# Help needed: Debate AGAINST legalisation of cannabis **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 13, 2010, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-needed-debate-against-legalisation-of-cannabis/560596 "2010-11-13T22:09:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 14
**Author:** ![History\_Mystery\_and\_the\_Wolf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/53a042/32.png) [@History\_Mystery\_and\_the\_Wolf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/History_Mystery_and_the_Wolf)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2010, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-needed-debate-against-legalisation-of-cannabis/560596/14 "2010-11-14T01:02:11Z")
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: - 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. - Black market will continue to exist: infrastructure is in place, can undercut a liberalised market on strength/additives/cost. - 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: - 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. - 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. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-needed-debate-against-legalisation-of-cannabis/560596)._