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Originally Posted by matthew330
Most typically conservative viewpoints are written off as "extreme, uninformed, and extreme generalizations", until liberals can approach them for what they are, i feel confident you guys will continue to remain the angry bitter loosers (in the political sense, not personally) that you were in the last year. I saw it coming with your approach to gay marriage, iraq, etc etc etc etc.
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It wasn't any offense to you, but the article you posted was full of contradictions and weaknesses for the intended purpose, that's all. The guy's gonna need STRENGTH in his position to defend marijuana being illegal, so lumping it with extreme hard drugs like PCP, crack, heroin, and LSD won't help his position. Those drugs are totally not even in the same league as marijuana. Not even CLOSE.
I'm just saying, if it's supposed to be for a debate paper, you want substance to it, not just random facts with nothing to back them up.
For instance:
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His Attorney General, Janet Reno, criticized minimum mandatory jail sentences for drug crimes.
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They fail to explain why this is bad. You could refute this with a million and one arguments. A strong one being: you get more time in jail for drug related matters as opposed to something like RAPE. Why should a person get so many years in prison for putting a drug in his body as opposed to someone who physically assaulted and traumatized another person?
Earlier statements recognize tobacco and alcohol and being legal and regulated. One could refute back, "Why are they legal, but marijuana is not?"
Or even the whole "Tell that to a woman who was raped by a man on PCP" thing.. because people get raped whether the attacker is sober or not. It's not like there's an epidemic of PCP users raping random women.
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Legal PCP isn't going to make a person less violent than illegally purchased PCP.
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This is assuming all PCP users are violent psychopaths.. which will bring up (somewhere) a rebuttal on use and misuse of a drug.
See what I'm saying about the generalizations? You can't do that when you have a debate. You COULD, but not if you want to appear intelligent.
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even if drugs are legalized, there will still be a black market for them
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This is based off of what, exactly? Alcohol and tobacco are legal. Are there black markets for them? Sure, people get semi-trucks and take cigarettes from virginia to NYC, but it's not like it's a big problem that the country is dealing with. "Damn, we should outlaw cigarettes and alcohol because of the black market surrounding them." There's probably isolated incidents, not much beyond that.
As for jobs needing it to remain illegal.. like the DEA, etc.. that's ridiculous. The amount of people they catch compared to the amount of people they DON'T catch is nothing. I don't know what the exact statistic is, but let's just say that for every one person who gets caught, there are many many more who don't and never will. Imagine actually being able to TAX those who purchase it. It would pretty much cancel out the "economic loss" of legalizing..
I mean, I COULD go on and on and on with this article. All I'm stating is... it was extreme ("Tell that to a woman who is raped by her boyfriend while he was high on PCP."), misinformed, and weak (items posted above).
Now, unless his position in the debate isn't supposed to be THAT strong, the article won't do much good.
Grondar hit the nail on the head - there really isn't a cogent argument as to why marijuana should remain illegal. I've had debates with the best of people on this and I have yet to see ONE valid argument for it that can't be applied to something else that's perfectly legal and controlled already.