Drugs should be legalized in the United States

Whats been great is that we've had an amazing round over a very hot issue, but never once got personal or aggressive. Since this is the last speech I'll just summarize the round. The 5 key arguments in this round are as follows. 1. Will drug use increase or decrease? 2. Do drug users violate the rights of others? 3. Does the War on Drugs fulfill my opponent's burden? 4. Does affirming solve the black market? 5. Do medical benefits outweigh harms? Here's why I believe I win these arguments. 1A: Deterrance My opponent did not address my argument that her own sources are telling you that people are deterred from drug use by criminal sanctions. All she says is that most people aren't deterred. However, "most" does not equal "everyone". So when she argues "most" will still take drugs, she concedes that "some" will not. At that point, since its been proven that drug users cause harm to other people, I win the round because there will be more of these harms occuring when we take that deterrance away. 1B: Availability We have both given examples of drugs being legalized. I gave four, where drug use spiked. She gave three where it did not. Here's why you prefer my examples. In the four examples I gave, two of them involved drugs becoming available to everyone. One legalized them for all adults, and the other was prescription heroin for addicts. Her examples only involve heroin being given to adults who are severe addicts. Look at her sources for these. They specifically tell you that these drugs were only made available for hardcore addicts over a certain age. You cannot draw conclusions from these until these drugs have become available for everyone. But I did offer examples where everyone had access to drugs, and we saw what happened. 2. Do drug users violate other's rights? I have proved that drug users increase our insurance and hospital costs, which equates to taxation without representation (which violates our right to, well, taxation without representation), and that drug users damage their families and injure coworkers at a high rate. Pro has never denied any of these. Her only argument is that obese people increase insurance costs just as often as drug users. Let me go over this quickly. She argues that heart disease causes 35% of deaths. Deaths, not hospital costs. So 1. This is not relevant to my argument. She then says 34% of Americans are overweight. However, she has not given us anything showing how many of those overweight people have heart disease. So she is missing a huge link here, and without it these arguments fall apart. Pro contends that the government cannot be paternalistic and that it can only restrict rights that can harm other people. I have shown that drug users do indeed harm others and violate rights, so by her own logic, we are justified incriminalizing drugs. 3. Does ending the WoD = Legalizing? After proving that ending it does not equate to legalization in my last speech, pro makes an absurd claim that I "would not advocate a WOD". That is completely false. In addition to showing why the WOD is not Aff ground, I then attacked every single argument she made about it anyway. Never in this entire debate have I said we should end it. That was her only argument about this in her last speech. She completely dropped mine, which stated that even if she wins all War on Drug arguments, she still loses because it doesn't mean we legalize. This is HUGE. She loses access to all arguments related to it due to this concession. 4. Does affirming solve black market? In her last speech, pro claimed I dropped this. She herself refutes that. Here are a couple of her quotes. "Con completely drops this huge contention" Later, "Con's response has been a market would still exist. .. " So she claimed I dropped it, but then said I made an argument against it. In any case, Pro makes the claim that a black market for only underage users is insignificant. I already explained this isn't true; my evidence showed you that the underage drug users is literally over half of the entire market. Over 50% is not "insignificant". Against this, she says that she doesn't know why there would be cartels in the first place if you affirm. The reason is that she only legalizes for people over the age of 18. So the cartels remain for everyone under that, which is 51%. So what we hopefully see is that the black market will not be solved through her legalization system. 5. Do medical benefits outweigh harms? Pro claims some illegal drugs have medical benefits. Yes they do. However, the harms of them outweigh. For example, wild mushrooms are high in fiber, so they provide a nutritional benefit, but they are also poisonous. So the harms outweigh the benefit. I give sources explaining the negative health effects of drugs and pro says thats true of your everyday painkiller. I ask my opponent, does Tylenol cause permanent depletion of seratonin levels, like ecstasy? Does Aleve cause Psychosis, like LSD? No, they dont. We need to realize that the harms of illegal drugs like E and crack are much stronger than your regular over-the-counter stuff. To finalize, I stronly urge you to reread my initial argument on Deterrance, showing what happened when marijuana was made freely available and heroin was available with a prescription. These really show you what happens if we affirm. While my opponent's examples are equally interesting, they simply do not involve enough of the population to draw conclusions from. For all of these reason, I urge a con vote. Thanks for the debate.