As I wrote in last weeks News-Optimist, I was recently invited to be a judge at a debate tournament at NBCHS. As I described in my story about the experience, I left the debate with my mind full of thoughts, which took a few days to fully coalesce.
After the third and last debate, we three judges were given an opportunity to comment on why we made the decisions we did and offer advice. After the other judges had spoken, I think everyone almost forgot I hadn't - the comments and critiques of the other judges were all but exhaustive.
But I did speak, because I thought it was important to bring up a point that had been stuck in my head as the debates progressed.
The topic was "that this house should condemn the use of drones in warfare," and, in my mind, the affirmative side won the debate handily. It wasn't because their points were necessarily better, their arguments more profound, their attacks on their opponents' positions more cutting. The two sides were evenly matched, a fact that was confirmed to me when I saw the side that had lost the debate (the negative side) had received third place overall in the tournament, with the winning team placing somewhere lower.
The main reason to me that the winning team had won came down to their choice of tactic. The losing side, arguing in support of drones, had based a large proportion of their arguments on practicality. Drones were efficient, more accurate, could be piloted by someone far away (who is therefore not experiencing rushes of adrenaline or behaving rashly) and provided great accountability, since commanding officers could literally look over a pilot's shoulder. Unlike conventional jet aircraft, drones could hover over a target for hours and hours, waiting for a perfect opportunity to strike, without risking a soldier.
The affirmative side won the debate in my judging because their focus was different. Rather than focusing on challenging the other side's claims about efficiency, they argued from a moral standpoint - explaining that drones dangerously divorced soldiers from the very real combat they took part in. This facet of their argument boiled down to a simple, effective comparison - it is one thing to kill someone you can see with your own eyes, and another thing entirely to watch a video-feed in an air-conditioned room and press a button on the joystick. One most definitely would feel like murder, the other, more of a video game.
Of course, the debates were more complicated and messy than my description, and neither point entirely destroys the other side. It is easy to see dropping a bomb from a military jet or stealth bomber isn't operationally different from doing it from a drone, as far as the pilot is concerned, and the efficiency argument ignores that a drone is, from the perspective of a military, cheaper than some of the alternatives. But in the war of ideas, the affirmative side won because they argued from the perspective of morality, while the other side argued from the perspective of efficiency.
So I had to speak up, because the debate illustrated an important philosophical point about how our brains work. Expressed abstractly it isn't as clear, but anyone knows a moral argument is, in a sense, the most basic argument possible. By arguing from the perspective of morality, the affirmative side had effectively undercut the other side's argument.
Of course, as soon as I described my judgment, I started having second thoughts. Surely, most people will judge an argument from the perspective of morality to defeat an argument from the perspective of practicality. No one will buy a perfectly efficient, perfectly safe, cheap car that runs on crushed puppies. But morality isn't always the bottom line in an argument - no argument has a "bottom line."
A few days later, all the buzzing in my head came together, as I realized what I had been thinking. When I came in to work Monday, I learned the Federal Liberal Party had backed a resolution calling for the legalization and regulation of marijuana at their conference over the weekend.
In some ways, the debates around marijuana legalization have taken this form - one side argues against marijuana legalization from the perspective of morality, while the side in favour of legalization uses a variety of other arguments (prohibition is ineffective, it saddles too many young people with a criminal record, it is not as dangerous as its opponents claim it is, etc.).
To those against legalization, the argument is simply a moral one garnished with a few smaller arguments. Marijuana is a dangerous substance, more harmful than its proponents claim, it is a danger to youth and has addictive potential. Those in favour of legalization offer a variety of arguments, but none are as pointedly moral as the arguments of those against legalization.
Nevertheless, the legalization argument, in my mind, does defeat the argument against legalization in one main way.
With all the commentary around drug legalization, it can often be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Both sides of the debate are guilty of lying to some extent. Those against legalization will often point to the results of studies that suggest marijuana has a large variety of negative effects, without noting, of course, that most studies have shown these effects to be relatively mild, and, in fact, far milder than alcohol or cigarettes. Proponents of legalization, at their most extreme, argue the plant is actually good for you - ignoring the obvious effects of smoke inhalation of any kind and some of the long-term effects.
In many Western countries, these are the sorts of arguments that are heard for and against legalization. But Portugal, in 2001, decriminalized small amounts of all drugs - equivalent to a 10-day supply. This approach is different from any other. Holland, for example, has never officially decriminalized any drugs, just refuses to arrest people using them. And Portugal still arrests drug dealers, traffickers and producers of drugs.
Portugal's approach seems strange - while condemning drugs by prosecuting dealers, drug use is treated not as a criminal act. Drugs in general are instead treated as a medical problem. While there was widespread concern among government, law enforcement, doctors and others about the implications of the decision, there is little disputing the results.
So where exactly, in terms of the legalization arguments does Portugal sit?
Portugal's approach seems to acknowledge both sides. Of course, the government is pro-decriminalization, but their arguments for decriminalization are almost the exact same as the arguments for many opposed to decriminalization.
Simply put, Portugal decriminalized drugs because its government recognized that, while drugs were harmful, the harm that they caused could be best managed by legalization. The argument that drugs were harmful was not greeted, as it is in so many Western countries, with a kneejerk attempt to eliminate drugs from the world altogether, but with a question: if drugs are bad, what is the best way to manage this ill? In the beautifully phrased words of a Portuguese doctor who works with addicts, Portugal traded "the dream of perfection and the promise of failure" for "moderate hope and some likelihood of success."
And the effects of Portugal's decriminalization are difficult to argue with.
Portugal, firstly, did not become a mecca for drug tourists. And serious drug use, especially among young people, decreased. Furthermore, the number of people seeking treatment from drug addiction grew, by close to double, the rates of drug-related deaths decreased and the number of cases of infectious diseases decreased. Because of all of these changes, the burden on the criminal also decreased drastically. The United States spends nine times as much money on drug enforcement as on treatment. Portugal is the reverse, spending nine times more money on treatment than on punishment.
Drug use is a tremendously complex topic - it is biological, psychological, medical, criminal. And although drug use can destroy lives, it can also be relatively harmless. What often causes the most damage is not drug use itself, but what goes along with it - Al Capone, remember, made his money off of an illegal drug in the 1920s, and the gang violence that has ravaged Mexico recently is deeply related to the money that exists in the United States for Mexican marijuana. In Mexico right now, 45,000 Mexican troops, or one quarter of the Mexican Army, fight against drug cartels in a war that claimed 6,000 lives in 2008 alone - more than the number of American soldiers claimed by the Iraq War. The total amount of money in Mexico's drug war is estimated to be between $17 and $38 billion dollars - a fact that has some reporters describing Mexico's war as a war for drugs rather than a war on drugs.
On the side of drug users, the statistics are equally damning. Many addicts are forced into illegal activities to pay for their addictions - an estimated 70 per cent of inmates in the United States, for example, test positive for illicit substances when they were arrested.
This all relates back to my initial point - that a purely moral argument isn't necessarily the last word in an issue. The approach in Portugal has been to acknowledge the purely moral argument against drugs, but not simply to respond by banning them. Portugal chose instead to consider the best way to reduce drug use, which is not necessarily abolition.
Understandably, there were many critics of the Federal Liberal Party for coming out in favour of marijuana legalization. And simply legalizing marijuana is a far cry from what happened in Portugal where small amounts of crack cocaine, crystal meth, PCP and other harder drugs can be consumed legally. If marijuana is legalized in Canada, it would likely mean that it would be controlled in a similar way to alcohol and cigarettes, which is also different from the way that Portugal regulates drugs (by arresting dealers, producers and traffickers, but leaving users untouched).
But I would invite all those speaking out vociferously against drug legalization to consider the possibility that legalization might actually be better for society than quixotic attempts to eliminate drugs from society altogether.
