University debater checking in. The neg/op to legalised pot is very difficult, but here are my brief thoughts on what I’d run for a case. I’m sure others could add to it, but I think it would be enough for an OO or a decent CO extension at WUDC, or a neg case in Australia-Asian style.
----- Third party harm. Role of the government is to prevent harms to others.
Third party harms associated with legal pot:
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Social costs in lost productivity, health costs, costs associated with impaired reasoning (compare, harms due to alcohol consumption). Poor parenting, lots of shattered homes. The neg/op need to scaremonger about pot.
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Black market will continue to exist: infrastructure is in place, can undercut a liberalised market on strength/additives/cost.
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Black market will move into other areas, but this will destabilise it, resulting in large amounts of violence in fragile urban centres.
-Signalling/Message: government repudiates its own message that drugs are bad (DARE, whatever) this causes a mass loss of faith in government proclamations about other hard drugs, spiking their uptake as young people decide the government is probably also wrong about those
---- Personal harm. Paternal harm of the government to protect people from themselves:
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Drug taking is not a rational decision making nexus: cannot accurately predict risk of addiction, each step along the chain will further erode decision making.
---------------Also, gateway drug analysis. -
Will trickle down to minors, those who shouldn’t have it (Schizophrenics). Look at alcohol: the availability swamps regulation.
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It gives you cancer, and no one should be able to profit from that. Hey, the argument works against cigarettes!
---- Cultural harm. Nation-state analysis: role of the state in enforcing a collective moral standard/identity of the State (compare, French language). Systemic drug taking degenerates the culture of the nation, legitimate for the state to intervene to stop it.