Hi, I'm going to be debating someone on drug legalization soon and I'm pretty confident with the philosophical side of the debate and the plethora of information there is exposing the "War on Drugs". However, the person I'm debating against brought up an argument that I've yet to counter. Their argument was that the legalization of drugs (particularly the more potent ones) would lead to more traffic accidents involving drugs. I know it's a simple argument and I may be missing an obvious point in countering this, but I've yet to find a good response to this. The approach I decided to take, in a Libertarian fashion, was to introduce the concept of privatizing roads and highways and argue how various private road/highway owners would most likely prohibit the use of drugs on their highways in order to attract road users who wanted to be protected, but then I ran into the problem of monopolies with roads. What if one owns a road and imposes a monopoly-like toll or restriction on it because it is a vital and singular route that many people need to use?
I've argued this with a statist and tried to explain how a new competitor could then easily enter that market and build a new road or alternate route that offered lower rates and how all the road users would then flock to that route, forcing the original route owner to lower their own rates. However, my opponent labeled that as "too simplistic" and inconsiderate of many factors. I'm starting to believe them because WHAT IF there really is only one route? Is it that easy to just build a new route somewhere?
I've read sections of "On the Privatization of Roads and Highways", but it didn't really address this issue in great detail (although it did provide me with a bunch of other key points that I might use), and, of course, I've searched this site and the internet, but couldn't really find that much.
Gee, I guess he's for alcohol prohibition as well? If not, his argument is totally silly.
Why anarchy fails
Point out to him that the entire idea of having boxes of metal flying by at 60mph is ridiculous. Who in the world would support that?
I'd avoid road-privatization, it's just a whole new can of worms. The fact is that people use drugs today and he's assuming that de-criminalization would result in increased usage which is not likely (I can't remember where but there was actually a study done on this in the wake of some drug liberalizations that found that usage dropped). But even assuming that usage increased, the primary deterrent to irresponsible driving is legal liability. That's how we deter drunk driving, it's how we deter murder, it's how we deter every sort of ugly and irresponsible human behavior, so the question you should ask him is this: If legal liability is good enough for deterring every other sort of irresponsible behavior (including drunk driving, which is more dangerous than driving on any other drug I'm aware of), why isn't it good enough to deter "driving while high"?
Plus, if he's ever watched Cheech & Chong he'd know that driving while high on pot results in driving too slow, not too fast.
:-P
Clayton -
Spot on, Clayton. OP, write down his argument and USE it as your own. If you won't succeed, at least you get some lulz. DO IT.
(english is not my native language, sorry for grammar.)