DA
1NC
Legalization causes drug cartel diversification – they’d steal oil
Dickinson 11, Elizabeth, former assistant managing editor at Foreign Policy, “Legalizing Drugs Won't Stop Mexico's Brutal
Cartels,” June 22nd, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/22/legalizing_drugs_wont_stop_mexicos_brutal_cartels
But would
legalization really work? With each day that passes, it looks like it wouldn't be enough,
for one overarching reason: The cartels are becoming less like traffickers and more like mafias.
Their currency is no longer just cocaine, methamphetamines, or heroin, though they earn revenue from each of these products. As
they have grown in size and ambition, like so many big multinational corporations, they have
diversified. The cartels are now active in all types of illicit markets, not just drugs. "Mexico is
experiencing a change with the emergence of criminal organizations that, rather than being product-oriented -- drug
trafficking -- are territorial based," says Antonio Mazzitelli, head of the UNODC office in Mexico City. They now
specialize in running protection rackets of all kinds, he says, which might explain why the violence has gotten so
bad: Mafias enforce their territorial control by force, killing anyone who resists or gets in the way. "Before, we had
organized crime, but operating strictly in narcotrafficking," adds Eduardo Guerrero Gutiérrez, a consultant and
former advisor to the Mexican presidency. "Now we have a type of mafia violence ... and they are extorting from
the people at levels that are incredibly high -- from the rich, from businesses." For this reason, Mazzitelli
says, legalization would have "little effect." Cartels such as the Zetas and La Familia, long categorized as
drug-trafficking organizations, have transformed themselves into territorial overlords. With
distinctive zones of influence, complex organizations, and a wealth of manpower on which to draw,
they act as shadow governments in the areas they control, collecting "taxes" on local establishments
and taking a cut of the profits from illegal immigration to the United States. "This fight is not solely or primarily
to stop drug trafficking," Mexican President Felipe Calderón told the U.S. Congress in May 2010. "The aim is to ensure the safety of
Mexican families, who are under threat of abuse and wanton acts of criminals." The cartels' expansion may have begun
through their everyday narcotrafficking work -- namely through money laundering, one of the most discussed topics in
Mexican politics today. Once upon a time, this was quite easy to do; cartels could wire the money in convoluted ways or open new
accounts to which individuals would report earnings from businesses that existed only on paper. But as
the government
cracked down in recent years, the cartels got more creative. In June 2010, Mexican authorities put strict limits on how
much cash any individual could deposit into a bank on any given day or in any given month. They also limited the amount of cash
one could use to buy things like airplanes or cars. So the cartels started engaging in actual trade, which helps them launder their
drug profits, explains Shannon O'Neil, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. They
buy consumer
goods, such as televisions and perfumes, in the United States and sell them on the Mexican side at a loss. The
revenues are "clean" money. And as a bonus, the cartels have a network of vendors ready and willing to sell
illicit goods. Other markets are entirely separate from the narcotics business. Perhaps the most dramatic example
is oil, one of Mexico's largest exports and increasingly a vehicle for illicit trade. On June 1, the country's national oil
company, Pemex, filed a lawsuit accusing nine U.S. companies of colluding with criminals linked to the drug trade to sell as
estimated $300 million worth of stolen oil since 2006. That's an amount equal to the entire cocaine market in Mexico, says
UNODC's Mazzitelli. In other words, if
the cocaine trade dried up, the cartels would still have access to an
equally large source of revenue. Equally troubling is the firearms trade, which has a direct link both to
the violence and to the sustainment of the criminal organizations working across this country of 107 million.
There are no reliable estimates of just how big this market is, but according to a recent U.S. Senate investigation, some 87 percent of
the weapons used by the cartels are sourced from the United States. "If this were Southeast Asia, they'd be bombing the gun stores in
Arizona, as if that's the Ho Chi Minh trail," says Ted Lewis, head of the human rights program at Global Exchange. Mexico's
cartels have also infiltrated the government and security forces, though primarily at a local level. "Just going
by all the reports -- academic and media -- we could safely assume that all municipal police departments are infiltrated," argues
Walter McKay, a security consultant who has spent the last three years working in Mexico. "But it's not just the police. We focus on
police and police corruption, but the
entire apple is rotten." In the latest example of how high the rot goes, the ex-mayor of
there is the
Tijuana, Jorge Hank Rhon, was recently arrested for gunrunning and alleged links to organized crime. Then
cartels' sheer size. An estimated 468,000 people worked in the drug trade in 2008, making the cartels collectively among the
biggest industries in Mexico. (By comparison, the state oil company, the largest firm in Mexico, has about 360,000 employees.)
The cartels also now outnumber the police, estimated at just over 400,000 personnel nationwide in 2010.
oil siphoning causes shocks
Martin and Longmire 11 – Jeremy Martin is Director of the Energy Program at the Institute of the Americas. Sylvia
Longmire is a Mexico Security Expert & President, Longmire Consulting. (“The Perilous Intersection of Mexico’s Drug War &
Pemex”, March 22, 2011, http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2011/03/perilous-intersection-of-mexicos-drug.html)
As discussed previously, oil theft from Pemex pipelines, money laundering by way of service stations, and, worst of all, provocative kidnappings of the
company’s executives and those of service companies working with the state firm, are all on the rise. Unofficial figures place thefts from the Pemex
network at roughly $2 billion annually. And security experts point to this as an important source of revenue for drug cartels—especially as the Mexican
government continues to crack down on them. Thefts from the Pemex network are not new, but the increase and the strain it is placing on the alreadytaxed company is important. And the illegal tapping has grown significantly in the areas where the drug war is the most pervasive. The spike in fuel
thefts and illegal trading, as well as kidnappings, has led some to question whether Pemex is fully in charge of all its facilities across the nation. For
some experts following the situation, the answer is a resounding no. Indeed, many analysts indicate that the physical
security and
monitoring of pipelines belonging to Pemex are severely lacking. According to Mexican daily El Universal, oil looting has
occurred in almost every state in Mexico, while the Wall Street Journal, citing Pemex statistics, indicated that between January and November 2010,
Pemex discovered 614 illegal siphons—368 in liquid fuels pipelines, 196 in oil pipelines, and 50 in liquefied petroleum gas ducts. Pemex has begun
installing systems to detect declines in pressure in some oil product pipelines but the project is expected to take years to complete. Kidnappings send
shudders Kidnappings
of Pemex executives and subcontractors, including workers from international firms, have taken place
throughout the
company and Mexico. The kidnappings have terrorized a community where, according to a Los Angeles Times story, jobs on the oil
across the country but most notably in Tabasco, Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, sending shudders
rigs and at the gas wells are handed down, father to son, for generations. “How is it,” asked a relative of a kidnapped worker, “that Pemex, supposedly
the backbone of the nation, can be made to bow down like this?” One analysis, published by Grupo Reforma highlighted the oil town of Reforma,
Chiapas, where at least 30 Pemex employees—ranging from executives to laborers—have been kidnapped over the past year. Mexico Weekly has also
reported on other forms of violence that have flared in prime Pemex production zones, such as the Burgos Basin, site of Mexico's biggest natural gas
field in Tamaulipas. Last spring, gunmen seized the Gigante Uno gas plant and kidnapped five Pemex workers. Increasingly unsafe conditions are
severely hindering Pemex’s ability to produce natural gas in the Burgos Basin. The Burgos Basin stretches across the northern border state of
Tamaulipas, where the Gigante Uno plant is located, and spills into the states of Nuevo León and Coahuila. All three states are experiencing extremely
high levels of drug-related violence, especially along these states’ border with Texas. The stretch from Nuevo Laredo to Matamoros is in the midst of a
bloody conflict between the Gulf cartel and Los Zetas, former paramilitaries and enforcers for the Gulf cartel who are now one of the more vicious DTOs
in their own right. Los Zetas are viewed as largely responsible for the kidnapping of Pemex employees in that region. “Once
Pemex …
comes under regular attack from the cartels, rather than just random, disorganized thugs, then you have far
more serious national security problems – much worse in the government's eyes than a bunch of homicides in the
slums of Ciudad Juárez," said Malcolm Beith, author of The Last Narco, a book about the hunt for Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera. Regrettably,
Burgos is becoming synonymous with the perilous intersection of Mexico’s raging drug war with Pemex’s efforts to produce the critical energy supplies
the nation and region demand. The Murphy Energy case One case of fuel theft from Pemex that’s winding its way through the justice system provides a
unique insight into that part of the problem the company is confronting. According to MarketWatch, federal documents released in August 2010
revealed a Texas chemical plant, owned by German chemical company BASF Corp., bought $2 million worth of petroleum products that had been
stolen from Pemex and smuggled across the US border. The documents also showed the stolen condensate passed through several companies' hands
before arriving on a barge at the BASF facility in Port Arthur, Texas. The actual transport of stolen oil from Mexican pipelines into US corporate hands
is complicated at best. Donald Schroeder, former president of Trammo Corp., testified that in January 2009, two companies, Murphy Energy Corp. and
Continental Fuels, contacted him. Both wanted to sell him stolen condensate. Apparently he agreed to buy it, and the transfers began. “Unnamed
import companies” would sell the condensate to intermediary companies like Continental (which has since shuttered its headquarters in Houston).
Those import companies would smuggle the condensate across the border and store it in Continental facilities. No details were available on how those
trucks managed to successfully cross the US Mexico border. These piecemeal transfers would continue until there was enough oil in the storage facility
to fill a barge and ship to BASF. Jim McAlister, an Assistant US Attorney, said he has no reason to believe that BASF has any involvement in the alleged
wrongdoing. The President and founder of Murphy Energy Corp., Matt Murphy, said the company did not know that the condensate was stolen. Josh
Crescenzi, the vice president of Continental Fuels, has not been indicted in the case, nor has anyone else from Continental. This particular case has been
a success, resulting in the handover of $2.4 million by US customs authorities to the Mexican government. But the extent of corruption in Mexico—
within Pemex, in particular—and the ease with which oil can be stolen from pipelines makes the mitigation of oil looting an almost insurmountable
challenge. Adding to the problem is the fact that Mexican cartels are involved. According to Reuters, the Mexican government believes the cartels use
stolen jet fuel in their aircraft to cover up any evidence of illicit flights. In August 2009, Mexico’s federal police commissioner Rodrigo Esparza said Los
Zetas used false import documents to smuggle at least $46 million worth of oil in tankers to unnamed US refineries. President Felipe Calderón has said
that DTOs in northern Mexico are responsible for most oil theft. On some levels Pemex is not just a victim of oil-thieving DTOs; sometimes, it’s directly
involved. In February 2010, Mexican military units seized more than four tons of marijuana at Pemex installations in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. The
discovery was made after Pemex security alerted officials that armed men were removing Pemex employees from a fuel supply station. In response, a
Mexican Naval helicopter was dispatched to the scene but retreated after receiving heavy weapons fire from the ground. When military units arrived on
the ground, they found the marijuana loaded on trucks abandoned at the site. These alarming facts have led to perhaps the most ominous question of
all: Is the company being infiltrated by the perpetrators of the nation’s drug business? In light of the increasing number of incidents President Calderón
has acknowledged, there may well be internal operatives at Pemex aiding and abetting the DTOs. For its part, Pemex is soliciting the help of the
Mexican people to try to put a stop to oil looting. Last August, the Mexican government posted a Pemex press release, in which exhorts that oil looting
is not just an unpatriotic crime against the company and the government, but against the Mexican people. It also offers the number of a hotline where
individuals can anonymously report pipeline breaches. Why the perilous intersection matters The relevance of what is happening in Mexico matters on
a variety of levels, but in particular, there are three broad reasons that bear discussion. First, and as best portrayed in Figure 2, Pemex has seen its oil
production drop precipitously since 2004. The firm has been struggling for the better part of the last decade to deal with a burdensome tax straitjacket,
poor planning at its largest field, a lack of new discoveries of oil and production, and an inability to implement serious reform. Moreover, by the nature
of being dragged into—and becoming part of—Mexico’s massive drug war, Pemex
is clearly suffering from the additional strain
and havoc wrought by the myriad elements of the conflict on its business. From huge financial losses to the increasing inability to
control its network and prevent theft to the more serious kidnapping threats, the evidence is only becoming clearer. The second reason concerns
Mexico’s fiscal dependency on oil and Pemex. As assorted struggles impact the company's and the nation’s fiscal well-being, broader and longer term
economic growth and employment discussions become ever more complicated for policy makers. These issues are particularly critical as the nation
appears far from passage of the necessary and far-reaching national tax and fiscal reforms that could ameliorate some of the burden on Pemex and the
nation’s oil dependency. Third, all
of the above leads to the real potential for further erosion of Mexico’s critical
role as a secure and constant energy supplier for the United States and the Western Hemisphere. As oil
prices steadily rise in early 2011, it is quite rational to revisit the significant energy security aspects of Mexico’s
persistent energy woes, which are now clearly exacerbated by the overflow of drug war violence and corruption. On the heels of yet another State
of the Union address in the United States that included elegant rhetoric about the country’s energy imbalance and energy security risks, a
comprehensive, all of the above approach and solution remains far from reach. Conclusion Clearly oil, and energy more broadly, is not a sector of the
economy where Mexico needs any further impediments. Pemex’s huge hurdles derive largely from its inability to replace declining oil production and
navigate a burdensome nationalistic legacy. What is now added to the combustible mix is an increasing drain on the company’s finances and, worse, a
sense of trepidation among executives in the field. Threats against its executives and loss of its resources are surely not a useful element as the company
makes efforts to reform itself. All of the above analysis is of extreme relevance to Mexico for its financial and overall well-being—and especially for
Pemex. It is also critical for North American energy security as the United States, in the wake of the Deepwater
Horizon incident, deals with offshore drilling restrictions and slow downs in the formerly prolific Gulf of Mexico. Moreover, there are thorny issues
surrounding increased production from Canada’s oil sands for the US market. This was made abundantly clear during an early February visit by
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to the White House. More than 80 environmental groups used the occasion to send a letter of protest to
President Obama. These concerns do not appear to have any immediate or simple resolutions and make
the United States' need to
count on Mexico greater than ever before.
nuclear war
Qasem 07 – Islam Yasin Qasem is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics and Social Sciences at the University of
Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, MA in International Affairs from Columbia. (“The Coming Warfare of Oil Shortage,” July 9,
2007, online: http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_islam_ya_070709_the_coming_warfare_o.htm)
Recognizing the strategic value of oil for their national interests, superpowers will not hesitate to
unleash their economic and military power to ensure secure access to oil resources, triggering worldwide
tension, if not armed conflict. And while superpowers like the United States maintain superior conventional
military power, in addition to their nuclear power, some weaker states are already nuclearly armed, others are
seeking nuclear weapons. In an anarchic world with many nuclear-weapon states feeling insecure, and a global economy in
downward spiral, the chances of using nuclear weapons in pursues of national interests are high.
And, cartels would turn to ecotrafficking – it’s a huge expanding market – means
the aff doesn’t solve – independent rainforest impact
Bargent 14, James, freelance journalist based in Medellin. He has reported on Colombia and Latin America for the Miami
Herald, the Toronto Star, Sky News, InSight Crime, the Times Education Supplement, Colombia Reports, AlterNet, Toward
Freedom, Upside Down World, “Eco-Trafficking in Latin America: The Workings of a Billion-Dollar Business,” July 7th,
http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/eco-trafficking-latin-america-billion-business
Eco-trafficking is no longer the preserve of a handful of poachers, loggers and specialized smugglers, but has become a
billion-dollar trade run by transnational organized crime networks that spread corruption, violence and
environmental destruction in their wake throughout Latin America. The natural resources of South
and Central America make rich pickings for savvy criminals with the right contacts. The rainforests of the
Amazon and Central America contain a wealth of valuable timber, while the region's array of
exotic wildlife supplies goods for both local markets and wealthy foreign collectors. According to a
recent report on environmental crime by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (pdf), the illegal
timber trade alone brings in estimated annual profits of $100 billion, while the global wildlife trade is
worth an estimated $19 billion annually, with approximately 350 million plants and animals sold on the black market every year.
This is the first part of a two part series on eco-trafficking in Latin America. See part two here. The
profits on offer have
seen eco-trafficking emerge as one of the most lucrative forms of organized crime, both in Latin
America and around the world. "Sometimes it is known as an emerging crime, but for us, wildlife and timber crime is no longer
emerging," Jorge Rios, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's (UNODC) new Global Programme for Combating
Wildlife and Forest Crime (GP), told InSight Crime. "It falls into the same category as drug trafficking, arms trafficking and human
trafficking because it is clear from the patterns of transit and seizures and the amount of resources that are involved, that it is
transnational organized crime." Big Profits, Big Crime Networks Compared to the criminal poster boys of the drug cartels, little is
known about the networks behind eco-trafficking, but the UNODC is convinced many of them maintain a broad portfolio of criminal
activities. "These
are organized criminal networks that also deal with drugs and other illicit
commodities -- they're as good as anyone else, they diversify," said Rios. The Global Initiative report
breaks down the eco-trafficking chain into three links; source, transit, and destination. The first group involved is the bottom of the
chain, those that fell the trees and hunt the animals. The second is the smugglers that move the product, either illicitly or by turning
it into a legal product through fraud or by manufacturing. The last is the vendors, collectors, consumers and businesses that sell or
use the final product, and the criminal "controllers" that oversee the whole chain. According to Bernardo Ortiz, head of the South
America office of wildlife trade monitoring group Traffic, it is at the second stage that eco-trafficking commonly intersects with
established organized crime groups. "You have the people who have invested money in buying and putting all these things together
and then you start seeing how the experts on illegality start facilitating the flow of these commodities through controls," he told
InSight Crime. "These are the same guys who know how to bring any illegal stuff through these corridors." In Colombia, where
organized crime's roots run deep, the overlap between eco-trafficking and the trafficking of drugs, arms, cash and people is
substantial, according to Ortiz. But even in countries with less developed trafficking networks, the two will likely interact. "Once you
get into dirty business, you are always going to end up bumping into those that control whatever illegal activities," he said. In
Colombia and Peru, eco-trafficking
is also linked to illegal armed groups. In Colombia, guerrilla and narcoparamilitary groups charge "taxes" on any illicit shipments passing through the remote
territories they control, while in Peru, the Shining Path guerrillas also profit from the illegal logging trade, according to the
authorities. In other areas, organized crime groups dedicated to eco-trafficking -- in particular the timber trade -- appear to have
evolved. In Nicaragua, communities and the authorities have complained of a growing "wood mafia" and the presence of Honduran
armed groups seeking to profit from timber illegally logged in remote border regions.
Rainforest biod loss is extinction
Takacs, professor of environmental humanities at the Institute for Earth Systems Science and Policy at Cal state, 1996
(David. “The idea of biodiversity: Philosophies of Paradise,” p. 200-201)
So biodiversity keeps the world running. It has value and of itself, as well as for us. Raven, Erwin, and Wilson oblige us
to think about the value of biodiversity for our own lives. The Ehrlichs’ rivet-popper trope makes this same point; by eliminating
rivets, we play Russian roulette with global ecology and human futures: “It
is likely that destruction of the rich
complex of species in the Amazon basin could trigger rapid changes in global climate patterns.
Agriculture remains heavily dependent on stable climate, and human beings remain heavily
dependent on food. By the end of the century the extinction of perhaps a million species in the Amazon basin
could have entrained famines in which a billion human beings perished. And if our species is very
unlucky, the famines could lead to a thermonuclear war, which could extinguish
civilization.” 13 Elsewhere Ehrlich uses different particulars with no less drama: What then will happen if the current
decimation of organic diversity continues? Crop yields will be more difficult to maintain in the face of climatic change, soil erosion,
loss of dependable water supplies, decline of pollinators, and ever more serious assaults by pests. Conversion of productive land to
wasteland will accelerate; deserts will continue their seemingly inexorable expansion. Air pollution will increase, and local climates
will become harsher. Humanity will have to forgo many of the direct economic benefits it might have withdrawn from Earth's well stocked genetic library. It might, for example, miss out on a cure for cancer; but that will make little difference. As ecosystem
services falter, mortality from respiratory and epidemic disease, natural disasters, and especially famine will lower life expectancies
to the point where cancer (largely a disease of the elderly) will be unimportant. Humanity
will bring upon itself
consequences depressingly similar to those expected from a nuclear winter. Barring a nuclear conflict, it
appears that civilization will disappear some time before the end of the next century - not with a bang but a whimper.14
Legalization creates splinter groups
Murray et al 11 (Chad, Ashlee Jackson, Amanda Miralrio, Nicholas Eiden, Elliott School of
International Affairs, George Washington University, April 26, 2011, “Mexican Drug Trafficking
Organizations and Marijuana: The Potential Effects of U.S. Legalization”///TS)
The Sinaloa cartel and Tijuana cartel might splinter into smaller groups. In addition, the loss of
more than 40% of revenue would probably force them to downsize their operations. Like any
large business going through downsizing, employees will likely be shed first in order to maintain
profitability.120 These former DTO operatives will likely not return to earning a legitimate
income, but rather will independently find new revenue sources in a manner similar to their
employers. Therefore it is possible that the legalization of marijuana in the United States could
cause territories currently under the control of the Sinaloa cartel and Tijuana cartel to
become more violent than they are today. This is troubling, as Sinaloa, Baja California,
Sonora, and Chihuahua states are already among the most violent areas of Mexico.121
Cutting off a source of revenue and splintering the cartels increases violence
Shirk 11 (David, Department of Political Science, University of San Diego, 2011, “Drug Violence
and State Responses in Mexico”, http://iis-db.stanford.edu/evnts/6716/ShirkDrug_Violence_and_State_Responses_in_Mexico.pdf///TS)
The second problem is that smaller does not necessarily mean more manageable. Indeed,¶
thus far, the result of cartel fragmentation has been a much more chaotic and
unpredictable¶ pattern of violent conflict among drug trafficking groups than Mexico has ever
seen.¶ Moreover, as Mexico’s cartels have splintered into smaller organizations, their
crimes have¶ become more diversified, branching into kidnapping, bank robbery, human
smuggling and¶ trafficking, oil siphoning, and other illicit revenue-generating activities that
increasingly place¶ ordinary Mexicans at risk. In this sense, the stated goal of reducing the level
of the threat to¶ the state is highly questionable, since the state is no more capable of
tackling smaller, more¶ decentralized organizations than it is larger, hierarchical
organizations.
2NC
A2: link not intrinsic to imagination -- Opportunity cost education is good
Gregory R. Beabout 2008 is an adjunct fellow of the Center for Economic Personalism and
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University Challenges to Using the Principle of
Subsidiarity for Environmental Policy; 5 U. St. Thomas L.J. 210 (2008)
Economics offers many insights into how the world around us works, much more than would be
possible to summarize even in a full-length law review article with many footnotes.5 From among those many
insights, I have selected three "propositions" that demonstrate the fundamental points that economics is necessary, but not
sufficient, to address environmental issues and that economics is necessary, but not sufficient, to reconcile the obligations
of faith toward the poor and the need to protect the environment.
By "propositions" I mean fundamental truths about human behavior and the natural world
that we ignore at our peril, truths as basic as the laws of gravity or humanity's susceptibility to sin. We can
write statutes or regulations that ignore these-and Congress, legislatures, and regulators the world
over frequently do-but such measures risk the same fatal results as bridges built without
accounting for gravity. These propositions I will offer are economic "theory," but they are theory in the sense that the
laws of gravity are a theory and are founded upon economic insights spanning hundreds of years of careful
analyses, testing of hypotheses, and rigorous debates. That does not mean all economists agree on
all policy implications or that every prediction by an economist comes true. It does mean that the
core principles of the discipline are not mere matters of opinion and that economics is not a "point of
view" to be accorded equal weight with folk tales or political preferences. All
theories of how the world works
are not equal -some work better than others and the ones that work deserve greater weight in
policy debates than the ones that do not. Economics' great strength is that it is a concise and powerful
theory that explains the world remarkably well. Those who ignore its insights are doomed to
fail.
Science fiction author Robert Heinlein coined the phrase "TANSTAAFL" as a shorthand way of saying "There Ain't No Such
Thing As A Free Lunch" in his classic 1966 science fiction novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, in which he described a
revolution by residents of lunar colonies against oppressive governments on Earth in 2076.6 Heinlein had the
revolutionaries emblazon TANSTAAFL on their flag and wove the principle through the free lunar society he imagined-a
place where even air cost people money.
"No free lunch" means that everything costs something. Everything. No exceptions. At a minimum, if I spend my
time doing one activity, I cannot spend that time doing something else. Economists refer to the
idea that resources devoted to one activity are unavailable for other activities as "opportunity cost ."
If we do X, we cannot use those resources to do Y. The failure to recognize that there is an opportunity cost to
committing resources to any given use can have disastrous consequences because when we do not
recognize that our actions have costs we cannot intelligently consider our alternatives . And if we
cannot assess the costs and benefits of our alternatives, we cannot make reasoned choices among
them.7 In short, tradeoffs matter, and we need to pay attention to them.
Cartels aren’t targeting Pemex in the squo – martin and Longmire assumes
current cartel violence and says an INCREASE would be bad.
Yes the link is reverse causal -- Cartels diversify away from marijuana
Zaiac 14, Nick, public policy researcher based in Washington, “Marijuana Legalization Won’t Crowd Out Cartels,” May 21st,
http://dailycaller.com/2014/05/21/marijuana-legalization-wont-crowd-out-cartels/
Everyone agrees that drug cartels are terrible, violent organizations, which is probably why a recent Washington Post article
describing a collapse in Mexican wholesale marijuana prices after 2012 has garnered so much attention. Advocates of cannabis
legalization in the U.S. were quick to jump on the story as a victory over the cartels since Mexico decriminalized the drug in 2009.
These advocates
have long claimed that legalization would lead to a weakening of Mexico’s cartels
and, with it, their stranglehold on the country. Unfortunately, this may be wishful thinking, as there are
doubts about how much cannabis legalization can really hurt the cartels. “Farmers in the storied
‘Golden Triangle’ region of Mexico’s Sinaloa state … say they are no longer planting the crop,” the heavily
quoted Washington Post article reports about marijuana farming. “Its wholesale price has collapsed in the past five years, from $100
per kilogram to less than $25.” While a reader can easily misconstrue this quote as saying that less pot is being produced, thereby
weakening the cartels, the article then goes on to describe how
the farmers are instead planting opium
poppies, which will supply the US heroin trade instead. Indeed, recent months have seen a surge
in reports of cartels moving into new forms of illegal activities. A few weeks ago, Mexican
authorities in seized 68,000 tons of cartel-mined iron ore while en route to China. Last year, the Zetas
cartel was revealed to have been involved in massive illegal coal mining operations. Around the same time,the
Knights Templar cartel’s vast involvement in the avocado trade was exposed. And then came the revelation that the “lime crisis”
every margarita-lover in the nation is freaking out about is, at least in part, being fueled by cartel involvement in the fruit’s trade.
Cartels’ movement into normally legal markets seems shocking to many, but the ideas are far from new. As far back as 1995, noted
social scientists Diego Gambetta and Peter Reuter wrote about how cartels
will seek out opportunity for profit any
way they can, citing Cosa Nostra’s involvement in price fixing the concrete industry. Cartels act as catalysts of illicit
entrepreneurship, giving individuals the ability to enter the darker side of legal markets. The
lime trade is an excellent example. Exporting limes to the U.S. is a good, common, and legal
trade. The Knights Templar thereby expropriated some lime farms while using their clout to
regulate competition out of existence. Cartels have proven extremely adaptable to
outside pressure. When some government action can prove successful in the short-term, like the Coast Guard shutting
down the Caribbean cocaine trade, the cartels will adapt. In the Caribbean case, it meant shifting supply routes overland
via Mexico. When crackdowns occur in particular industries, the cartel will shift away from it. A
notable example of this was the U.S.-based mafia’s avoidance of the heroin trade in the 1950s, ceding the trade to the Sicilian mob.
The penalties for trafficking heroin were so stiff that they posed systemic risk to the mafia, and thus they avoided an otherwise
lucrative market. As such, cartels
are becoming diversified networks of businesses, not
simply reliant on the traditional drug trade for revenue. Back in 2011, Sylvia Longmire noted that this
diversification would insulate cartels from economic and political shocks of legalization, just like
having a diverse portfolio of stocks insulates investors from some risk.
they find other crime avenues that destabilize mexico
Murray et al 11 (Chad, Ashlee Jackson, Amanda Miralrio, Nicholas Eiden, Elliott School of
International Affairs, George Washington University, April 26, 2011, “Mexican Drug Trafficking
Organizations and Marijuana: The Potential Effects of U.S. Legalization”///TS)
Mexican DTOs would likely branch into other avenues of crime. Perhaps the most
obvious short-term effect of marijuana legalization is that this would rob the Sinaloa and
Tijuana cartels of up to half of their total revenue. 117 The economic strain placed on the Sinaloa
cartel and Tijuana cartel may not necessarily help Mexico in the short term. The short-term
effects of legalization could very well create chaos for Mexico. “The cartels compensate
for their loss of drug revenue by branching out into other criminal activities--kidnapping,
murder-for-hire, contraband, illegal immigrant smuggling, extortion, theft of oil and other
items, loan-sharking, prostitution, selling protection, etc.”118 This means that if the social and
economic environment remains the same then “they are not going to return to the licit
world.”119 If the Sinaloa cartel and the Tijuana cartel turn towards activities like kidnapping,
human trafficking and extortion, it could lead to a spike in violence that would prove to be
destabilizing in those organizations‟ areas of operation.
CP 1
1NC
Counter-advocacy: Brent and I believe that Marijuana should remain illegal.
We can still engage in an ideographical analysis of the historical and mainstream
narratives about marijuana, but this analysis is not intrinsic to a call for the
legalization of marijuana.
2NC
They made some args about how the CP didn’t solve the case (current prohibition
targets minorities, the CP doesn’t solve their agency args because we don’t
investigate history) but I told them that it’s ok because it’s just a Uniqueness
counterplan for our DA because a large component of the 1AC is “marijuana
legalization inevitable”
FW
1NC
Topicality –
Our interpretation is that the affirmative should instrumentally defend topical
action – that means defending the consequences of plan action
First -- definitions
Legalize means to confirm by law – and make lawful
McGRAW-HILL LEGAL 07 [Burton's Legal Thesaurus, William C. Burton. Used with
permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., http://legaldictionary.thefreedictionary.com/legalize]
legalize verb approve, authorize, bring into conformity with law, confirm, confirm by law, decree by law,
enact by law, ferre, legislate, legitimate, legitimatize, make lawful, make legal, order by law, permit by law,
pronounce legal, sanction, sanction by law, validate
The United States is the United States Federal Government
Washington State Legislature (http://apps.leg.wa.gov/wac/default.aspx?cite=458-20-190)
WAC 458-20-190 Agency filings affecting this section Sales to and by the United States—Doing business on federal reservations—
Sales to foreign governments. (1) Introduction. Federal law prohibits Washington from directly imposing taxes upon the United
States. Persons doing business with the United States are nonetheless subject to the taxes imposed by the state of Washington,
unless specifically exempt. This rule explains the tax reporting responsibilities of persons making sales to the United States and to
foreign governments. The rule also explains the tax reporting responsibilities of persons engaging in business activities within
federal reservations and cleaning up radioactive waste and other by-products of weapons production for the United States. Persons
engaged in construction, installation, or improvement to real property of or for the United States should also refer to WAC 458-2017001 (Government contracting, etc.). Persons building, repairing, or improving streets, roads, and other transportation facilities,
which are owned by the United States should also refer to WAC 458-20-171 (Building, repairing or improving streets, roads, etc.).
Persons selling cigarettes to the United States or any other federal entity should also refer to WAC 458-20-186 (Tax on cigarettes).
(2) "United States" defined. (a) For
the purposes of this rule, the term "United States" means
the federal government, including the executive, legislative, and judicial branches,
its departments, and federal entities exempt from state or local taxation by reason
of specific federal statutory exemption.
Violation – The affirmative does not defend legalization by the United States
federal government
Topicality is a voting issue –
That’s key to limits ---there are an infinite number of reasons that the scholarship
of their advocacy could be a reason to vote affirmative--- these all obviate the only
predictable strategies based on topical action---they overstretch our research
burden and undermine preparedness for all debates. That also justifies Aff
conditionality – without the plan text as a stable source of the offense the aff can
shift their advocacy to get out of offense which discourages research and clash
Second is ground – negative strategies are all based on the process of the FG
legalizing any of the 5 topic areas – the affirmative switches the topic to an aff bias
literature base that makes it impossible to be negative. Not too many areas of the
topic are a bad idea so the only equitable ground for both sides is a discussion of
how to make the topic areas legal
At the very least, they’re extra topical – they claim advantages off of things in the
1ac that aren’t consequences of legalization – that’s an independent voting issue
for limits – the negative could never predict everything the affirmative could
potentially tack onto their plan
Failure to engage the state means the aff fails, coalitions break down, and hawks
seize the political – only engagement solves
Mouffe 2009 (Chantal Mouffe is Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of
Westminster, “The Importance of Engaging the State”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 233-7)
In both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there is therefore emphasis upon ‘critique as withdrawal’. They all call for
the development of a non-state public sphere. They call for self-organisation, experimentation, non-representative and extraparliamentary politics. They
see forms of traditional representative politics as inherently oppressive.
So they do not seek to engage with them, in order to challenge them. They seek to get rid of
them altogether. This disengagement is, for such influential personalities in radical politics today, the key to every political
position in the world. The Multitude must recognise imperial sovereignty itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of
subverting its power. Whereas in the disciplinary era I spoke about earlier, sabotage was the fundamental form of political
resistance, these authors claim that, today, it should be desertion. It is indeed through desertion, through the evacuation of the
places of power, that they think that battles against Empire might be won. Desertion and exodus are, for these important
thinkers, a powerful form of class struggle against imperial postmodernity. According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical
politics in the past was dominated by the notion of ‘the people’. This was, according to them, a unity, acting with one will. And
this unity is linked to the existence of the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not representable
because it is an active self-organising agent that can never achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can never converge in a
general will, because the present globalisation of capital and workers’ struggles will not permit this. It is anti-state and antipopular. Hardt and Negri claim that the Multitude cannot be conceived any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is
representative of the people. They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are non-representative, are needed. They
advocate a withdrawal from existing institutions. This is something which characterises much of
radical politics today. The emphasis is not upon challenging the state. Radical
politics today is often characterised by a mood, a sense and a feeling, that the state itself is
inherently the problem. Critique as engagement I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the
form of social criticism best suited to radical politics today. I agree with Hardt and Negri that it is
important to understand the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is
better apprehended within the framework of the approach outlined in the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). What I want to stress is that many factors have contributed to this
transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with Hardt and
Negri’s view is that, by putting so much emphasis on the workers’ struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by
one single logic: the workers’ resistance to the forces of capitalism in the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon
immaterial labour. In their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the creative role played both by capital
and by labour. To put it another way, they
deny the positive role of political struggle. In Hegemony and
use the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the way in
which meaning is given to institutions or practices: for example, the way in which a given
institution or practice is defined as ‘oppressive to women’, ‘racist’ or ‘environmentally
destructive’. We also point out that every hegemonic order is therefore susceptible to being
challenged by counter-hegemonic practices – feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, for
example. This is illustrated by the plethora of new social movements which presently exist in radical politics
today (Christian, anti-war, counter-globalisation, Muslim, and so on). Clearly not all of these are workers’
struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to influence and have influenced
a new hegemonic order. This means that when we talk about ‘the political’, we do not lose
sight of the ever present possibility of heterogeneity and antagonism within society. There are
Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics we
many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a heterogeneous society – it need not only refer to the workers’
struggles. I submit that it
is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension when one envisages
the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. This means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers’
struggles) is at work in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order
to do this we can find interesting insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of
Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists
manage to use the demands for autonomy of
the new movements that developed in the 1960s, harnessing them in the development of the
post-Fordist networked economy and transforming them into new forms of control. They use
the term ‘artistic critique’ to refer to how the strategies of the counter-culture (the search for
authenticity, the ideal of selfmanagement and the anti-hierarchical exigency) were used to
promote the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary
framework characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how
an important dimension of the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism involves rearticulating existing discourses and
practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism in terms of a hegemonic
intervention. To be sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their analysis is a clear example of what Gramsci
called ‘hegemony through neutralisation’ or ‘passive revolution’. This refers to a situation where demands
which
challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system, which is achieved by
satisfying them in a way that neutralises their subversive potential. When we apprehend the
transition from Fordism to post- Fordism within such a framework, we can understand it as a
hegemonic move by capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged
legitimacy. We did not witness a revolution, in Marx’s sense of the term. Rather, there have been many
different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices. It is clear that, once we envisage social
reality in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’ practices, radical
politics is not about withdrawing completely from existing institutions. Rather, we have
no other choice but to engage with hegemonic practices, in order to challenge
them. This is crucial; otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with and
challenge the existing order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state completely, we leave
the door open for others to take control of systems of authority and regulation. Indeed there are
many historical (and not so historical) examples of this. When the Left shows little interest, Rightwing and authoritarian groups are only too happy to take over the state . The strategy
of exodus could be seen as the reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are many points in
common between the two perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is
the privileged political subject. But in both cases the
state is seen as a monolithic apparatus of domination
that cannot be transformed. It has to ‘wither away’ in order to leave room for a reconciled society beyond law,
power and sovereignty. In reality, as I’ve already noted, others are often perfectly willing to take control. If
my approach – supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices – has been called ‘post-Marxist’ by many, it
is precisely because I have challenged the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To acknowledge the ever present
possibility of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As
far as
politics is concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle
between conflicting hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic
parameters of social life. A successful hegemony fixes the meaning of institutions and social
practices and defines the ‘common sense’ through which a given conception of reality is
established. However, such a result is always contingent, precarious and susceptible to being
challenged by counter-hegemonic interventions. Politics always takes place in a field crisscrossed by antagonisms. A properly political intervention is always one that
engages with a certain aspect of the existing hegemony. It can never be merely
oppositional or conceived as desertion, because it aims to challenge the existing order, so that
it may reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order. Another important aspect of a hegemonic politics
lies in establishing linkages between various demands (such as environmentalists, feminists,
anti-racist groups), so as to transform them into claims that will challenge the existing
structure of power relations. This is a further reason why critique involves engagement,
rather than disengagement. It is clear that the different demands that exist in our societies are
often in conflict with each other. This is why they need to be articulated politically, which
obviously involves the creation of a collective will, a ‘we’. This, in turn, requires the determination of a
‘them’. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem to believe that the
Multitude possesses a natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see ‘the People’ as homogeneous
and expressed in a unitary general will, rather than divided by different political conflicts. Counter-hegemonic
practices, by contrast, do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what could be called an ‘ensemble
of differences’, all coming together, only at a given moment, against a common adversary. Such
as when different groups from many backgrounds come together to protest against a war perpetuated by a state, or when
environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and others come together to challenge dominant models of development and progress.
In these cases, the adversary cannot be defined in broad general terms like ‘Empire’, or
for that matter ‘Capitalism’. It is instead contingent upon the particular circumstances in question
– the specific states, international institutions or governmental practices that are to be challenged.
Put another way, the construction of political demands is dependent upon the specific relations of
power that need to be targeted and transformed, in order to create the conditions for a new hegemony. This
is clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not ‘critique as withdrawal’, but ‘critique as
engagement’. It is a ‘war of position’ that needs to be launched, often across a range of sites, involving
the coming together of a range of interests. This can only be done by establishing links
between social movements, political parties and trade unions, for example. The aim is to create
a common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of sites, and often institutions,
with the aim of transforming them. This, in my view, is how we should conceive the nature of
radical politics.
through discussing paths of government action, debate teaches us to be better
organizational decision makers. Learning about the uniquely different
considerations of organizations is necessary to affecting change in a world
overwhelmingly dominated by institutions.
Algoso 2011 – Masters in Public Administration (May 31, Dave, “Why I got an MPA: Because
organizations matter” http://findwhatworks.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/why-i-got-an-mpabecause-organizations-matter/)
Because organizations
matter. Forget the stories of heroic individuals written in your middle school civics textbook.
Nothing of great importance is ever accomplished by a single person. Thomas Edison had
lab assistants, George Washington’s army had thousands of troops, and Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity had over a million
staff and volunteers when she passed away. Even Jesus had a 12-man posse. In different ways and in vastly different contexts, these
were all organizations. Pick
your favorite historical figure or contemporary hero, and I can almost
guarantee that their greatest successes occurred as part of an organization. Even the most charismatic,
visionary and inspiring leaders have to be able to manage people, or find someone who can do it for them. International
development work is no different. Regardless of your issue of interest — whether private sector investment, rural
development, basic health care, government capacity, girls’ education, or democracy promotion — your work will almost always
involve operating within an organization. How well or poorly that organization functions will have dramatic implications for the
results of your work. A
well-run organization makes better decisions about staffing and
operations; learns more from its mistakes; generates resources and commitment from external
stakeholders; and structures itself to better promote its goals. None of this is easy or straightforward. We
screw it up fairly often. Complaints about NGO management and government bureaucracy are not
new. We all recognize the need for improvement. In my mind, the greatest challenges and constraints
facing international development are managerial and organizational, rather than
technical. Put another way: the greatest opportunities and leverage points lie in how we run our
organizations. Yet our discourse about the international development industry focuses largely on how much money donors
should commit to development and what technical solutions (e.g. deworming, elections, roads, whatever) deserve the funds. We
give short shrift to the questions around how organizations can actually turn those funds into
the technical solutions. The closest we come is to discuss the incentives facing organizations due to donor or political
requirements. I think we can go deeper in addressing the management and organizational issues mentioned above. This thinking led
me to an MPA degree because it straddles that space between organizations and issues. A
degree in economics or
international affairs could teach you all about the problems in the world, and you may even learn how to
address them. But if you don’t learn how to operate in an organization, you may not be
able to channel the resources needed to implement solutions. On the flip side, a typical degree
in management offers relevant skills, but without the content knowledge necessary to understand the context and the issues. I think
the MPA, if you choose the right program for you and use your time well, can do both.
2NC
They said “Fiat is always imagination” “perm of methods” “c/I = direction of the
topic” “we meet bc we K legalization and imagine it’s not illegal” “USFG isn’t this
topic” “you have ground (cap good, prohibition good)” more args about the perm
of methods
Critical Theory destroys the ability to engage in productive debates and political
solutions. It is wishful thinking that produces only “me-search” and not
“research”.
Chandler 2009 (David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, “Questioning
Global Political Activism”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 81-2)
Today more and more people are ‘doing politics’ in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom in International
Relations (IR) study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would argue that the attraction of IR
for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practise global ethics. The boom in the IR
discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of power and interests and
the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I would argue that this rejection has not been a product of
theoretical engagement with Realism but an ethical act of rejection of Realism’s ontological focus . It
seems that our ideas and our theories say much more about us than the world we live in. Normative theorists
and Constructivists tend to support the global ethical turn arguing that we should not be as concerned with ‘what is’ as with the
potential for the emergence of a global ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which
political elites espouse rather than the practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the discipline today are
those frameworks which have taken up Critical Theory and argue that focusing on the world as it exists
is conservative problem-solving while the task for critical theorists is to focus on emancipatory
alternative forms of living or of thinking about the world. Critical thought then becomes a process of
wishful thinking rather than one of engagement, with its advocates arguing that we need to focus on
clarifying our own ethical frameworks and biases and positionality, before thinking about or teaching on
world affairs. This becomes ‘me-search’ rather than research. We have moved a long way from
Hedley Bull’s (1995) perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to put our values to the side to follow
where the question or inquiry might lead. The inward-looking and narcissistic trends in academia, where we
are more concerned with our reflectivity – the awareness of our own ethics and values – than with engaging with
the world, was brought home to me when I asked my IR students which theoretical frameworks they
agreed with most. They mostly replied Critical Theory and Constructivism. This is despite the fact that
the students thought that states operated on the basis of power and self-interest in a world of anarchy.
Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their choices said about them as ethical
individuals, than about how theory might be used to understand and engage with the world . Conclusion I
have attempted to argue that there is a lot at stake in the radical understanding of engagement in global
politics. Politics has become a religious activity, an activity which is no longer socially mediated; it is less
and less an activity based on social engagement and the testing of ideas in public debate or in the
academy. Doing politics today, whether in radical activism, government policy-making or in academia, seems to bring people
into a one-to-one relationship with global issues in the same way religious people have a one-to-one relationship with their God.
Politics is increasingly like religion because when we look for meaning we find it inside ourselves
rather than in the external consequences of our ‘political’ acts . What matters is the conviction or the act
in itself: its connection to the global sphere is one that we increasingly tend to provide idealistically.
Another way of expressing this limited sense of our subjectivity is in the popularity of globalisation theory – the
idea that instrumentality is no longer possible today because the world is such a complex and
interconnected place and therefore there is no way of knowing the consequences of our actions . The
more we engage in the new politics where there is an unmediated relationship between us as
individuals and global issues, the less we engage instrumentally with the outside world, and the less we
engage with our peers and colleagues at the level of political or intellectual debate and organisation.
Progressivism is possible, and it depends on effective decision-making
Clark, professor of law – Catholic University, ‘95
(Leroy D., 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23)
I must now address the thesis that there has been no evolutionary progress for blacks in
America. Professor Bell concludes that blacks improperly read history if we believe, as
Americans in general believe, that progress--racial, in the case of blacks--is "linear and
evolutionary." n49 According to Professor Bell, the "American dogma of automatic progress" has
never applied to blacks. n50 Blacks will never gain full equality, and "even those herculean
efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary 'peaks of progress,' short-lived
victories that slide into irrelevance." n51
Progress toward reducing racial discrimination and subordination has never been
"automatic," if that refers to some natural and inexorable process without struggle. Nor has
progress ever been strictly "linear" in terms of unvarying year by year improvement, because the
combatants on either side of the equality struggle have varied over time in their energies,
resources, capacities, and the quality of their plans. Moreover, neither side could predict or
control all of the variables which accompany progress or non-progress; some factors, like World
War II, occurred in the international arena, and were not exclusively under American control.
With these qualifications, and a long view of history, blacks and their white allies achieved two
profound and qualitatively different leaps forward toward the goal of equality: the end of
slavery, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Moreover, despite open and, lately, covert resistance,
black progress has never been shoved back, in a qualitative sense, to the powerlessness and
abuse of periods preceding these leaps forward. n52
Debate should be about the process, not the product – a discussion of the details is
a more beneficial strategy
Paroske 11 - Assistant professor of communication, Department of Communication and Visual Arts, University of Michigan (
Argumentation and Federal Rulemaking. Controversia; Fall2011, Vol. 7 Issue 2, p34-53, 20p ebsco)
The process
of democratic governance is more than a means to an end. Often, how we deliberate
a policy is as important or even more important to the outcome of the debate than the
underlying issue itself. Recent history is rife with examples of laws that rose and fell on the
mechanics of voting in the legislative body or the parliamentary vehicles in which the legislation
was offered. There is a normative element to deliberation in a democracy, and failure to vet an issue sufficiently is
often seen as grounds for rejecting the legislation itself (Paroske, 2009). For example, it is routine for
legislators of a minority party in Congress to denounce a pending bill because there were not
enough hearings on the issue, or that a sufficient number or kind of amendments was not
allowed, or even that the time devoted to debate on the floor was insufficient. These questions of
process in legislation dominate headlines. Less studied, but perhaps even more interesting, are questions of
process in a regulatory framework. Given its complexity, rulemaking is especially prone to processoriented questions. Far more than legislation, rules must navigate a number of prescribed
argumentative hurdles on their way to adoption. This raises the stakes for following proper
procedure both logically and practically, as violating protocols makes it likely the rule will be
rejected. In addition, the authority of agencies in the federal government is nebulous. Agency power
to make rules is delegated by Congress, but there is little consensus on the degree of latitude that
those designees hold. Since rulemakers lack constitu- tional warrants for coercing citizen
behavior, they are highly susceptible to criticism of their authority and jurisdiction. Asked to act
both independently and under the watch of the constitutional branches, rulemakers must pay
careful attention to process.
CP 2
1NC
Text --- Cannabis should not be illegal in the United States
---The affirmative’s use of the term “marijuana” cannot be separated from its 1930s origin as a
form of racist propaganda against black and brown bodies. Reject their racially politicized
discourse as a starting point for policy change.
Romanelli 2013 Carl, 2006 Green Party Candidate for U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania, founding member of Luzerne County Green
Coalition, It’s Cannabis, not Marijuana, Wilkes http://wilkesbarrescrantonig.com/2013/04/02/its-cannabis-not-marijuana/
For thousands of years humankind has interacted with cannabis and hemp. Its amazing applications have been known, and experienced, from the
days of ancient Egypt to the present time. It is used as medicine, is employed in the manufacture of thousands of industrial products, and
functions, too as a social and religious enhancement. However, there are quite
a few Americans who are unable to
recognize the term “cannabis.” It is not because this is a rare plant, exotic and originating from faraway places. To the contrary,
this particular plant is still enjoyed and exploited worldwide on a regular basis. It grows wild all over the planet. So, why the lack of recognition?
Because, in the US we rarely call the plant by its actual name. Here, it’s known as marijuana and
our dangerously uninformed American public sees it as a threat and a scourge. Such misinformation can be traced back to
the 1930s when the American public was much more knowledgeable on cannabis and hemp, so a
new word had to be invented, or borrowed, in order to sell prohibition. That word had to be tied
to an already engrained dark energy in America, that of racism. So a word that sounded like
something unique to Black, Latino, or Native Americans had to be conjured to effectively scare
the public with the purported dangers of the leaf. Of course, holding federal hearings in secret also helped the cause, as it kept scientists and
farmers from exposing the radical and sinister plans of prohibition. the economy is denied the benefits, and individuals and businesses are denied
the opportunities that would be available through legal cannabis The
word “marijuana,” coined by the Director of the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger of southern Pennsylvania, marks a now 75-yearold campaign of lies and the persecution of anyone favoring this popular and helpful plant.
Anslinger spent most of his career in the shadow of his rival, J. Edgar Hoover. They were both power-crazed bigots amassing files on many high
profile entertainers. Just as Hoover kept secret information on celebrities like John Lennon and Elvis, Anslinger created files on performers like
Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Also like Hoover, Anslinger’s paranoia left few free of his bullying, as even beloved icons in the
prime of their career—Louis Armstrong, Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason, to name a few—made “the list” by the 1950s. Just as Hoover viewed
Rock and Roll musicians as a threat to American heritage, so, too did Anslinger see Jazz musicians as posing the same danger. Of course, the
behavior of poison-hearted individuals like Anslinger and Hoover yielded substantial economic rewards for the special interests of their day. Just
as powerful government officials today serve corporate monsters like Monsanto, in the early days of cannabis prohibition powerful corporations
such as DuPont and Kimberly-Clark (a pulp-based timber and paper company) benefited greatly. However, it was racism that pushed prohibition
over the tipping point to the new absurd reality of the misinformation campaign which still persists today. Sadly, the government no longer needs
to be secretive, as its abuses are blatant and right in front of our eyes in the form of the prison state our so-called free country has become. The
trail of lies and garbage science that follows the word “marijuana” extends beyond the horrors of
incarceration. As Americans, we have lost our right to privacy, lost property through forfeiture and seizure, have become victims of
entrapment by police and blackmail by informants (because the mere presence of cannabis immediately brands a person as a criminal), are
subjected to unwarranted searches (including urine testing for employment), to say nothing of prohibition’s contribution to law enforcement and
judicial system corruption. As a result, the economy is denied the benefits, and individuals and businesses are denied the opportunities that would
be available through legal cannabis. Further, what would obviously be a profitable trade in recreational and medical cannabis for legitimate
business instead is driven into the realm of organized crime and cartels. We end up with a situation—just as we saw with alcohol prohibition—in
let’s take a deep breath, stop using the Mword and dragging along all the lies that have been bound to it, and instead fall in step with
history and the rest of the world by calling the plant by one of its true names: cannabis or hemp. With
that as a starting point we may also understand the truth about the non-addictive, non-toxic cannabis plant. The very notion that we
which the insane laws prove far more harmful than any of the banned substances. So
need to arrest otherwise law-abiding citizens for smoking cannabis is cruelly immoral and inhumane The truth concerning cannabis is that it is
incredibly effective as medicine. Oils made from highly potent strains have been effective in curing many forms of cancer. Inhaled cannabis has
proven a great appetite enhancer and has demonstrated other benefits. Ointments and salves derived from cannabis have numerous therapeutic
properties for healing of wounds, and can even protect us from the radiation of the sun. So-called “industrial hemp” is a cannabis variant
containing extremely low levels of the psychoactive component, THC. This variant can be used to fashion tens of thousands of products, among
them clothes, paper, building materials, soap, rope and many other valuable goods. Finally, the herb will not, and never has, killed anyone. The
very notion that we need to arrest otherwise law-abiding citizens for smoking cannabis is cruelly immoral and inhumane, not to mention
hypocritical. It is impossible to overdose on cannabis, but plenty are killed by criminals profiteering on its underground trade, and by policing
agencies engaged in the war on cannabis. After all, death is a primary component of warfare, is it not? It
is time for truth and
justice. Demand it. Learn the reality about cannabis and stop the injustice of punishing folks for choosing nature over chemicals. The
first place to start is to shed the racist propaganda of the past 75 years, and to get used to
reminding all: IT’S CANNABIS, NOT MARIJUANA. Let the propagandists and drug warriors know we will not
live in fear of our neighbors and that we demand our natural right to interact with a plant, will medicate as we see fit with natural substances, and
will assert our right to have options for our own economic future beyond corporate subservience.
---Counterplan Solves --- Shifting the frame of the discussion from “marijuana” to “cannabis”
enables a linguistic transformation that overcomes racist propaganda.
HHC 2013 Harborside Health Center, Medical Cannabis Support and Dispensary, The “M” Word, http://www.harborsidehealthcenter.com/theM-word.html
We prefer to use the
word cannabis, because it is a respectful, scientific term that encompasses all the
many different uses of the plant. The word "marijuana" is an emotional, pejorative term that has
played a key role in creating the negative stigma that still tragically clings to cannabis. Most cannabis users
recognize the "M word" as offensive, once they learn its history. The term started off life as a Mexican folk name for cannabis, but was
first popularized in the US by the notorious yellow press publisher, William Randolph Hearst. Hearst was a racist, as
well as being committed to the prohibition of cannabis, which threatened his timber investments. He used his control of hundreds of
newspapers to orchestrate a vicious propaganda campaign against cannabis, which featured lurid (and
false) stories about black and brown men committing outrageous acts of murder and mayhem. That campaign
played on then-predominantly racist public opinion to make cannabis illegal at the federal level in 1937. Since then, the M word has
come to be associated with the idea that cannabis is a dangerous and addictive intoxicant-- and
thereby helped continue the prohibition of cannabis. Language is important because it defines
our ideas. Words have a power that transcends their formal meaning. When we change words,
we can also change the thoughts that underlie them. By changing the words we use to describe
cannabis, we can help our fellow citizens understand the truth about it, and see through the decades of
propaganda. That understanding will convert cannabis opponents into supporters, and bring
closer the day when all our prisoners go free, and nobody else is ever again arrested for cannabis.
Case
1NC
The aff doesn’t solve anything – vote neg on presumption – Passive voice
camouflages, conceals and breeds unaccountability, it is analytically and politically
dreadful.
Enloe, 2014 (Cynthia, Research Professor in the International Development, Community, and Environment Department at
Clark University, general goddess of knowledge, “A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe on Curiosity, Confidence, and Feminist
Questions” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Vol 38:2, Summer, 2014 // JED)
FLETCHER FORUM: As editors, we consciously strive to eradicate the passive voice for editorial purposes. Can you explain your
own arguments for eliminating the use of passive voice, particularly in questions?
the passive voice hides
the actor. So, when one says that “aid is being withheld from the Syrian opposition because of
worries about the growing numbers of jihadist fighters amongst the opposition,” you, the reader, should
ask “who is withholding that aid for that reason?” Is it particular elected or civil servant officials
inside the British government? Is it the Qataris? Which Qataris? Is it the U.S. State Department?
Which foreign policy establishment’s worries have won the internal argument about giving more
aid to the anti-Assad opposition?
CYNTHIA ENLOE: I think my main objection, and I have to work on it myself all the time, is that
The passive tense is analytically risky because it camouflages cause, it camouflages who does
what. Even worse, because the passive tense is often used with such authority, it encourages the
reader or the listener not to ask critical questions. And that makes us dumber. The passive tense is
grammatically correct, but it is analytically and politically dreadful.
we need to use the active
voice to admit that “it is not clear who withheld aid; we need to find out.” One should not use the
active tense only when you know the answer; one can use the active tense to alert readers that
they, the writer/speaker, as well as the readers, need to find out. The passive tense breeds not just
incuriosity; the passive tense breeds unaccountability.
Of course, oftentimes writers or researchers do not know who did what. That is okay; but then
The devil is in the details – the process of legalization matters
Adler 14, Jonathan, teaches courses in constitutional, administrative, and environmental law at the Case Western University
School of Law, where he is the inaugural Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Business Law and
Regulation, “This is your federalism on drugs,” 8/28, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokhconspiracy/wp/2014/08/28/this-is-your-federalism-on-drugs/
Some of the more difficult
legal questions confronting state efforts to legalize marijuana involve
the intersection between state law and the existing federal prohibition. Even if the federal
government decides to scale back marijuana law enforcement in non-prohibition states, federal law remains federal
law and it continues to have an effect. Banks, attorneys and others are bound to respect federal law
even in the absence of conforming state laws, and the legalization of a product at the state law does not eliminate the
federal prohibition. Last December, I moderated a panel on “Marijuana and the States,” co-sponsored by CWRU’s Center for
Business Law and Regulation and the Federalism Society that explored some of the tensions between state and federal law on
marijuana, particularly in the area of law enforcement. The Obama administration claims it wants
to respect state
choices, but the laws against marijuana remain on the books. So those who possess marijuana —
or facilitate the production and sale of marijuana — are still violating federal law, and there’s not much the
Justice Department, acting on its own, can do about that. To further explore the legal and policy questions raised by
state-level marijuana policy reforms, the Center for Business Law and Regulation will be hosting a day-long conference on
September 12: Marijuana, Federal Policy, and the States. Presenters will include Ernest Young (Duke), Angela Hawken
(Pepperdine), Robert Mikos (Vanderbilt), Julie Hill (Alabama) Doug Berman (OSU), Mark Kleiman (UCLA), Alex Kreit (TJSL),
Brannon Denning (Cumberland), John Hudak (Brookings) and the VC’s own Will Baude (Chicago). The papers will consider a range
of questions from the scope of federal power and range of state autonomy to the control of spillover effects and the intersection of
marijuana prohibition and banking law. Registration and webcast information may be found here. The hope for the conference, like
the December panel, is to spur greater discussion on the federalism issues presented by state-level marijuana policy reform. It
seems pretty clear that multiple states want no part in marijuana prohibition. The question, then,
is whether the federal government will let states go their own way and, if so, how the federal government
can accomplish that end.
That turns solvency
Rauch 13, Jonathan, guest scholar in Governance Studies at Brookings. He is a contributing editor of National Journal and The
Atlantic, is the author of several books and many articles on public policy, culture, and economics, “Washington Versus Washington
(and Colorado): Why the States Should Lead on Marijuana Policy,” March,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/3/26%20marijuana%20legalization%20localism%20rauch/washi
ngton%20versus%20washington%20and%20colorado_rauch_v17.pdf
This paper argues that the public’s preference is well grounded. Specifically, it makes three points. First, the
clash over
marijuana, far from being anomalous, is the latest and greatest in an escalating series of state-federal
confrontations on hot-button issues. If not handled with care, it could lead to legal confusion,
policy incoherence, and political resentment. Law by itself cannot decide how to proceed; there is no
avoiding making political choices which determine whether and how the federal government and states will cooperate
or collide. Second, in making those choices, a good place to look for insight is to same-sex marriage. Though the two issues are
substantively and legally very different, from a political point of view their similarities are quite striking. With same-sex marriage, a
state-led approach has been a remarkable success, particularly at containing social conflict and adapting deliberately to social
change. Most of the reasons for that success also apply to marijuana legalization. Third, letting
states lead on marijuana
decision-making is legally more difficult than letting them lead on marriage, and it is politically less natural. State
leadership was the default option with marriage; for marijuana it will take hard work and a willingness to
stretch. That said, the work is worth doing. Trying to impose and sustain a one-size-fits all, top-down resolution from Washington,
D.C., is likely to be too unsustainable and inflexible to succeed.
Their use of the ads and visual images is a tool of the corporeal economy that
aestheticizes life and excludes those who cant see the ads
Bill Hughes, ‘99 (Department of Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University , “The Constitution of
Impairment: modernity and the aesthetic of oppression”, Disability & Society, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1999, pp. 155±
172, EBSCO)
The Perceptual Pathology of Non-disablement
A carnal sociology (Crossley, 1995) of impairment requires recognition of the importance of `intercorporeality’ , (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), of the sensual
and sensate relationships between bodies, and an appeal to the ways in which perception is a social act of social constitution. Particular
attention needs to be paid to the aesthetic and emotional mediations which give form to the carnal economy
of everyday life, to the exchanges between bodies which are (to simplify) acts of individual and collective
rejection or acceptance. Every body is steeped in semiosis, emitting clues to identity. Acceptance and rejection in intercorporeal relations is
often as much to do with perceptions of tribal af® liation as with the `peculiaritie s’ of the individual. To argue that discrimination,
exclusion and even oppression can arise at the level of sense perception (in which vision is dominant) is not to
propose an individualistic or naturalis tic explanation of the senses. On the contrary the senses are socialised
and socially constructed (Synnott, 1993). This idea is specifically and clearly articulated, for example, by Walter Benjamin’ s idea of the
`industrialisation of perception’ (Buck-Morss, 1971). The social makes a powerful claim on perception. It is never simply a
physical act.
When a person with an impairment encounters a discriminatory gazeÐ be it institutional or personalÐ she encountersÐ not a pure lookÐ but an act of
invalidation. I want to argue that this act is constituted by a deficit which I will call the perceptual pathology of non-disablement. It is
pathological because it is not neutral and because it thinks of itself as being so. It fails to recognise its own
partiality and assumes, without warrant, the absolute clarity of its own vision. It is an act which embodies a particular
carnal point of view which is infused with the `authority’ of interconnecting discourses drawn principally from medicine, morality and aesthetics. It is
pathological because these interconnecting discourses are immersed in mythologies of normality, truth,
beauty and perfection.
It is essential that a carnal sociology of impairment problematise the perception of non-disabled actors. This is the reverse of the biomedical, Cartesian
disposition to problematise the perception of people with (for example) sensory impairments courtesy of the idea of the faulty machine. 20/20
vision does not guarantee absolute clarity of vision or perspective. Place and time are a sure source of scotomas. Mimetic
and representational theories of knowledge are insensitive to the prejudices of social and cultural location, to
the perpetual imbrications of the corporeal and the political, the perceptual and the discursive. Non-disabled
perception cannot see the limitations of its way of seeing. Its pathologyÐ as I suggested in the previous paragraphÐ resides in this omission. It is not
the impaired body that is distorted, but rather the specular experience and the language that construct it. To put it another way, the non-disabled
gaze is disfiguring yet it assumes itself to be an act that identifies disfigurement.
The medicalisation of impairment is crucial to its perception by non-disabled actors. It provides a particularly
narrow regime of meaning such that people with impairments can be wholly reduced to an authoritative diagnostic category. The impaired person is
therefore, visualised, by way of a system of reference that is reduced (more often than not) to a single word; for example `spastic’ , a word, indeed, in
popular culture, that has doubled as a term of abuse. With a little more `knowledge’ this single system of reference can be doubled and the recipient of
the gaze can be reduced to a regime of meaning denoted by the terms `cerebral palsy’ . The point, however, is that the denotative lexicon, is a
massive attenuation, simplification and objectification of the visual field. The impaired person, becomes synonymous with
the `condition’ , is made meaningful and becomes wholly known by it alone. The (usually complex) clinical meaning of the condition does not need to
be known and usually is not. So the `truth’ becomes a word (or two) and the word corroborates the gaze (yes, even in a world
where signi® ed and signi® er have a profoundly complex and ambiguous relationship). The
moment of corroboration is an
annihilation of the subjectÐ as feminists have repeatedly argued with respect to the male gaze. It is an easy empirical `truth’ that is given in
the medico-popular gaze of non-disablement and a mutant, minimalised language that brings its denotative dimensions to an abrupt end.
Recognition is instantaneous and fixed by the medico-scientific authority of a unitary corporeal signifier. The
gaze is over-determined by the carnal disposition of the other.
At the connotative level signification breaks out of the narrow diagnostic category and multiplies by way of the negativism inherent in it. (The
negativism is not supposed to be there but it is. There may be an interstice between denotation and connotation but, if so, it is as invisibly thin as the
cut that splices a moving image. By and large the distortions of language and the distortions of specular appearance collapse into one another.) The
gaze submits to the moralisms of medical classification, to the order and disorder that is an imperative constituent of clinical
terminology. The `condition’ is visualised as an abnormality, a dysfunction, a pathology, a flaw, a fault, a deficit, a lack (of wholeness)
¼ `a crying shame’ . The gaze cannot hold itself to a lexicon of neutrality. It spills into the language of disorder and the judgement of tragedy (Oliver,
1990, 1996). It will also, by definition, according to Canguilhem (1991) spill into the experience of repulsion and aversion or as Hahn (1986) puts it,
into `aesthetic’ and `existential anxiety’ .
Cartesian perspectivalism dupes the gaze into interpreting the image as unitary and coherent. The hard
data of the eye then erupts into a logocentric avalanche of further interpretations
that snowball into a weltanshauung. When the traces of the processes melt we are left with the certainty that we know the truth of
the object or body. The dupe arises from what Foucault (1973, p. 115) describes as `the great myth of a pure gaze that would be pure language: the
speaking eye’ . The gaze, as Sartre (1958) suggests is also distancing. The scientific gaze is, in fact, supposed to be. This is how it secures its master
principle of objective observation (the speaking eye!). Yet the lay person, no less than the expert, uses the eye to push the other away. It
is a
means of fixing the ontological certainty of self and other. For Sartre, this is a universal element in the
generic dialectical process of the constitution of the self and the social, but it can be applied at the level of actual human relationships since the general
binary categorie s of self and other translate into sociological polarities such as the relationship between disabled and nondisabled persons. In this
context the distancing function of non-disabled perception is largely a question of existential integrity. The carnal flaw of the impaired other is
perceived not only as hard evidence of identity but also as testimony to the wholeness of self. The gaze registers this difference as fundamentalÐ
though it never is. The distancing gaze constructs the stranger. Sartre (1982) goes so far as to suggest that such distancing can
be expressed in the distinction between the human and the sub-human, in for example, how the coloniser sees the
colonised. It establishes a mode of relations in which alterity is the ossified principle. It establishes distance
between `I and alter’ which is the basis of repulsion and charity, and of the phagic and emic welfare strategies that have been
applied to disabled people throughout modernity.
As I have suggested the gaze both embodies and spills out into interpretation and judgement. It is a profoundly cultural act, constituted by a particular
`scopic regime’ or way of seeing and knowing but also constitutive of social and cultural relationships, including patterns of oppression, discrimination
and exclusion. The gaze sees through and constructs discourse. The non-disabled gaze is enmeshed in an aesthetic and emotional
complex of interpretation and judgement which, for purposes of analysis, I will split into two `political’ themes which link the constitution of
impairment directly to speci® c manifestations of oppression which are part of a complex aesthetic of oppression; the `tyranny of perfection’
(Glassner, 1992) and `personal tragedy theory’ (Oliver, 1990).
The former is a reference to the way in which contemporary `visual culture’ (Jenks, 1995) fetishises appearance and image. In post-modernity,
everyday life has been aestheticised (Featherstone, 1992) to the extent that beauty has become the template of
morality and ethics (Shusterman, 1988) and, therefore, a primary source of validation and invalidation. This context
produces new tyrannies, such as the `tyranny of slenderness’ (Chernin, 1983) in which impossibly rigid regimes of bodily maintenance and
consumer asceticism (Featherstone, 1991) have become severe constraints particularly upon many women’ s lives. The `assorteric’ [5] (Levin, 1988)
nature of the gaze is accentuated as judgements of character and worth are read off from and couched in physiognomical distinctions. The concept of
body fascism has arisen in popular culture to express the oppressiveness inherent in the narrowing of norms about the ideal body and the (postmodern) celebration of difference has arisen as an expression of resistance to it. Impairment ® gures(!) badly in a world in which the `six pack’ and the
`size eight garment’ have become measures of authenticity and self-control, as well as sources of social acceptance and rejection. As validity is reduced
to appearance, and physical beauty and ® tness become key symbols of cultural capital, it seems likely that, for impaired people, the exclusionary
practices of old will take on new forms. Aesthetic forms of oppression and the struggle again st them will be intensified. New ways of struggling
against the cultural production of liminality and marginalisation are required. Pride and difference seem to be the concepts/practices that are emerging
to serve this end.
Consequences matter – having faith in a utopianesque view of the world does
nothing to rid conservative groups from pushing against the legalization. It also
makes us complacent by believing the world will resolve itself
legalization is counterproductive- increases use, especially in adolescents which
inhibits brain development, increases the risk of car accidents, and increase the
risk of contracting a mental illness
Also the aff can’t solve racial profiling or mass incarceration because arrests rates are bound to
increase with legalization- alcohol legalization proves- and the aff can’t solve DTOs- taxes create
incentives to remain- underground tobacco industry proves- AND legalization doesn’t solve
illegal trades, means DTOs are here to stay
Sabet 12 (Kevin, was senior policy advisor to President Obama's drug czar from 2009-2011. He
also worked in the White House on drug policy under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W.
Bush, October 30, 2012, “There Are Smarter Ways to Deal With Marijuana Than Legalization”,
http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-marijuana-use-be-legalized/there-are-smarterways-to-deal-with-marijuana-than-legalization///TS)
Because marijuana legalization would expose us to unknown risk—and because there
are better options than both "let 'em use" or "lock 'em up"—I join both major presidential
candidates and the American Medical Association in opposing marijuana legalization. It is a
reckless policy option. But that does not mean we have to be content with the status quo either.
There are smarter ways to deal with marijuana than either extreme.¶ According to the
nonpartisan RAND Corporation, legalization would greatly reduce the price of marijuana,
thereby significantly increasing use, especially among kids. This is a problem because the
brain is developing until age 25, and recently completed research shows that pot can
significantly decrease IQ, double the risk of a car crash (according to the most exhaustive review
ever undertaken on the matter), and significantly increase the chance of contracting a mental
illness. Today's marijuana is not the same stuff parents think back today with nostalgia about—
in fact it is about 4-5 times stronger in potency. ¶ Even the supposed benefits of
legalization may not pan out. Ironically, under legalization, we could see arrest rates
for marijuana actually increase, similar to what we see with alcohol (there are 2.7 million
arrests a year for alcohol versus 800,000 for marijuana), as more users drive high or violate
marijuana growing and using laws. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the
underground market would significantly diminish. In a legal market, where marijuana
is taxed, the well-established illegal drug trade has every incentive to remain. Today's thriving
underground market for tobacco is a good example of this. The drug trade is so profitable that
even undercutting the taxed price would leave cartels with a handsome profit. Marijuana
legalization would also do nothing to loosen the cartels' grip on other illegal trades
such human trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, piracy, and other illicit drugs
(marijuana accounts for a minority of revenues gained by drug trafficking groups). Producing
marijuana en masse at home is also much easier to do than with tobacco or alcohol. We can
expect a thriving grey market.¶
1NR
Think of this as a pic out of the images that they have used WHICH HAS BEEN
DROPPED – they have no defense or even ink about the images that they used in
the first place
The medical gaze marks the world in a binary between normal and abnormal that
priveleges an occularcentric epistemology that manifests in material exclusion of the
disabled – vote negative
Bill Hughes, ‘99 (Department of Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University , “The Constitution of
Impairment: modernity and the aesthetic of oppression”, Disability & Society, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1999, pp. 155±
172, EBSCO)
This binary marking out of the world, first, in the interests and `innocence’ of classification and then (inevitably) in
the name of moral order, was a key feature of nineteenth century positive sociology. Normality and abnormality,
function and dys-function were the master categories that provided sociology with its window on the world. The
gaze that sponsored the sociological imagination from Comte to Parsons is compelled to search for `social pathology’ which `refers
to maladjustments in social relationships’ : an
ocularcentric epistemological position which `is
based on the analogy of bodily maladjustment of function in the organ’ (Gillan & Blackmar, 1930, p. 24).
For sociology, the medicalised body was an attractive way of making sense of the social body. The
former was a natural, organic object of analysable, calculable, spatio-temporal forces and motions, in
which the normal and pathological competed for hegemony . In the context of industrialisation and
urbanisation and, more importantly, the `need’ Ð as Nietzsche might have itÐ to constitute these new social phenomena in `regimes
of truth’ , positive sociology developed a way of seeing which, like biomedicine itself, was normative and normalising (Canguilhem,
1991). The `observations’ of nineteenth century medical science pathologised and invalidated impairment. The
capitalist
economy, with its accent on labour power, validated this invalidation (Finkelstein, 1980) and positive
social science, by virtue of its disembodied discourse of handicap and (in the twentieth century) its
disablist concepts of the impairment and rehabilitation role (Oliver, 1996) stamped the exclusion
order. This suggests that the perceptual and discursive constitution of
impairment is important in the material construction of disabling barriers.
The impaired body is rendered disorderly (and thus repulsive and detestable) by the `positive’
observational practices that produce it.
That medicalization of life transforms into the social exclusion and genocidal
politicals
Hughes 2002 (Bill Hughes, social policy at University of Glasgow, 2002, Disability Studies Today, p. 60-2)
The dominant framework for understanding disability in the modern period has been the medical
model. From the early nineteenth century onwards, biomedicine legitimated the view that biophysical
‘abnormality’ or ‘maladaptation’ leads to, or is the cause of, social ‘abnormality’ or
‘maladaptation.’ In other words, to be defined as a ‘flawed body’ is simultaneously to be defined as
incapable of adequate social participation. The corporealization of disability meant, in practical terms, the
segregation of those so labeled. The logic of the medical model runs from diagnosis to social response. In causal terms, there seem to
be three linked elements in the chain: impairment leads to disability, which in turn leads to confinement or ‘institutionalization’.
The social respond to the ‘flawed’ body particularly in the nineteenth century – was
anthropoemic. This concept refers to the expulsion or exile of alien persons. The Victorian penchant for
excluding people from social participation on the ground of what today might be called ‘difference’ was summed up by Foucault’s
(1969) notion of the ‘great confinement.’ The segregation
associated with confinement was not only
equivalent to a custodial sentence – often for life – but was also the sentence of a ‘social death,’
which was – in itself a sort of tacit legitimation for the denial of human rights and the application of
oppressive practices of care (Barnes 1990). These institutional spaces of exclusion, into which disabled people were cast, were,
after all, ‘civilized’ by medical jurisdiction. The very authority that had objectified disabled people by reducing them to their
impairments now had the opportunity to define disabled people’s needs and, in many cases, act in locl parentis. [continues] The
medical model of disability is, and has been, strongly associated with the potentially reactionary,
theme that ‘biology is destiny,’ and is embedded in popular culture by the ‘naturalization’ of the view that natural
aptitudes determine life chances. Nurture is causally impotent in the social world, it is natural endowment that is the most
efficacious variable. At its worst, in the nineteenth century, the medicalization
of disability dovetailed with what
Foucault called the ‘racisms of the state’ (1979: 54), with the Darwinist and eugenicist perspectives
which promised to cleanse the social body of impunity, imperfection, degeneracy and effectiveness. The concept
of ‘fitness’ was used, in such contexts, as a criterion for making ‘humanity’ – defined in terms of aesthetic ideals of
embodiment – into a relative term. Modernity is riddled with such eugenic conceptions of social hygiene. They are
based on the view that disabled people are either ‘unfit’ to be in society or to reproduce. The eugenic
gaze proposes collective solutions to the contaminant that disabled bodies represent, but does not propose collectivist explanations.
It is imprisoned in the repertoire of socio-biology and social Darwinism, and treats disability as an error of nature that should be
righted. When wedded to a rigid concept of heredity, biological
reductionism may at its worst translate into a
politics of genocide.
This is an easy aff ballot – their only answer was that they criticize the use of visual
imagery of the neoliberal society – that was not the occularcentrism argument –
we have criticized your USE of those images and belief that criticizing them can
ever actuate change. It most certainly cannot HOWEVER the use of imagery is a
neoliberal tool which ALWAYS excludes people with disabilities especially those
who cannot see. Turns the aff because it makes it another form of neoliberal action
David T. Mitchell AND Sharon L. Snyder, ’10 (PhD Michigan and executive director of the Institute
on Disabilities, AND Assistant Professor of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois,
Chicago, “Disability as Multitude Re-working Non-Productive Labor Power” Temple University and
Independent Scholar, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4.2 (2010), 179-194)
It may seem strange to cite disability movements in the context of a definition of multitude that is not based on identity. After all, disability seems to
mark a horizon of contemporary identity-based politics based on variable bodily capacities, appearances, and experiences of stigma developed without
common community institutions or practices of everyday life. For Negri, "the multitude is the power of the singularities that are
brought together within cooperative constellations; and the common precedes production" ("Kairos," 215).
This characterization better captures the productive multiplicity that characterizes movements of disabled
people's goals at a micro and, ultimately, macro level.
First, disability does not constitute a shared social condition. Instead, disabled people recognize the intense
differences that constitute their bodies (what Negri calls "resistant singularities") as their greatest commonality. The
embrace of idiosyncrasy, functional diversity, and aesthetic impropriety across bodies has both an empirical and socially derived utility. This
embrace is empirical in the sense that disability movements contest inadequate universalist categories of
medicine and rehabilitation. According to Disability Studies, the imprecision of medical taxonomies of deviance simultaneously pathologizes and
groups disparate experiences as shared when they may in fact be disparate in a phe-nomenological sense. The embrace is socially derived
because the "unity" of disabled people fighting for their rights seeks a radical edge that is essential to
revolutionary politics: The [multitude], the producers of the common formula from which they are—nonetheless—excluded, are the motor of
the materialist teleology, because only the multitude of the poor can construct the world under the sign of the common, pressing forth relentlessly
beyond the limit of the present. (Negri, 185)
As explained above, cross-cultural efforts by disability groups to seize the commons in the name of universal accessibility for all bodies
contests the neo-liberal state's justification of privatization. Disability movements, as opponents to "accumulation by
dispossession," play a critical role in the expose of neo-liberal practices that disenfranchise people from access to
shared public space (Harvey, 43)-Beyond these two important applications of Disability Studies to critiques of postmodern capitalist containment
strategies, disability
may also be approached in a manner that, perhaps, no other political theory allows . Rather
than focusing on more traditional Marxist objects of resistance—such as the "worker" or "the masses" or
"class conflict"—Hardt and Negri expand the boundaries of effective political culture not only beyond
identity (particularly that of nation), but also beyond the critical Marxist category of surplus labor power. Whereas
surplus labor power denotes a concept of an ever available pool of laborers that assists in keeping wages
down, job security tenuous, scab labor a prevalent threat against worker agency, and a misdirection of
identification between the proletariat, potential proletariat, and the bourgeoisie, the category leaves entire
populations outside of the definitions of resistance . Negri puts the question in this manner:
But can those who are excluded from work still be considered part of a living labor? Of course, since even the
excluded are part of the common. And the poor person, who is more excluded than anyone, i.e. the
singularity at the greatest risk at the edge of being—at the point where Power closes off the teleological
striving towards the to-come—the poor, therefore, are the most common. For if it is only the common that
produces production, those who are excluded but participate in the common are also the expression of living
labor. ("Kairos," 225)
In order to create a less exclusionary definition of subjects beyond notions of labor and surplus labor (both
remain tied to definitions of competitive markets), Negri uses "living labor" to suggest forms of creativity that
cannot be reduced to an economic value. His definition of resistant subjects does not simply expand outwards to
include those who occupy "non-productive bodies," but rather takes its lead from those whose capacities
make them "unfit" for labor as the baseline of human value. In fact, the more "risk" individuals experience
within capitalism, the less likely they are to feel invested in its continuance. As those cultural constituencies
left out of the loop of potential labor, non-productive bodies are inoculated against participating in the
misdirected destabilization of workers as so often characterizes the activities of those in the surplus labor
ranks.1
CONTINUED - NO TEXT REMOVED...
The Work of "Non-Productive Bodies"
Who are the inhabitants of "non-productive bodies"? What do they have to do with disabled people? Why have they existed below the radar of radical
labor theory for so long? Non-productive bodies are those inhabitants of the planet who, largely by virtue of
biological (in)capacity, aesthetic non-conformity, and/ or non-normative labor patterns, have gone invisible
due to the inflexibility of traditional classifications of labor (both economic and political). They
represent the non-laboring populations—not merely excluded from—but also resistant to standardized labor
demands of human value. As many recognize, the term disability was first coined in the mid-i8oos to designate
those incapable of work due to injury. This grouping identified disabled veterans of the Civil War as eligible for various governmental
supports: a pension, prosthetics, life training, etc. Likewise, the diagnostic category of feeblemindedness in the same period
defined those who, due to congenital "feature," were incapable of participating in a competitive market-based
economy. This group also qualified for levels of public support largely received in centralized, carceral forms of institutional care. As we argue in
Cultural Locations of Disability (2006), membership in this latter classification group resulted in the coercion of individuals to exchange their liberties
for social supports. This designation as "non-productive" developed in spite of the fact that many institutional
residents participated in laboring economies developed within institutional societies: residents farmed the
institutions land, provided housekeeping services to fellow inmates and administrators, supervised each other
on behalf of the institution, produced products for the state—brooms, clothing, baskets, etc.—at excessively
low wage rates. In many cases nothing more was provided in exchange for their labors beyond the "benefit"
of living an excluded life within the walls of the institution.
Within this context of disability as non-productive bodies lay an unseen network of labor practices where the
presumably "insufficient" provided for themselves within the walls of an undetected economy. Institutions
often operated as if they were small city-states that actively rendered the labor of the non-laboring classes
invisible. In many cases by the early twentieth century, a majority of institutions could claim themselves as "self supporting." Ironically, such
claims in effect disproved the theory upon which institutions were based: those who could not compete in a labor market should be sheltered from its
demands in an institutional world that functioned as a closed circuit of dependency and care. Instead, institutional residents made an
ideal labor force—those who could efficiently meet the needs of their own segregated society—when
conditions could be adjusted according to the principle: from each according to their ability to each according
to their need(s). The realization of Marx's famous formulation in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha within institutions consequently posed a threat
to reigning orders of capitalism operating beyond the walls of the institution.
In fact, historically, capitalists and bourgeoisie alike have sought remedies in legislatures across the country against institutional labor practices. Blind
broom-makers in downtown Chicago were shut down because their efficiency undermined the ability of other broom manufacturers to make a profit
during 1910. These workers with visual impairments, in turn, went on strike and forced the city to re-open their place of employment on the basis of
their status as an exceptional class of laborers.2 This is one of the great ironies of institutional life for those who were deemed "non-productive" on the
basis of physical, sensory, and/or cognitive incapacity.
The identification of hordes of people designated as "non-productive bodies" and located on the outermost
fringes of productive economies replaces now antiquated categories such as "the masses" The potential for
widespread civil unrest proved compromised because workers found themselves engulfed within networks of
capital that kept them enthralled. Further, as modernity gave way to post-modernity, the antagonistic divisions between workers and
capitalists that were anticipated to fuel revolution became increasingly blurred. No longer did one participate in a simple, agonistic division of labor,
but, for Hardt and Negri, David Harvey, Frederic Jameson, and other political theorists, late capitalism now saturated every nook and cranny of life
and became increasingly confused with the natural order of things. One could find no outside to capitalist production given that the network of
exchange had grown so diffuse and pervasive (here we find Hardt and Negri's concept of biopoliticsy borrowed from Foucault). Capitalism's power
came to be increasingly located in its ability to naturalize its own artificial economic context within every social interaction. This marked the birth of
what Marx anticipated as social capitalism.
Passive voice conceals violence, hiding who is responsible for the violent acts to
blacks and women.
Merola and McGLone, 2011 (Nicholas A. Merola is a doctoral student and Matthew S. McGlone is an
Associate Professor in the Departmentof Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin,
“Adversarial Infrahumanization in the Abortion Debate,” Western Journal of Communication, Vol. 75,
No. 3, May 16, 2011 // JED)
Agentless passive voice constructions in language, in which action is described without explicit
reference to the actor, are another way to reconstrue violent acts. For example, changing the description
of a news event from ‘‘Police shot Blacks dead as meeting turned into riot’’ to ‘‘Blacks shot dead
as meeting turned to riot’’ shifts the implied responsibility for the conflict from the police agents
wielding the guns to the Black victims at which they were aimed (Ng, 2007). Similarly, authors’ use of
grammatical passive voice in police reports and newspaper articles about spousal abuse
MARKED
(e.g., ‘‘the complainant reported having been beaten on numerous occasions’’) can obscure batterers’ responsibility
for their actions (Lamb, 1991; Lamb & Keon,1995). After reading stories about violence against women
that were phrased in the passive voice, males attributed less responsibility to perpetrators and
perceived less harm, and both males and females showed more acceptance of violence against
women (Henley, Miller, & Beazley, 1995). Euphemism and passive voice can be used to conceal an act and disperse the blame for
actions against others. A more direct assault on outsiders is to dehumanize them, to literally view and speak of them as subhuman
entities (Bandura, 1990). Language is a primary means of dehumanizing the out group. Language in the form of negative labels and
racist names are transparent strategies for reducing the humanity of others, but metaphor can also be employed. Bosmajian (1984)
describes how the metaphors used to describe enemies in wartime reshape how people think about them. Hitler and the Nazis used
metaphors that cast Jews as a disease or parasites (e.g., the Jewish bacilli) to dehumanize them, an act that also sets up the
metaphorical extension that they should be exterminated. Santa Ana (1999) cites numerous examples of metaphorical framing of
immigrants as animals in the¶ Los Angeles Times.
Legalization is extremely counterproductive- addiction, mental health, ruined
lives AND the aff can’t solve
Bennett and Beach 14 (William, the first director of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy, hosts the nationally syndicated radio show Morning in America, and Christopher, a
writer in Arlington, Virginia, and the executive producer of Morning in America, May 5, 2014,
“The legalization Juggernaut: Why Won’t More Political Leaders Speak Out On Marijuana?”,
ProQuest///TS)
In their book Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to¶ Know, Mark Kleinman,
Jonathan¶ Caulkins, Angela Hawken, and Beau¶ Kilmer—all of whom support the¶ legalization of
marijuana in some¶ fashion—report, “Marijuana use is¶ highest among 18-25 year olds; their¶
past-year rate (31 percent) is three¶ times the U.S. average.”¶ Hence the pot-tarts and marijuanainfused sodas, brownies, cookies, and pasta sauces that already line¶ the shelves of Colorado’s
pot shops.¶ Billboards advertising marijuana dot¶ Denver freeways and feature cartoon
characters; they’re obviously aimed¶ at young people.¶ The authors also found that¶ “more-thanweekly users account for¶ more than 90 percent of marijuana¶ demand.” In other words,
legalization¶ enables an industry that thrives on¶ maximizing addiction.¶
Furthermore, the medical science¶ is clear: Marijuana use has deleterious¶ effects on health and
behavior, especially among the young.¶ Marijuana today is far more potent¶ than it was in the
1960s and ‘70s. This is not your parents’ or grandparents’¶ pot. “Over just the past fifteen
years,¶ potency levels measured in U.S. seizures have more than doubled,”¶ Marijuana
Legalization reports. The¶ University of Mississippi Potency¶ Monitoring Project found that
the¶ average potency of all cannabis seized¶ by state and federal law enforcement¶ increased
from 3.4 percent in 1993 to¶ about 8.8 percent in 2008. By most¶ estimates, the average potency
today is¶ 13 or 14 percent.¶ The more potent the drug the more¶ dangerous its effects. Marijuana
has¶ already been linked to two deaths in¶ Colorado: a 19-year-old college student who jumped
to his death from¶ a Denver hotel room after eating six¶ times the recommended amount of a¶
pot cookie and a man who allegedly¶ shot and killed his wife after eating¶ marijuana candy and
hallucinating.¶ It seems that the American Medical¶ Association was right when it came out¶ with
a long report opposing legalization in 2013. Among its most damning¶ findings was: “Heavy
cannabis use in¶ adolescence causes persistent impairments in neurocognitive
performance¶ and IQ and use is associated with¶ increased rates of anxiety mood,
and¶ psychotic thought disorders.”¶ And now even casual pot smoking has been linked to
harmful brain¶ abnormalities. An important new¶ study by researchers at Northwestern
University to be published in¶ the Journal of Neuroscience found that¶ young adults who
smoked pot only¶ once or twice a week still showed¶ significant abnormalities in the part¶ of the
brain that deals with memory¶ and motivation.¶ And the consequences of marijuana use are not
restricted to individual users. Over the last 10 years,¶ fatal car accidents involving people¶ who
were stoned have tripled, according to a report in the American Journal¶ of Epidemiology .¶
Marijuana, of course, is a gateway¶ drug. Even the authors of Marijuana Legalization admit that
"kids who use marijuana—particularly those who¶ start marijuana use at a young age—¶ are
statistically much more likely to go¶ on to use other drugs than their peers¶ who do not use
marijuana.”¶ Rather than address these problems, many supporters of marijuana¶ change the
terms of debate. But the¶ claims that if we legalize pot we can¶ reap economic
benefits from taxation¶ and regulation, right wrongs in the¶ criminal justice
system, and undercut¶ the criminal cartels are mostly false¶ It doesn’t seem to be the
case that¶ legalization will produce a financial¶ windfall. Early revenue estimates from¶
Colorado’s own legislative economists¶ have already been revised downward.¶ In any case, a
few more dollars for state¶ governments to spend pale beside the¶ societal costs of
wasted Lives, incapacitated employees, doped-up students,¶ and stoned parents
neglecting life and¶ family responsibilities.¶ Neither is it true that legalizing pot¶ will rid
us of the big crime syndicates.¶ When asked how much drug-related¶ crime, violence, and
corruption marijuana legalization would eliminate,¶ the authors of Marijuana Legalization¶
admit, “Not much.” To date, police in¶ Colorado report that the black market¶ is alive and well.
With taxes on legal¶ pot running 25 percent, cartels can¶ provide cheaper, untaxed weed,
and¶ consumers will buy it.¶ Finally, proponents of legalization¶ claim that pot smokers
(particularly¶ young black males) are crowding our¶ prisons. This couldn’t be further
from¶ the truth. The U.S. criminal justice¶ system is the single largest referral¶ source for
drug treatment programs.¶ What’s more, those serving time for¶ marijuana possession
alone account¶ for less than 1 percent of the state and¶ federal prison population,
and most¶ of these prisoners are drug dealers¶ who pleaded guilty to possession in¶ exchange
for a lesser sentence.¶ The allegations of racial injustice are untrue as well. While studies
of arrest data show that African¶ Americans are 2.5 times more likely¶ to be arrested (not
incarcerated) for¶ marijuana possession than whites,¶ the disparity comes from
purchasing¶ behavior, not racist enforcement. A¶ comprehensive RAND study
demonstrated that African-American marijuana users were “nearly twice as likely¶ to buy
outdoors, three times more¶ likely to buy from a stranger, and significantly more likely to buy
away¶ from their homes.” All these factors¶ greatly increase their risk of arrest.