Need help arguing against drug legalization

[Timbothefiveth]

Hey, can anyone help me find some good arguments against drug legalization, especially good statistics?
Thanks.

 

[gelsbern]

The best statistics would have to come from places where drugs are already legalized. Otherwise they are skewed, just as they would have been for alcohol during the Prohibition.

 

[Belloc_Fan]

catholicdefense.blogspot.com/2009/12/sam-harris-on-drugs-so-to-speak.html

I’m not sure if this helps at all, but it’s something semi-related I’d been discussing.

 

[Rascalking]

I don’t know if this will help you or not, but here are some thoughts.

1. Drug abuse will take your, and your families life away. It doesn’t just effect the user. It destroys everything the user touches. It DOES affect society. Why legalize something so dangerous?
2. Drug users don’t just sit around and get high-to get money,they will lie, cheat,steal, and abuse people-the general society. A drug addict will commit other crimes.

I know about drug addiction firsthand. It kills your mind, body, and soul. It is a sickness, and we should never forget that. When you argue with someone about it, remember not to blame the addict-they truly don’t know what they were doing. The drug was controlling their life.

 

[Lancer]

Maybe this will help…and as Matthew Kelly (Australian author & evangelist-speaker) always says:…“there is genius in Catholicism…”!

Pax Christi

In a new pastoral manual issued last week by the Vatican, the Catholic Church called on the governments of the world to resist the temptation to legalize the drug traffic. The manual, “Church, Drugs, and Drug Addiction,” was produced by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry after Pope John Paul II called in 1997 for a study of “the distressing drug problem in the world.”
The manual, which is not yet available online, opens with the words of John Paul II, the cleric who has led the Church since 1978. “The Pope tells us of three specific actions for a pastoral care program which confronts the drug problem,” Archbishop Javier Lozano Barragan told a Vatican press conference heralding the release of the manual, “prevention, treatment and repression.”
The text of the five-chapter manual refers in depth to prevention and treatment, but the Pope made his stance clear in his opening remarks. In them, the pontiff affirmed that “we must all fight against the production, creation, and distribution of drugs in the world, and it is the particular duty of governments to courageously confront this battle against ‘death trafficking.’”
According to Archbishop Barragan, the Vatican is opposed to the legalization of any drugs, even soft drugs such as cannabis, because it considers their use incompatible with Christian morality. (Until copies of the manual are available, it remains unknown if the Church now finds alcohol use incompatible with Christian morality.) But, said Barragan, the Church understands that repression alone will not end drug use, and it will urge governments and societies to change their cultures to combat the problem.
Barragan accused the mass media, the movies and modern music of sending out messages that favored drug use and a generally permissive attitude. “Drugs serve to achieve an immediate pleasure in the effort to flee from internal unease so that users find no other type of solution,” warned the prelate. ** He also reproached Western society for supporting a “deviation from liberty” that assumes people may do what they wish with their own bodies.**
A spokesman for the US Council of Bishops told DRCNet that while they had not yet seen the manual, it was not a departure from current Church policy in this country. “The bishops are against the use of illegal drugs,” said spokesman Bill Ryan. “I don’t think this will affect their stance.”
But just as the pontiff’s conservative positions on other social issues have not won unanimous consent even within the hierarchy, John Paul II’s restatement of Church doctrine on drugs clashes with the position taken by at least one prominent clergyman, Father Miguel Concha. In March, Concha, head of the Church’s Dominican order in Mexico and president of the Mexican Academy of Human Rights, called for an examination of legalization at a Tijuana conference organized by an investigative journalists association (narconews.com/concha.html).
Reading from a document crafted for the occasion, Concha affirmed that, “We who are Civil Society and its organizations, with the decided support of a mass media genuinely committed to democratic values… propose to consult, in the most open, professional and objective manner, what our societies think and decide about the deregulation and progressive decriminalization of the production, commerce and consumption of certain types of drugs.”

stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/214/thepope.shtml

 

[TenBobNote]

Now I know your trying to argue against but I will argue why they should be legalized.

For the same reason God gave us a free will I believe one can only do absolute right when something is a free choice, if someone refrains from doing something, like smoking pot only because it is illegal are they really being moral? I think not, for the same reason that God did not create us to “love” him because we need to make the choice freely.

Now I agree that the church or anyone for that matter should not say that drugs are a good thing. Yet for the abstinence to mean something, you must have the choice.

 

[Athanasiy]

Some believe in goodness of wine , some believe in goodness of beer !
They say that some light drugs have positive effect on you. In Netherlands they believe in this theory , that some grass is not dangerous but even can be useful.
But if there would be objective proves of this theory then it would be widely accepted.
So may be if there would be discussions of the farmacy experts then we could see on what proves they base their theories.

 

[St_Francis]

Now I know your trying to argue against but I will argue why they should be legalized.

For the same reason God gave us a free will I believe one can only do absolute right when something is a free choice, if someone refrains from doing something, like smoking pot only because it is illegal are they really being moral? I think not, for the same reason that God did not create us to “love” him because we need to make the choice freely.

Now I agree that the church or anyone for that matter should not say that drugs are a good thing. Yet for the abstinence to mean something, you must have the choice.

The issue of whether or not to legalise or keep illegal drugs cannot be based on your reasoning above, because that would render all laws moot. We couldn’t say, “Oh, murder should be legalised because then people will be acting more morally if they refrain, and we should allow them that freedom of choice,” now, could we?

There are several types of freedom: there’s moral freedom, in which one is free to act in a moral manner; there’s physical freedom, in which one has the physical capacity to do something; there’s legal freedom; there’s psychological freedom…

We do not need to say that just because God gave us free will that we should have no laws at all in order to allow everyone the ability to “choose freely.”

 

[Ridgerunner]

Those who want to legalize illicit drugs usually mean marijuana only. There are all kinds of arguments, and I can’t produce what you want. But I have known a lot of stoners, and it’s just impossible for me to think it’s harmless.

I think it is instructive that few employers will put up with a person having either alcohol or drugs in his system at work. There are reasons for that, as anybody familiar with workplace accidents can tell you. There is a high incidence of drug use in those who sustain such accidents. I have had occasion to review workers’ compensation files, and it’s extremely high…much higher than alcohol, by the way. Now, someone could argue that that only reflects the incidence of drug use in the society. But when an employer uses random drug screening, and the incidence is much lower than it is post-accident, it pretty well tells you that the drug use is more common among those having industrial accidents than it is among the working population generally.

 

[TenBobNote]

The issue of whether or not to legalise or keep illegal drugs cannot be based on your reasoning above, because that would render all laws moot. We couldn’t say, “Oh, murder should be legalised because then people will be acting more morally if they refrain, and we should allow them that freedom of choice,” now, could we?

There are several types of freedom: there’s moral freedom, in which one is free to act in a moral manner; there’s physical freedom, in which one has the physical capacity to do something; there’s legal freedom; there’s psychological freedom…

We do not need to say that just because God gave us free will that we should have no laws at all in order to allow everyone the ability to “choose freely.”

Not if you use the basis that as long as another individual is not harmed the freedom should remain. But then we get back into my libertarian argument which should take place there…

 

[Timbothefiveth]

Not if you use the basis that as long as another individual is not harmed the freedom should remain. But then we get back into my libertarian argument which should take place there…

It harms the user and it harms the user’s soul, as well as harming other people and their soul as usage spreads.

However, it doesn’t stop there. Violent and property crime have high links to use of drugs, higher than even drug dealing.
bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=777