Drug Legalization

Thanks, Danielle. =Legalization vs. Decriminalization= This is where the debate is going to be decided. As I see it, Danielle has two good arguments in favor of legalization over decriminalization: That the power of the drug cartel would decrease when faced with legal competition, and that legalized drugs could be "safe, legal, and taxed." I will address these two claims and in the process will show why some kind of decriminalization similar to the Portugal model is a superior policy. Re: CartelLet's talk first about the cartels and their monopoly on drugs. First of all, it's deeply questionable what this "safe and legal" competition would look like or if it would even materialize. Contra Danielle's repeated and absurd claim that alcohol is more dangerous than meth or heroin, big pharma is not going to open itself up to the legal, ethical, and social ramifications of marketing and selling recreational drugs that ruin bodies and lives. You cannot manufacture "safe" meth. It's probable that there would not be that meaningful of a deviation from the status quo, except without drug laws there's no pretense to arrest violent gang members before their turf wars mow down innocent civilians. But how serious is the problem of drug violence? According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, only around 4% of homicides are drug related, or around 600 deaths[1]--mostly against other drug dealers, so no great loss. Heroin killed 13,000 people in 2015. Other opioids killed close to 10,000. Prescription drug abuse killed 17,500[2]. Cocaine killed 5,800 in 2014. Meth killed 3,700[3]. It goes on and on, and this doesn't even mention the tremendous $193 billion social cost associated with the ruined bodies and lives of drug abusers--a number that is dwarfed by the incredible cost of more widespread *legal* drugs. Moreover, drug usage itself contributes greatly to crime. According to the same BJS report, 19% of victims of violent crime perceived their attackers to be under the influence of drugs on their own or in combination with alcohol, a pretty staggering statistic when you consider that only around 5 million people, 1.5% of the population, use non-marijuana illicit drugs[4].It's very easy to see how even slightly increased usage would outweigh this impact. And usage would clearly go up. Danielle outright conceded the economic theory explaining why usage would increase. She dropped and therefore conceded the argument that alcohol prohibition actually cut usage in half--and reversed a worrying trend of increasing alcoholism. Her source that argued how Opium use in China didn't increase is embarrassingly bad because it only looked at import data. I'm shocked Harvard would allow their name to be used with such a shoddy study--imports eventually did decrease, but that was only because domestic production increased by 118 times, from 300 tons before the first Opium War to 35,300 tons in 1906[5]. If China failed to effectively prohibit Opium, it was only because of their famously weak central government. By the 1930s, 10% of the population was addicted to Opium. Forced rehabilitation for addicts and death for dealers drove that number to 0[6]. Bans work, and Danielle's own arguments prove this. Danielle concedes that Marijuana use in Colorado went up drastically after legalization, but argues that use of other drugs wouldn't because users understand the risks. Except she also argues that alcohol is worse than meth or heroin. If prohibition doesn't work and people are educated enough to know the risks, why is an incredibly destructive, literally worse than heroin, but legal drug like alcohol used regularly by over half the population while the still widely prohibited but innocuous Marijuana is only used by 13%? It just doesn't add up. Drug use would massively increase if they were all legal and freely available. All of this ignores that forced rehabilitation would actually *decrease* use. Danielle notes in her first round how Portugal went from having one of the worst rates of drug overdose in Europe to the second lowest and that drug use continually declined. This isn't due to drugs becoming heavily regulated and "safe", because trafficking and manufacturing are still illegal in Portugal. It happened because the country pivoted towards a more humane approach to drug use and forced addicts into mandatory rehabilitation. Danielle wants us to be allowed to force addicts ruining their lives and bodies and becoming societal leeches into rehab only AFTER they've already hurt someone else. With legalization the only question is how much usage goes up. With decriminalization we are instead asking how much it goes *down*. It's incredibly obvious which is the better policy.Re: Regulation and safetyI don't totally disagree with this point. Sure, some deadly drugs that have horrific effects on the body might become marginally safer if they were regulated. How marginal? We don't know because Danielle has failed to provide any numbers, but all the regulation in the world cannot create "safe" heroin. Carfentanil, a drug 10,000 times more potent than Morphine that is used to tranquilize elephants[7], is never going to be safe for human consumption. How is it even possible to "regulate" such a thing? At the end of the day any increase in drug safety is going to be massively outweighed by the costs of increased consumption. And unlike decriminalization, regulation does nothing to DECREASE drug use, which ultimately leads to greater public safety. Portugal shows us that we don't need to make drugs freely available and then cross our fingers, hoping that we made them as safe as possible. We can drive drug overdoses and addiction down to the vanishing point by forcing users to get the help they need BEFORE it becomes a huge problem.Danielle vastly exaggerates how easy drugs are to get in this country. How many people even know what the deep web is, or how to use it? It's difficult to fully stamp out drugs but it's obvious that the threat of legal ramifications all throughout the supply chain obviously decreases both use and availability. Marijuana was always easy to get, but use still skyrocketed after legalization and has doubled nationwide as legalization and medical Marijuana created legal avenues for consumption[8]. Danielle argues that due to regulation, the price of drugs will actually go up after legalization. This is absurd. A blanket prohibition on production backed up by years in prison is far more costly to producers than regulations dictating drug purity. We know what prohibition does to the price of drugs--an analysis from the NCBI found that the price of alcohol, a drug that easily lends itself to long term storage and where millions of gallons already existed, tripled or quadrupled after the 18th amendment was passed[9]. Widespread availability increases the use of even hard drugs. Afghanistan, where the vast majority of the worlds Opium is produced, leads every other country in opium usage, and it's not even close[10].Danielle argues that we could decrease drug use through taxation. I'm glad that she agrees with me that increasing the costs drives usage down, but the costs of criminalization are far higher than she could reasonably expect a sin tax to be. The average tax on a pack of cigarettes is $1.69[11], less than 30% of the average cost of $5.51 a pack[12]. Criminalization drives the price of drugs up 300-400% without even considering the costs associated with getting caught. A tax this large would easily drive people back into the black market, negating her argument. Ultimately the state could never hope to recoup the horrific social and financial costs of drug addiction through taxation, especially after legalization drives an increase in use. Danielle also has no compelling answer to prescription drug abuse. She supports the regulation of Oxycontin or cancer drugs to try and make sure they're used properly. I'm surprised that Danielle doesn't see that this is the exact same rationale behind prohibition. Removing laws PROHIBITING certain people taking these drugs is a part of legalization. By advocating that we PROHIBIT people from taking medicinal drugs without a prescription Danielle is engaging in a MASSIVE contradiction and violating her own framework. Are we allowing the consumption of all drugs as long as it doesn't directly harm anyone else or are we not? If we followed Danielles framework and legalized all drug use, we have to look to my impacts of self medication which kills tens of thousands of people around the world. Why should chemotherapy drugs be sold to non cancer patients?We're fortunate in that history has given us multiple experiments to draw conclusions from. We know that legal drugs such as alcohol and cigarettes are used far more often than even comparatively innocuous illicit drugs like Marijuana, a drug whose usage has rapidly increased as the legal restrictions have lessened. We know that Opium legalization in China was a total failure, with a staggering 10% of the population becoming addicts. We know that prohibition in the United States significantly decreased alcohol consumption. If we're interested in decreasing usage all examples of legalization have been manifest failures. On the other hand, we know that decriminalization in Portugal was a huge success by almost any metric and succeeded in driving usage and overdoses down. This is because users were legally FORCED to get help while the supply remained low because manufacturers and sellers were still punished for their crimes. Again, because it warrants repeating, the last time Opium was legalized in a country 1 in 10 eventually became addicted. There is absolutely nothing Danielle can possibly offer to outweigh even the RISK of tens of millions of new addicts, especially when we have another workable policy solution. The US should follow Portugal's example and implement policies that have proven effective. Sources: http://tinyurl.com...