All psychoactive substances should be legalized for adults to purchase and use, sold from dispensaries in a regulated fashion as we do with alcohol.

I will admit that I have a bias towards Pro in this conversation. However, the resolution was really teed up for Con to hit this out of the park. All Con needed to do was find two drugs, that clearly should not be legalized, and those drugs could even be theoretical. If a newly discovered drug has a psychoactive effect that will lead to permanent brain damage 72% of the time it should not be legalized. The catch-all statement of "all" was a huge mountain to climb, and I had no idea how Pro would do it.

Pro did not do it. However, Con never put Pro away. Con talked in circles about addiction issues and overall social weight. And therein contradicted himself, explaining how the majority of addicts are high-functioning productive members of society. Con speculated a few times on a variety of issues and while being creative, it really undermined his case when Pro pointed out the lack of evidence. In the balance of the arguments, Pro was crisper, rebutted well, and painted a better picture. Pro did not deal with the All part of the reso very well, however, Con did not deal with it at all.

I am surprised Pro did not look at the regulatory framework in Canada for cannabis and reverted to Portugal and France, which are decriminalized and unregulated.

Both debaters argued with a total view passion of the concept, and Con lost the opportunity of the individual silver bullet to snipe a win. Con is usually very good at identifying these trap elements, so I feel that the passion for the subject clouded the view of the actual resolution. Pro did not forfeit any rounds and deserves the conduct point. I think this debate brought up a bunch of secondary small debate subjects, and I would be happy to participate in any of those.

Thank you for the great content, and the opportunity to give my opinion. I appreciate it.

I think when it comes to weighing what issues are most important in this debate, I'm just not getting enough reason to weigh issues of freedom/liberty over more tangible harms. I know a large part of Pro's argument comes from the position that harms are worse with drugs that are currently legal, and while I take his point, I don't think that does anything to move the needle. I can acknowledge that there are hypocrisies in existing drug policies and see that legalization of these particular drugs is still damaging, even if the harms they cause are less than the harms of currently legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. In fact, the argument could have been made that their legalization is part of the reason they're so harmful, and that piling on with more legal drugs doesn't yield a positive impact just because those drugs cause lesser harms.

Still, there's a lot to take in here with regards to the actual harms of these drugs, and I think both sides could have done a better job in this department. Pro argues extensively about the chemistry of these drugs, and while that point is interesting, I don't think it does much for his position except limit the degree of harm caused by these drugs, assuming that they're not adulterated. I think the better point is that those adulterants are only likely to be in these drugs currently because they are illegal, i.e. the chief cause of harm is the adulterants and legalizing them removes those adulterants. Pro also argues that legalization reduces the number of instances where law enforcement actively utilizes drug laws to inflict harms by planting drugs or just securing larger prison sentences that aren't warranted. I think the latter could use more explanation (there are good points there but Pro doesn't spend much time fleshing them out), but the former is decent, albeit limited in actual quantity of cases to a couple of examples.

Con's argument to this effect is initially strong, arguing that an increase in the number of people using these drugs (both sides kind of just assume that will happen) yields an increase in the number of addicts and he shows pretty clearly that addiction is bad. I don't think he's winning on the numbers of addicts, and while the adolescent point initially looks like it could bolster it, the argument just seems to disappear after R2. The trouble with this argument is that, while I buy that the number of addicts would increase, it's more difficult to buy that their circumstances would be anywhere near as bad as they are now with the presence of adulterants. I think when Con drops the issue of adulterants, it kind of sinks the whole argument that more addicts is worse than leaving these drugs illegal, mainly because the vast majority of harms are associated with the adulterants, not the addiction (bad though that is). I think Pro also makes the point well that different levels of addiction/abuse make that harm more variable than Con lets on. I think what could potentially have bolstered this point the most was the argument about regulation or lack thereof. I don't love the fact that Pro is still defining how his system would work all the way out in R3, and some of his claims about how the system would function seem to rely on some pretty loose assumptions of how these drugs would enter the market and be regulated. I think there was room to argue that this system might not be much better than the existing black market, relying on sufficient chemists to monitor marketed products and the assumption that the drug companies peddling them would not modify the recipe in ways that might not be easily caught, introducing their own adulterants. There just isn't enough of an argument here, though - Con keeps his points too general to the failures of a hybridized system rather than engaging with the specifics of Pro's system. I also just don't buy that cartels would assume substantial control over the government. That scenario needed more warrants and evidence for what happens in a legal system.

Overall, while Pro did forfeit a round (hence Conduct), I think he's winning on bigger issues of safe use of drugs in the absence of black market adulterants and preventing abuses of the legal system that cost lives. While Con has some solid points about addiction, they just don't gain the kind of steam they need to overcome these issues.

Two days left and no votes so far. Here goes.

Both sides start off making competing claims about the effects of legalization. I can accept that making drugs illegal means that more people will be arrested, though it's unclear how harmful all of these drugs will be. The word "all" in the resolution makes me think that Con is best off picking a few drugs and showing the harms of legalizing those (date rape drugs, for example). Pro responds to the studies given, arguing that addiction itself is not the issue but that contamination is. I end up not completely certain about whether legalization + regulation would save lives, but that leaves the impact of the number of people arrested, which gives this debate to Pro. I also think some of Pro's points were better supported with research. While Con had a number of counters, a number of them were speculative, such as poking holes in a potential regulatory system without showing why those problems are likely to arise.