "Because _____." Me: "That's why not.")Note that I only need one counterexample to disprove Pro's position -- I could just as easily use crystal meth, or crack, or whatever drug scares you the most, as a different counterexample.SummaryMore heroin is available -> more people use it. People use heroin -> they hurt themselves [1] and other people, physically, emotionally, socially, economically, etc. These instances are not isolated. The harm ripples out through communities, lowers everyone's quality of life, and is economically costly for everyone. If the government can reduce this problem without causing more problems, then it has the responsibility and the moral obligation. Reducing the problem at the source (production and importation) accomplishes that goal.The problemPersonalIt goes without saying that heroin is one of the most addictive drugs in existence. An addict's brain is reconfigured to treat heroin as a necessity for survival. An addict craves heroin like a person craves food when starving to death. Seeking the next high comes at the expense of everything else in life, from food to personal care to social responsibilities. Overdoses kill, and prolonged use also deteriorates the brain, [2] impairing things like judgment and stress response.Addiction makes the addict's entire life miserable and it hurts the people around the addict, from children neglected by parents looking to get high, to parents who effectively lose their children to the drug, to friends who are forced to watch their friends spiral down into despair, to all of us who could have benefited economically from the talent that was wasted.EconomicA study [3] estimated that in 1996, heroin addiction cost the US economy $16.7 billion in productivity loss, medical care, and social welfare. The 2015 equivalent is $25 billion, and there is no reason to think conditions have improved. And conditions would only get worse if we suddenly increased the amount of heroin available to people, thereby increasing the amount of addicts and enabling current addicts to continue their habit. (Think of it this way: heroin is more addictive than alcohol. Therefore, if the two are equally available, then there are probably more heroin addicts than alcoholics. In the US, 1/12 adults are alcoholics [4]. Only 669,000 [5], or one in 470, Americans report using heroin. Imagine how many would use heroin if they could get it more easily.)More than anyone else, heroin hurts the communities of people who have the least money to repair the damage, let alone to spend on their own habits. When an entire community is in poverty, its social structures and safety nets -- families, schools, churches, businesses, etc. -- deteriorate. This means more people feel they are alone and they have nothing better to work for. Many of them turn to the euphoria of heroin to fill the void. Now that they are hooked, they have less time and money to spend on the things that could have lifted them and those around them out of poverty. With this generation effectively removed from the workforce, the next generation is born into a world where poverty is even worse and drugs are even harder to escape. It is a cycle.Public healthNo matter how hard you try with harm reduction programs, you can never guarantee that people do not share or reuse needles (convenience and apathy are louder voices than you would think), inject themselves properly (repeated injections, especially into the skin instead of the vein, damage the injection site), etc. And once you are infected with something like HIV, you are likely pass it onto other people, ruining their lives because of your habit.Furthermore, mentally ill people have an additional temptation to try the drug as a form of self-medication, or a means of escape from their lives. The sad thing is that a drug addiction is just as much of a mental illness as any other. It exacerbates whatever condition came before it. With their lives consumed by the quest for the next high, mentally ill addicts are less likely to get the actual help they needed in the first place.Public safetyNot only do addicts effectively stop contributing to the economy, and not only do they cost billions of dollars in health care, but some of them support their habit with violence. In a study in the US in 1991 [6], out of the people in federal prison for violent crime, robbery, and burglary, 18%, 27%, and 32% of them (respectively) committed their crimes to obtain money to buy drugs. As with the study on economic costs, there is no reason to think conditions have improved.As long as heroin costs anything at all, and there are poor people who feel like they need it to survive, it will give them a reason to steal and to use violence if they feel it is necessary. The only solutions are to help addicts recover (good) and to prevent people from getting hooked in the first place (better).The solutionReducing the amount of heroin in the country is the most obvious line of defense against creating new addicts. There are two main arguments to support it ethically:1. Prevention is better than reaction.Criminal law can only react to a problem once it has already happened. Yet we do it anyway because doing nothing is worse than reducing the harm and using the threat of legal punishment to discourage future crime.Same with social welfare. Once people are already in the cycle of poverty, helping them survive day-to-day is better than leaving them to die, even if it will never get them truly back on their feet.If you are willing to go to those lengths to improve public safety and welfare, then you should leap at the opportunity to reduce the root cause of the problem so you do not have to pick up the pieces later. Just like if you are willing to give a man a fish every day, then you should leap at the opportunity to teach him to fish.I cannot emphasize that enough: if you choose to ignore the root cause of a problem, then you have no ethical basis to mitigate it once it happens. If you argue that heroin should freely flow into the country, then by that logic, you would conclude that there should be no criminal laws, no police, and no social welfare, period.2. The heroin business is predatory.It is convenient, simplistic moral thinking to say everyone should have the right to harm themselves.In reality, no one chooses to make a single step from "healthy" to "life destroyed by heroin". They try it in a moment of weakness -- maybe to self-medicate, or maybe because of peer pressure -- and from then on, their subconscious brains literally cannot distinguish between sobriety and dying.Drug dealers knowingly, deliberately, take advantage of this fact. They sell a product that is designed to make the customer's life a living hell until they come back for more.To promote the flow of heroin into the country is to promote those who prey on the weak.Sources[1] http://tinyurl.com...[2] http://tinyurl.com...[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...[4] https://ncadd.org...[5] http://www.drugabuse.gov...[6] http://www.policyalmanac.org...