1NC
1NC DA
Obama’s using capital to persuade Congress to avoid sanctions but
opponents are nearing a veto-proof majority
Riechmann, 12-29—Deb, AP writer, “Obama doesn't rule out opening US embassy in
Iran; Congress planning January vote on sanctions,” MN Star Tribune,
http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/286993011.html --BR
While President Barack Obama hasn't ruled out the possibility of reopening a U.S. Embassy
in Iran, Republicans say the Senate will vote within weeks on a bill to impose more
sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear program. Obama was asked in an NPR interview
broadcast on Monday whether he could envision opening an embassy there during his final
two years in office. "I never say never," Obama said, adding that U.S. ties with Tehran must
be restored in steps. Washington and its partners are hoping to clinch a deal with Iran by
July that would set long-term limits on Iran's enrichment of uranium and other activity that
could produce material for use in nuclear weapons. Iran says its program is solely for
energy production and medical research purposes. It has agreed to some restrictions in
exchange for billions of dollars in relief from U.S. economic sanctions. On a visit to Israel on
Saturday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the new Republican-controlled Senate will vote
on an Iran sanctions bill in January. He said the bipartisan sanction legislation says: "If Iran
walks away from the table, sanctions will be re-imposed. If Iran cheats regarding any deal
that we enter to the Iranians, sanctions will be re-imposed." Graham also is sponsoring
legislation that would require any deal with Iran to be approved by Congress before
sanctions could be lifted. Standing alongside Graham, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu called Iran a "dangerous regime" that should be prevented from having nuclear
weapons. "I believe that what is required are more sanctions, and stronger sanctions,"
Netanyahu said. The Obama administration has been telling members of Congress that it
has won significant concessions from Iran for recently extending nuclear talks, including
promises by the Islamic republic to allow snap inspections of its facilities and to neutralize
much of its remaining uranium stockpile. Administration officials have been presenting the
Iranian concessions to lawmakers in the hopes of convincing them to support the
extension and hold off on new economic sanctions that could derail the diplomatic effort.
Obama has threatened to veto any new sanctions legislation while American diplomats
continue their push for an accord that would set multiyear limits on Iran's nuclear progress
in exchange for an easing of the international sanctions that have crippled the Iranian
economy. Senate hawks are still trying to build a veto-proof majority of 67 votes with
Republicans set to assume the majority next month. Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., told Fox News
Sunday that Senate Republicans might have enough backing from Democrats to pass vetoproof legislation that would impose more sanctions on Iran. "The good thing about those
votes, they will be really bipartisan votes," he said. "I have 17 Democrats with me. . We
have a shot at even getting to a veto-proof majority in the Senate."
The plan’s a political landmine and a waste of political capital
Sullivan, 12—Andrew, one of the most widely syndicated columnists in the USA, “The
Silent Stoner President, Ctd,” The Dish, http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2012/11/27/thesilent-stoner-president-ctd/ -- BR
That old footage you showed of Obama speaking in favor of decriminalization in 2004 reminded me of one
of the weirdest Obama videos I've ever seen. It's from the summer of 2007 when he was running
for president and in it someone on a rope line in New Hampshire asked what his stance was regarding
medical marijuana. You can tell right away from Obama's body language that he really
doesn't want to answer this question, presumably because he thinks it's a political
landmine. Then the oddest thing happens, and I had to watch it a few times to make sure
that I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. You can see Reggie Love in the background
apparently listening to an earpiece, which I'm assuming must be radioed directly to
somebody like Gibbs or Axelrod or some other adviser. Reggie hears something in the
earpiece and suddenly has to get Obama's attention in the middle of this guy's question and
not-so-smoothly transfers the ear piece to Obama, who then pauses, and after a few beats
apparently parrots back the stock answer coming to him in his ear. Obama's response was that
the Feds cracking down on state medical marijuana operations wouldn't be a worthwhile use of federal resources.
it was one of those rare times where
you see the politically calculated side rather than the casual authenticity that usually comes
across in him, and the sense I got was that whatever Obama's actual position on marijuana
is, he's not about to let that be the issue that he wastes political capital on. That's not going
But never mind the answer, which didn't seem like his own. To me,
to be the issue that prevents him from becoming president and fixing everything else that he cares more about.
As a big Obama supporter back in the summer of '07, I wouldn't have dared point out this video before Obama won
the Democratic primaries, the election in 2008, or the recent reelection, but now that we're on the other side of all
three, I couldn't help but pass along the footage. Above is some footage closer to the real Obama.
Obama’s capital is do or die—failure triggers war
Winsor, 14 (Ben, “A Coalition Is Working Furiously Behind The Scenes To Support
Obama's Iran Talks,” Oct 2, http://www.businessinsider.com/rag-tag-iran-coalition-backingdiplomacy-2014-10)
Since November 2013, the Obama administration has engaged with Iran in tense, drawnout nuclear negotiations which optimists hope could bring an end to decades of hostility and
mistrust. Throughout it all, Congress has threatened to play the spoiler, with a tough
sanctions bill passing the House and looming in the Senate which would almost certainly
scuttle the fragile talks over the Iranian nuclear program. Now, as the deadline for the end
of the talks approaches, a coalition of legislators, advocacy groups, and White House
officials are working to hold Congress back from the brink of thwarting what they see
as a historic window of opportunity. They're fighting against legislators and
conservative groups like The Heritage Foundation and The Free Enterprise Institute who
are pushing for the US to take a hawkish stance. Legislators, led by Minnesota
Congressman Keith Ellison, have been maneuvering quietly behind the scenes in Congress
to keep the talks alive. At the same time, officials from the White House have been
leaning heavily on Senate Democrats to refrain from bringing a sanctions bill to
the floor. On the outside, a diverse range of pro-diplomacy groups, led by organisations
like the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and the liberal Jewish organization J
Street, have found a common cause and rallied together to lobby for restraint. Even the
Quakers are energized. “This is a do-or-die moment, either we succeed, or we go in a much
more negative direction,” said NIAC co-founder Trita Parsi at the group’s annual conference
last weekend. Parsi sees the negotiations as a historic moment during a narrow window
of opportunity. Presidents on both sides have sunk significant time and energy
into the talks and Parsi believes the current leadership in both countries is more likely to
make a deal than those who came before — or might come after. “The next president,
whatever political party they’re in, is not going to spend precious political capital
battling Congress… [Obama] is the guy,” Parsi said. Supporters fear that failure of the
talks could trigger increased sanctions, the rise of hardliners in Iran, and relations
spiraling toward military confrontation.
Goes nuclear—tons of different actors and scenarios for extinction
Avery, 13 -- Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen (11/6/2013, John Scales
Avery, “An Attack On Iran Could Escalate Into Global Nuclear War,”
http://www.countercurrents.org/avery061113.htm)
Despite the willingness of Iran's new President, Hassan Rouhani to make all reasonable
concessions to US demands, Israeli pressure groups in Washington continue to demand an
attack on Iran. But such an attack might escalate into a global nuclear war, with
catastrophic consequences. As we approach the 100th anniversary World War I, we should
remember that this colossal disaster escalated uncontrollably from what was intended to be
a minor conflict. There is a danger that an attack on Iran would escalate into a largescale war in the Middle East, entirely destabilizing a region that is already deep in
problems. The unstable government of Pakistan might be overthrown, and the revolutionary
Pakistani government might enter the war on the side of Iran, thus introducing nuclear
weapons into the conflict. Russia and China, firm allies of Iran, might also be drawn into
a general war in the Middle East. Since much of the world's oil comes from the region, such
a war would certainly cause the price of oil to reach unheard-of heights, with catastrophic
effects on the global economy. In the dangerous situation that could potentially result
from an attack on Iran, there is a risk that nuclear weapons would be used, either
intentionally, or by accident or miscalculation. Recent research has shown that besides
making large areas of the world uninhabitable through long-lasting radioactive
contamination, a nuclear war would damage global agriculture to such a extent that a
global famine of previously unknown proportions would result. Thus, nuclear war is the
ultimate ecological catastrophe. It could destroy human civilization and much of the
biosphere. To risk such a war would be an unforgivable offense against the lives and future
of all the peoples of the world, US citizens included.
1NC CP
The United States should propose amendments to all necessary
international drug control treaties to allow the legalization of marijuana.
The United States should reverse all laws that legalize marijuana. The
United States should halt all efforts to legalize marijuana while
international drug control treaties prohibit the legalization of marijuana.
The Drug Enforcement Agency should reschedule marihuana into Schedule
V of the CSA.
The amendment passes and results in eventual legalization—inter se
agreements avoid consensus issues
Don 14
[2014, Allison Don is a University of Minnesota Law School, J.D. candidate 2015, “Lighten
Up: Amending the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs” 23 Minn. J. Int'l L. 213, Hein
Online]
In light of the newly passed legislation within the United States concerning recreational
marijuana and proposed legislation in the international community, the best means of
aligning the Single Convention with evolving norms is to amend the treaty. n153
Amendments allow for formal changes to be made to a treaty while maintaining the treaty's
existence. n154 This allows for adjustment as "parties' understanding of the issue" n155
change or circumstances surrounding the issue change without requiring the drafting of a
new treaty or termination of an existing one. By amending the Single Convention to allow
for the recreational use of marijuana, the United States and other countries considering
such legislation would be able to continue the legislative process without any
international obligations impeding the progression towards marijuana legalization.
Article 47 within the Single Convention provides instructions for amending the treaty,
stating that "any party may propose an amendment to this Convention." n156 In order to
make such a proposal, the amendment itself and the reasons behind the amendment must
be transferred to the Secretary-General of the United Nations in writing who will then
disseminate the proposed amendment to the other parties of the treaty and the
Commission. At this point, the Commission has the power to decide if a conference should
be held to discuss the proposal or if the parties should simply be asked if they are willing to
accept. n157 If there is no objection within 18 months, the amendment becomes fully
adopted; if there is an objection, the Commission may then choose to hold a conference to
review the proposal. n158 With 153 current parties to the Single Convention, arriving at a
consensus may prove difficult. This does not preclude the option to amend as "amendments
require agreement between treaty parties, but not necessarily between all parties." Once an
[*237] amendment has been proposed and adopted, parties are free to decide if they will
become a party to the amendment. n159 Those who opt not to join the amendment remain
bound by the treaty's original obligations. n160 By proposing an amendment that would
permit the use of marijuana for recreational purposes, those countries who wish to
pursue such legislation would be permitted to do so and those countries who remain
in opposition would be able to remain parties to the original treaty preventing the use of
recreational marijuana. n161 C. Support for Legalization Within the United States from a Policy Standpoint The need for amendment is evident as
numerous countries move towards marijuana legalization. n162 Within the United States, a movement towards federal legalization is desirable for numerous reasons. Particularly,
legalization would increase tax revenues, lower drug use rates while also lowering the rate of international violence. 1. Marijuana is Costing Taxpayers Money The United States has one
of the busiest criminal justice systems in the world, resulting in and estimated 12.2 million arrests in 2012 alone. n163 Of these arrests, 1,552,432 were for drug abuse violations with
almost half for marijuana related crimes. n164 The money spent, on a national level, for this level of [*238] enforcement of marijuana laws alone is up to $ 7.7 billion a year. n165 The
excessive spending for the enforcement of marijuana prohibition is not only costing taxpayers, but it's also taking away from potential tax revenue. "If it were taxed similarly to alcohol
and tobacco, marijuana would provide $ 6.2 billion in additional revenue each year ... ." n166 The potential for generated revenue, coupled with savings gained by no longer having the
necessity for strict enforcement of marijuana prohibition could potentially amount to an "annual budget increase of nearly $ 14 billion." n167 In order to identify where some of these
saving would be coming from, it's important to take a closer look at spending within the federal prison system. There are well over 200,000 inmates incarcerated at the federal level;
51% of those inmates' most serious charge is a drug offense. n168 Depending on the level of security they're housed in, each inmate costs the federal government between $ 21,000
and $ 33,000 a year. This kind of expenditure led to the Obama administration having ""to request $ 6.9 billion for the Bureau of Prisons in fiscal [year] 2013.'" n169 The expensive
reality doesn't stop there, "federal prison costs are expected to rise to 30 percent of the Department of Justice's budget by 2020." n170 The potential savings to not only taxpayers but
also to the [*239] criminal justice system by essentially eliminating the prohibition on marijuana n171 can be better illustrated through comparisons to the Netherlands, where
marijuana has been decriminalized since the 1970s. For instance, in 2009, the United States incarcerated 743 people for every 100,000. In 2010, the Netherlands incarcerated 94
people for every 100,000. n172 While prison populations fluctuate from year to year and are impacted by numerous factors n173, the stark difference in incarceration rates between the
Netherlands and the United States is hard to ignore. On the expense side of things, the Netherlands spends approximately $ 307 per capita on their criminal justice system while the
United States spends approximately $ 552. n174 By adopting federal legislation similar to that of Washington and Colorado, the federal government would be lightening the current load
on the prison system while simultaneously generating revenue. 2. The Status of Marijuana as an Illegal Substance Has No Deterrent Effect Proponents of maintaining marijuana as an
illegal substance claim that social stigmas associated with breaking the law will prevent individuals from experimenting with and using marijuana. n175 However, there is no empirical
evidence to [*240] support this claim. Recent figures show that in the United States, despite marijuana legislation, high school aged children who view smoking marijuana as risky
behavior has steadily declined since the early 90's. n176 Although marijuana laws have been in effect for over 70 years, there is further evidence of increasing acceptance of the
substance with fifty-eight percent of the population believing marijuana should be legal. n177 Marijuana usage among the population as a whole also shows that marijuana laws have no
deterrent effect within the United States. In 2012, 7.6 million people over the age of 12 reported using marijuana 20 or more days a month, up from 4.8 million in 2002. n178 There
has also been a rise in the number of individuals who use marijuana 300 or more days a year from 3.1 million in 2002 to 5.4 million in 2012. n179 These figures continue to rise despite
an increase in marijuana enforcement. Between 1996 and 2006, there were nine million arrests for marijuana violations. Despite these arrests and their alleged deterrent effect, 25
million people used marijuana in 2007. n180 Growing public acceptance of marijuana in the United States is evident beyond the realm of private use. In 1987, Judge Douglas Ginsburg
was nominated for a seat on the United States Supreme Court by then President Ronald Reagan. Nine days after his nomination, Judge Ginsburg withdrew his name after receiving
backlash for his prior marijuana use. n181 Four years later, then President George H. W. Bush nominated Judge Clarence Thomas. When it became public that Judge Thomas had
previously smoked marijuana, President Bush stated that it was not an issue that warranted [*241] disqualification. n182 Shortly after, Senator Bill Clinton admitted to marijuana
experimentation and was later elected as the successor to George H. W. Bush as President of the United States. n183 Public acceptance of marijuana in the United States has become
so widespread that for the last 16 years the public has chosen as its President an admitted prior marijuana user. n184 3. Legalization May Decrease Overall Drug Use There is a great
deal of speculation as to the effects marijuana legalization would have, but the best indication is to look to the Netherlands where marijuana has been decriminalized since 1976. n185
Following the adoption of decriminalization, marijuana use in the Netherlands actually declined and has since stabilized with no tangible increase or decrease in use. n186 More
importantly, by providing an alternative means of obtaining marijuana, the Netherlands has successfully isolated casual marijuana users to the "coffee shops' found throughout the
country ""where it is as absurd to ask for hard drugs as it is at an average butcher's [shop] to ask for a zebra-steak." n187 By preventing exposure to drug dealers [*242] peddling
"hard drugs,' n188 decriminalization successfully decreased the demand for harder drugs, particularly heroin, because users were no longer being introduced to "hard drugs' by the
dealers they previously had to associate with in order to purchase marijuana. n189 4. U.S. Legalization Would Reduce Violence on an International Level The black market for marijuana
in the United States has led to the formation of drug cartels in Mexico. The cartels smuggle marijuana into the United States and the proceeds from the sale are then smuggled back
into Mexico where they account for over sixty percent of the cartels overall revenue. n190 Without any legal avenues for settling disputes among rival cartels, they are ultimately pitted
against each other in a violent fight for control over territory, smuggling routes and cities along the border between the United States and Mexico. n191 The resulting violence has
caused approximately "60,000 drug-related murders since ... 2006." n192 In 2011, Mexico's former President, Vicente Fox, explained that ""the drug consumer in the U.S. yields billions
of dollars, money that goes back to Mexico to bribe police and money that buys guns ... . So when you question yourselves about what is going on in Mexico, it depends very much on
what happens in this nation.'" n193 By not forcing marijuana producers underground, the United States could substantially alleviate the violence in Mexico. n194 [*243] CONCLUSION
. The United States
signaled a potential shift in its perspective by publicly condoning the new legislation.
The United States is not alone; the international community has shown an increased
approval, and in some instances outright support, of recreational marijuana. This
growing international support warrants an amendment to the Single Convention in order to
allow states to legislate recreational marijuana as they see fit without the constraints of
international obligations. Amending the Single Convention would allow the United
States to pursue federal legislation similar to that of Colorado and Washington. By
legalizing marijuana on the federal level, the United States would see positive gains both
domestically and internationally. The United States would stand to gain significant revenue
while simultaneously decreasing its prison population and international violence. Such
potentially significant ramifications warrant an amendment to the Single Convention in order
to permit states to weigh these benefits in their own territories without being held
hostage by an international treaty that's no longer in line with popular opinion.
Colorado and Washington took a leap of faith in approving the use of marijuana for recreational purposes despite conflicting federal law
The counterplan solves the case but avoids the disads – rescheduling
ensures that legalization happens down the line after treaty amendment
and creates domestic and international momentum
Sullum 14, Senior editor at Reason magazine (Jacob, 2/10, Why Reschedule Marijuana?,
reason.com/archives/2014/02/10/why-reschedule-marijuana)
In light of President Obama's recent observation that marijuana is safer than alcohol, CNN's Jake Tapper wondered
if he was open to reconsidering marijuana's status as a Schedule I drug. When Tapper asked him that in an
interview that aired last week, Obama derailed the conversation by denying that the executive branch has the
the CSA gives the attorney general the
authority to move drugs between schedules. The attorney general has delegated that
authority to the DEA (a division of the Justice Department), which is why that agency has been the recipient
power to reclassify marijuana. That clearly is not true, since
of petitions urging it to put marijuana in a less restrictive category. Because Obama incorrectly insisted that
rescheduling marijuana would require an act of Congress, he never addressed the merits of doing it
administratively. From the perspective of people who believe marijuana should be legalized for medical or general
use, the advantages of such a move are not as substantial as you might think. But neither are they, as UCLA drug
policy expert Mark Kleiman claims, "identically zero."
Moving marijuana to a less restrictive legal
category would have some significant practical effects, perhaps the most important of
which would be to advance a more honest discussion of marijuana's hazards and
benefits. As Kleiman points out, removing marijuana from Schedule I would not automatically
make it legal for medical use, since any cannabis product still would have to be approved by the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA). "For a doctor to prescribe it," notes Aaron Houston, a Marijuana Majority board member and
WeedMaps lobbyist, "there would have to be an FDA-approved formulation of it." Since marijuana itself cannot be
patented, a pharmaceutical company would not have much incentive to go through the arduous, time-consuming,
and expensive process required to gain FDA approval. Furthermore, drug regulators tend to look askance at herbal
medicine, preferring isolated chemicals. "They're never going to approve a whole-plant organic product," says Dan
Riffle, director of federal policies at the Marijuana Policy Project. Rick Doblin, executive director of the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which for years has been trying to jump through the hoops
required to get marijuana approved as a medicine, disagrees. "FDA,
like most regulatory agencies, wants
to expand the areas it regulates," he says. "FDA does want to regulate botanical drugs and
would be willing to approve whole-plant organic products if Phase 3 studies demonstrate safety and
efficacy." In any case, rescheduling marijuana might make it easier to conduct research on the
plant's medical utility, which could lead to cannabis-derived medications that would pass
muster with the FDA. "The biggest obstacle, at least historically, to doing research on
marijuana to prove its medical benefit is that it's in Schedule I," Riffle says. "So you had that
Catch-22, where marijuana is a Schedule I drug because there's no evidence, and there's no
evidence because marijuana is a Schedule I drug." Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon, co-author of
Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine and a leading expert on cannabis, agrees that marijuana's Schedule I
status has impeded research. "Since 1970," he says, "it has been the major reason why the
kinds of large double-blind studies which have been the basis for FDA approval of medicines
since the mid-1960s have been impossible to pursue in this country." Dale Gieringer, who runs the
California chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, notes that " there are very
burdensome registration requirements and regulations regarding Schedule I substances."
Although "most of them also apply to Schedule II," he says, they do not apply to substances in
Schedules III through V, which are deemed to have progressively lower potential for abuse.
There are other research obstacles, unique to marijuana. In 1999, responding to the legalization of
medical marijuana in California, the Clinton administration imposed an additional layer of review
on research involving cannabis, requiring approval by the Public Health Service as well as
the FDA, the DEA, and the relevant institutional review board. And even after they get all
the other necessary approvals, researchers have to obtain marijuana from the National
Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which has a monopoly on the legal supply—something that is not
true of other Schedule I drugs. NIDA, an agency whose mission focuses on marijuana's hazards, has not been keen
these requirements is a necessary
would be harder to defend if marijuana were
reclassified, which would mean acknowledging that it has medical value and can be used
safely. Rescheduling marijuana would not affect the legal status of state-licensed cannabusinesses in states such
to assist research aimed at measuring its benefits. Although neither of
consequence of marijuana's Schedule I status, they
as Colorado and Washington, which would still be criminal enterprises in the eyes of the federal government. But
rescheduling could remove one of the major financial challenges
facing state-legal marijuana suppliers: Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code
prohibits the deduction of business expenses related to "trafficking in controlled
substances," but only for drugs on Schedule I or II. If marijuana were moved to, say,
Schedule III, that prohibition would no longer apply. Schedule III, which is supposed to be for
Gieringer notes that
medically useful drugs that can be taken safely and have a lower abuse potential than drugs on Schedules I and II,
arguably is appropriate for marijuana because that is where the DEA put Marinol (a.k.a. dronabinol), a synthetic
version of THC, marijuana's main active ingredient. The DEA also has said naturally occurring THC used in generic
versions of Marinol belongs on Schedule III. But depending on how you define abuse potential, marijuana could go
on a lower schedule. "When you look at the Schedule IV drugs," says SUNY at Albany psychologist Mitch
Earleywine, author of Understanding Marijuana, "you've got the opiate Tramadol, the stimulant Modafinil, lethal
sedatives like phenobarbital and chloral hydrate, and the 'date rape' drug rohypnol. Surely cannabis is safer than
these." Grinspoon believes "none of the schedules is truly appropriate for marijuana." But if it he had to pick, he
says, "based on a realistic appraisal of the drug, I would put it in Schedule V." That category, which includes
codeine and opium preparations, is for prescription drugs with the lowest abuse potential. Rick Doblin notes that
the DEA could move cannabis to a lower schedule only if it changed its definition of "currently accepted medical
use," which demands the sort of large-scale, multi-site, double-blind studies that the FDA requires to approve a
new drug. "Assuming that marijuana has been approved as a prescription medicine by the FDA," Doblin says,
"Schedule II seems too high, since Marinol is in Schedule III. Due to its actual abuse potential, marijuana for
medical use should be in Schedule V." Alex Kreit, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego who
the CSA leaves undefined phrases on which scheduling hinges. The
DEA therefore "has enjoyed incredibly broad discretion to interpret and define 'potential for
abuse' and other scheduling criteria," Kreit writes on the Marijuana Law, Policy & Reform blog. Just as it could
studies drug policy, notes that
adopt a less demanding definition of "accepted medical use," the DEA could take a narrower view of "abuse," which
it equates with any nonmedical use. By that standard, marijuana, by far the most popular illegal drug, does indeed
have a high potential for abuse. But that judgment seems peculiar if abuse is defined as problematic use, in which
case potential for abuse might be measured by the percentage of users who become addicted or suffer serious
harm. In truth, as Lester Grinspoon observes, marijuana does not fit any of the schedules very well. It is not the
sort of medicine the FDA is used to approving. But it clearly can be used safely, as Obama conceded when he noted
that it is less dangerous than alcohol. Back in 1988, when he urged the DEA to reschedule marijuana,
Administrative Law Judge Francis Young called it "one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to
man." And while marijuana surely can be abused (what can't?), its potential for abuse seems lower than that of
many pharmaceuticals, not to mention alcohol and tobacco, which the CSA specifically excludes from its schedules.
In light of these inconsistencies, could the DEA take marijuana off of the CSA's schedules altogether? Probably not.
"I think it is very unlikely that the attorney general could remove marijuana from the schedules entirely," Kreit
the CSA gives the attorney general the power to "remove a drug or other substance entirely from
the schedules," it also says that "if control is required by United States obligations under
international treaties, conventions, or protocols in effect on October 27, 1970, the Attorney General
shall issue an order controlling such drug under the schedule he deems most appropriate."
says. Although
Since the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs requires its signatories (which include the United States) to
treaty
obligations seems to bar the DEA from descheduling, as opposed to rescheduling,
marijuana. Cannabis "requires a lot of control" under the Single Convention, notes Eric Sterling, president of the
criminalize production, possession, and distribution of cannabis for nonmedical purposes, this reference to
Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, who helped write federal drug legislation in the 1980s as counsel to the House
Judiciary Committee. "Cannabis is supposed to be controlled like opium and opiates." Then again, Kreit notes,
other CSA provisions "seem to contemplate situations where the U.S. does not accept international scheduling
determinations." Riffle, who is also a lawyer, sums it up this way: "I could make some arguments in a court that
[the reference to drug treaties] doesn't bind the executive, but I'd probably lose." The consequences of
administratively descheduling marijuana are difficult to tease out, given that some provisions of federal law refer to
marijuana specifically, while others talk about "controlled substances" or drugs on certain schedules. Aaron
Houston notes one salutary result of descheduling marijuana: Its consumers would no longer be barred from
owning firearms under the Gun Control Act of 1968, which purports to carve out an exception to the Second
Amendment for "unlawful user[s] of…any controlled substance." Even if the CSA permitted the Obama
even moving
marijuana down one level, from Schedule I to Schedule II, could have an important
impact on the drug policy debate. For one thing, it would free the Office of National Drug
Control Policy (ONDCP), which is required by law to oppose the legalization of any Schedule
I substance, to talk about the hazards of marijuana a little more honestly. Such freedom is
desperately needed, to judge by the effort required to extract the concession that marijuana is safer than
administration to deschedule marijuana, such a step would be politically inconceivable. But
alcohol from ONDCP Deputy Director Michael Botticelli at a congressional hearing this week. "You have Obama
saying that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, that it's important for Colorado and Washington to move
forward," says Riffle, "but nonetheless you have the ONDCP saying, 'We remain steadfastly opposed to
If it weren't a Schedule I drug, they wouldn't have to say that. The ONDCP would be
free to take a new position on legalization or put out more honest statements about the
harms associated with marijuana." Rescheduling marijuana also might affect the level of
cannabis candor at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is barred
from using any of its funds to promote the legalization of Schedule I substances. Riffle
thinks lifting that restriction might even make NIDA, which is part of HHS, more willing to
legalization.'
let researchers use its marijuana. Beyond such statutory implications, acknowledging that
marijuana is more beneficial and less hazardous than the government has been saying all
these years is apt to influence the conversation about how to handle this much-maligned
plant. When the president conceded, in an interview with The New Yorker, that alcohol is more
dangerous than marijuana, it set off weeks of high-profile discussion about whether pot
prohibition is sensible or fair. If he followed up on that observation by asking whether
marijuana meets the criteria for Schedule I, it would call further attention to the
arbitrary distinctions drawn by our drug laws. The resulting discussion could help
pave the way for more ambitious moves, such as legislation lifting the federal ban
on marijuana in the 20 states that have legalized it for medical or recreational use. Bill Piper, director of
national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, says rescheduling is not his top priority, but it would be "a
significant victory for commonsense drug policy," because it "would acknowledge the weight
of scientific evidence and popular support for medical marijuana, and it could boost state
legislative efforts." Sterling thinks that acknowledgment could help people who get into legal
trouble for growing medical marijuana. "Moving marijuana to any other schedule would be a
recognition by the government that it has medical value," he says, which "makes a difference
in terms of what can be said to a jury." Gieringer agrees. "Rescheduling would send a
powerful message around the U.S. that marijuana does have medical uses," he says, "even in
states like Alabama that don't allow it. This would help put to rest the common argument of cops and DAs
that marijuana isn't medicine." Regardless of the practical consequences, there is something to be said for telling
the truth. "When Obama took office," Riffle notes, "he said that decisions in his administration would be guided by
science, not by politics and ideology. It's very clear that marijuana's continued classification as a Schedule I drug
Since Congress banned marijuana in 1937, says Houston, "we have seen
extremely cynical efforts to overblow the danger of marijuana and to demonize it. A move
to reschedule or unschedule would be the first time since 1937 that our government started to roll back
some of that reefer madness."
violates that mandate."
1NC DA
The plan violates drug treaties creates a precedent for a pick and choose
approach to international law which spills over across all treaty areas
Hasse 13
[10/14/13, Heather Hasse is a New York consultant for International Drug Policy Consortium
and the Harm Reduction Coalition, “The 2016 Drugs UNGASS: What does it mean for drug
reform?”
http://drogasenmovimiento.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/13-10-14-the-2016-drugsungass-e28093what-does-it-mean-for-drug-reform_.pdf]
But why? With all of the progress made in reform around the world lately, many – especially
in the US – are asking if the UN is even relevant to domestic drug reform at this point. With
the recent marijuana laws passed in Colorado and Washington and the proposed legislation
in Uruguay – not to mention decriminalization measures enacted in Portugal and a growing
number of other countries – reform seems inevitable. At some point, the argument goes,
the UN system will simply be overtaken by “real world” reform on the ground. Why
even bother with advocacy at the UN? This is not an easy question to answer; however, I
truly believe that to be effective, reform efforts must be made at every level – locally,
nationally, and globally. It may be true that reform efforts in the US and around the world
have made significant progress in the last 10 years. But there is still a long way to go –
marijuana is still not completely legal anywhere in the world (despite state laws to the
contrary, marijuana still remains illegal under federal law throughout the US), and many
human rights abuses continue to be carried out against drug users throughout the
world in the name of drug control. Meanwhile, the international drug control treaties – the
1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and its progeny – remain in place and, in fact,
enjoy nearly universal adherence by 184 member states. That so many countries
comply – at least technically, if not in “spirit” – with the international drug treaty system,
shows just how highly the international community regards the system. As well it
should – the UN system is invaluable and even vital in many areas, including climate
change, HIV/AIDS reduction, and, most recently, the Syrian chemical weapons crisis (and
don’t forget that the international drug treaty system also governs the flow of licit
medication). While it is not unheard of for a country to disregard a treaty, a system in which
countries pick and choose which treaty provisions suit them and ignore the rest is, shall we
say, less than ideal. But beyond the idea of simple respect for international law, there are
practical aspects of reform to consider. The drug problem is a global one, involving not only
consuming countries but producing and transit countries as well. Without global
cooperation, any changes will at best be limited (marijuana reform in Washington and
Colorado hardly affects the issue of human rights abuses in Singapore or the limitations on
harm reduction measures in Russia). At worst, reform efforts enacted ad hoc around the
world could be contradictory and incompatible - as might be the result if, for example,
Colombia and the US opted for a regulated market without the cooperation of Costa Rica or
Honduras, both transit countries. Finally, no matter what you think about the treaties
and the UN drug control system, or how significant you believe them to be in the
grand scheme of things, they are here for the time being, and are necessary to any
discussion about drug reform.
Marijuana is a stress test for the broader treaty regime—the plan’s
unilateral legalization ahead of any treaty reforms destroys I-Law which is
key to prevent a host of existential risks—ISIS, Ukraine, warming and
terrorism
Bennett and Walsh 14
[10/15/14, Wells Bennett & John Walsh are scholars at the Brookings Institute, Marijuana
Legalization is an Opportunity to Modernize International Drug Treaties,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2014/10/15%20marijuana%20le
galization%20modernize%20drug%20treaties%20bennett%20walsh/cepmmjlegalizationv4.
pdf]
In making the case for the United States to proactively open the door to future change in
the drug treaties, we have emphasized, so far, the negative value of avoiding conflict and
instability. We would be remiss not to end on an equally important positive note. The
political changes and incentives in play in the marijuana-policy debate open a real
opportunity to demonstrate and improve the adaptability of the international legal
system—a system on which the United States relies more and more. No treaty can survive
the collapse of a political consensus supporting it. And no treaty system can endure if it
cannot cope with changing political conditions. Sustainability in international law depends
not only on commitment but also on resilience and adaptability. At this writing, one or
two more U.S. states may be about to adopt a version of marijuana legalization. If states
continue to legalize, and if the federal government continues to allow their reforms to
proceed, the short run for treaty reform may come quite soon. This is why we refer to
the challenge of marijuana legalization as a “stress test” for the adaptability of
international law. Should legalization prove politically popular or socially successful, it will
spread to more states and nations; should it spread, then one way or another both domestic
and international politics will find ways to accommodate it—either by adapting formal legal
commitments or by cutting new, informal channels around those commitments. The
latter would weaken international law; the former would strengthen it. Marijuanarelated reform to the drug treaties offers, in several respects, good odds of achieving
constructive adaptation. Reform need not entail any wholesale reconsideration of
international drug policy, nor need any brand new treaty be negotiated. Modest
incrementalism can do the job. In the United States, moreover, a growing political
constituency, embracing members of both political parties, favors reform, so the issue is
less partisan than many. Persuading the Senate to make more room for U.S.
experimentation by revising an existing treaty is a lighter lift than persuading it to
undertake entirely new treaty obligations. And, if the United States plays its cards right
(with, as we have suggested, suitably narrow and hedged legal changes), we believe a
consensus abroad for modest change could become within reach. In any case, broaching the
subject relatively early on—by ruling treaty change in, now, as a possibility, instead of
ruling it out as a non-starter—may itself open the door to a new international conversation
about modernizing and adapting drug treaties. In other words, marijuana offers as good
a chance as we are likely to see of setting a precedent for creative, consensual,
and gradual adaptation of a well-established international treaty structure. The
international legal system, however suspicious of it many Americans may be, has always
mattered and has never mattered more than now. For example, the campaign against ISIS
and the Ukraine crisis underscore all too dramatically the continuing importance of
multilateral security commitments. If anything, international law’s remit is growing as
environmental, social, economic, and security problems transcend national
borders. From global warming to sanctions on Iran and Russia to the campaign against
terrorism and military intervention in a host of theaters, the United States and its allies
increasingly rely on international agreements and commitments to legitimize and
amplify joint action against common threats. Of course, marijuana and the
international narcotics treaties are only one small piece of that puzzle. But they are a
highly visible piece, and they offer a real opportunity to demonstrate adaptation
through international legal channels, rather than around them. Laying groundwork
for manageably incremental changes—by beginning conversations with treaty partners and
other constituencies about where flexibility might lie—would reaffirm American
commitment to constructive adaptation, and to building consensus. Conversely,
pushing the outer boundaries of the drug treaties’ flexibility could weaken the
international order and damage American interests. To put the point another way:
Marijuana policy reform is a stress test that the United States and the
international order should, and realistically can, pass.
That triggers great power nuclear war
Harald Müller 2K, Director of the Peace Research Institute-Frankfurt and Professor of
International Relations at Goethe University, Summer 2000, “Compliance Politics: A Critical
Analysis of Multilateral Arms Control Treaty Enforcement,” The Nonproliferation Review,
http://cns.miis.edu/npr/pdfs/72muell.pdf
A third very crucial condition is a sufficient commonality of interest and commitment among the
major powers with regard to both the treaty in general and the compliance issue in question in
particular. The great powers act on the basis of a multiplicity of interests, commitments, and orientations. If the
major powers' broader political, economic, and security concerns turn out to be contradictory or even antagonistic,
action outside the
multilateral context will affect the great power relationship and, in turn, the prospects for
continued institutionalized cooperation. In short, power relations do not develop in an ahistorical and
context-free way, following quasi-natural laws. They depend rather on habits, conventions, and
perceptions that are shaped by experience. The constraints and relations in the international system are
thus not immutable, but rather malleable.12 When a treaty regime creates expectations of
multilateral compliance policies, unilateralist behavior can thus cause one of two difficulties: • It
may push other powers (and possibly their followers, proxies, allies, and partners) to rally around the accused
a non-multilateral compliance action by one or more of them becomes more likely. Such
party. This may occur either because the accused party is a close ally, or to deter the power(s) acting unilaterally
from further unilateral actions out of fear that such actions may lead to an adverse change in the balance of power.
diminish the chances for pursuing further the road towards
a world order based on cooperative security,13 rather than balance of power principles.
Moreover, such confrontations include a risk of escalation, which could lead to another
confrontation like the Cuban missile crisis, by far the most dangerous event so far in the
nuclear age. • Alternatively, the aggrieved powers may abstain from a direct confrontation out of concern for
Such a course of events would seriously
these risks, but freeze their cooperation in the arms control field as a sort of reprisal. Such a development, while
less dangerous on the surface, would risk the erosion of multilateral arms control and nonproliferation in the long
run. Would-be rule-breakers could be tempted to play off great powers against each other, making it possible for
them to pursue their rule-breaking activities with less risk and a greater likelihood of getting away unscathed with
the prospects of cooperative
security policy as an ordering principle of world politics decline, and the risk of a major
confrontation among great powers increases. This trajectory is a reflection of the pivotal
role of treaty community cohesion. Because of the particular importance of major
powers within that community—the presumption of legal equality notwithstanding—antagonisms
their deviant course of action. In either mode, arms agreements suffer,
among them are particularly likely to sunder that community and prevent it from
maintaining and strengthening the treaty when it is challenged by deviant behavior.
1NC Economy
Financial costs outweigh the benefits of taxation – dependence issues
Sabet 2009 - worked at the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the Clinton and Bush
administrations (June 7, Kevin A., “The price of legalizing pot is too high”
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/07/opinion/oe-sabet7)
One major justification for legalization remains tempting: the money. Unfortunately, however, the financial costs of
Yes, the marijuana market seems like an
attractive target for taxation -- Abt Associates, a research firm, estimates that the industry is worth roughly
marijuana legalization would never outweigh its benefits.
$10 billion a year -- and California could certainly use a chunk of that cash to offset its budget woes in the current
What is rarely discussed, however, is that the likely increase in marijuana
prevalence resulting from legalization would probably increase the already high costs of
marijuana use in society. Accidents would increase, healthcare costs would rise and
productivity would suffer. Legal alcohol serves as a good example: The $8 billion in tax
revenue generated from that widely used drug does little to offset the nearly $200 in social costs
attributed to its use. In fact, both of our two already legal drugs -- alcohol and tobacco -- offer chilling
economic climate.
illustrations of how an open market fuels greater harms. They are cheap and easy to obtain. Commercialization
glamorizes their use and furthers their social acceptance. High profits make aggressive marketing worthwhile for
Addiction is simply the price of doing business. Would marijuana use rise in a legal market for
a legal market would make
getting the drug that much easier. Tobacco and alcohol are used regularly by 30% and 65%
of the population, respectively, while all illegal drugs combined are used by about 6% of
Americans. In the Netherlands, where marijuana is de facto legalized, lifetime use "increased
consistently and sharply" after this policy shift triggered commercialization, tripling among
young adults, according to data analysis from the Rand Corp. We might expect a similar or worse result here in
sellers.
the drug? Admittedly, marijuana is not very difficult to obtain currently, but
America's ad-driven culture.
The aff causes legalization too fast – collapses marijuana industries – the
counterplans gradual approach solves best
Copeland 13, Civil Rights Analyst (Tripp, 1/10, Is Marijuana Legalization the Next Bubble
Industry?, mic.com/articles/22612/is-marijuana-legalization-the-next-bubble-industry)
According to Minsky, there are five elements to any bubble scenario. First, in the displacement stage, a
new entity piques investor interest. Second, the boom stage ensues as prices and participants begin to rise. The
third characteristic is euphoria where investors create justifications for increasingly higher market prices. Forth, the
the panic sets in
when prices fall dramatically and investors sell out to protect against financial ruin. I believe
the emerging pot industry is protected against this phenomenon — for now. The most
important factor protecting the marijuana industry from economic bubble status is
a conflict of laws. Conflict between federal prohibition and state legalization measures will
allow the industry to grow at a reasonable pace, as large scale financial and insurance
institutions will hesitate to support investors in a federally prohibited industry . Although the
marijuana industry is not lacking financial resources due to private and venture capital money, creating a
economic bust similar to the dotcom or housing market will require a much larger influx of
financial resources and participants. Without legalization on a federal level, that influx is
unlikely. Legal conflicts impose a scaling problem on the industry, limiting its growth.
However, in the long run, those limitations may be exactly what create a lasting dynamic .
Additionally, the incremental implementation via a state-by-state federalism approach will allow the
industry to learn from mistakes and determine best practices. Moreover, state governments will be
participants see a profit taking opportunity and money begins to leave the market. And last,
able to study different implementation methods, as they already differ on how to regulate a nascent marijuana
industry. Federalism also has the benefit of limiting federal policy intervention. Although the federal government
has not yet determined how to proceed, it seems likely they will leave this issue to the states. And by limiting the
invasion of federal policy through true federalism, there is less of a chance for broad, top-down policies to facilitate
a bubble environment.
No conflict from economic decline – recession proves
Barnett, 09 – Senior Managing Director of Enterra Solutions LLC, Contributing Editor and
Online Columnist for Esquire (Thomas P.M, “The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid
Financial Crisis,” Aprodex, Asset Protection Index, 8/25/09 http://www.aprodex.com/thenew-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis-398-bl.aspx)
When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was
ablaze with all sorts of scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing
conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading to world war, as it
were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by
China and emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back
over the past year and realize how globalization's first truly worldwide
recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international
security landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by
GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the
last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates
the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles
began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by
Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly,
the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most
accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most
important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for
that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long struggle between Georgia and
its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a most
familiar picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist
only two potential stateon-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one side
acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global
economic trends. And with the United States effectively tied down by its two
ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-into-Pakistan), our
involvement elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest, both leading up
to and following the onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts
movements. Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the
in Latin America, the usual military exercises with allies across Asia, mixing it up with
Everywhere else we find serious instability we pretty
much let it burn, occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do
something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led us to anything beyond
advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: No significant uptick in mass
violence or unrest (remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places like
Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); The usual frequency maintained in civil conflicts (in
all the usual places); Not a single state-on-state war directly caused (and no
pirates off Somalia's coast).
No great improvement or
disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the emergence of new
nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); A modest scaling back of
international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power
(inevitable given the strain); and No serious efforts by any rising great power to
challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are
great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered);
Moscow's occasional deployments of strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its
weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but the best include
China and India stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure,
we've finally seen global defense spending surpass the previous world record
set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on public
budgets created by all this unprecedented "stimulus" spending. If anything, the
friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was the most notable greatpower dynamic caused by the crisis. Can we say that the world has suffered
a distinct shift to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no.
The world's major economies remain governed by center-left or center-right
political factions that remain decidedly friendly to both markets and trade. In the
short run, there were attempts across the board to insulate economies from
immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under current trade
rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars." Instead, the World Trade
Organization is functioning as it was designed to function, and regional
efforts toward free-trade agreements have not slowed. Can we say Islamic
radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was clearly
overwhelmed by the Islamic world's growing disenchantment with the brutality
displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And looking forward, austere
economic times are just as likely to breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting
economic crisis did not prove to be
sufficiently frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global
regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much needed, as I
argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability of the U.S. dollar as the
world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have attached
great significance to this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic
warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world
of globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial
markets, such "diverging interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up
ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which America's fiscal profligacy
goes undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that
this global financial crisis has proven the great resilience of America's postWorld War II international liberal trade order. Do I expect to read any
analyses along those lines in the blogosphere any time soon? Absolutely not. I
fundamentalism. At the end of the day, the
expect the fantastic fear-mongering to proceed apace. That's what the
Internet is for.
US isn’t key – developing countries drive the world economy
Bergsten 2011 - director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, assistant
secretary for international affairs of the US Treasury during 1977–81, most widely quoted
think-tank economist in the world during 1997–2005 (the latest period for which such data
are available)MA, MALD, and PhD degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
(August 12, C. Fred, “The United States in the World Economy”
http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/paper.cfm?ResearchID=1905)
Fortunately, as already noted, most of the emerging market economies are
booming. These developing countries now account for half the world economy
(using purchasing power parity exchange rates). They have provided three quarters
of all global growth over the past decade. They are growing three times as fast
as the traditional leaders: about 6 percent versus 2 percent. Hence their global
share is rising substantially every year and will reach at least two- thirds over
the next decade. They, especially China, will play increasingly decisive world economic
roles.
superior performance is likely to accelerate in the period ahead.
They experienced some declines in growth during the recent Great Recession
but their lead over the rich countries actually grew, indicating their ability to
decouple from the West to a substantial extent. Their fiscal positions are
much stronger than ours: Projections to 2035 show their debt-to-GDP ratios will rise to
Moreover, their
only 50 percent, well within the danger thresholds of 60 to 100 percent, while the rich
countries as a group are currently on (totally unsustainable) trajectories toward 200
Having suffered their own debt crises in previous decades, the
emerging markets thoroughly reformed their banking systems and totally
avoided the financial meltdown experienced by almost all rich countries over
the past few years. South-South trade and investment among these countries is
exploding, further enabling them to avoid negative spillovers from the lagging rich
percent.
nations.
Eight of these countries have now joined the "trillion dollar club" with national
economic output exceeding that level: China, India, Russia, Brazil, Korea, Mexico, and
shortly Turkey and Indonesia. China alone accounts for 10 percent of all global output and is
growing by 10 percent, providing one quarter of the world’s overall economic growth of 4
percent.
the still poor South is largely financing the rich
North. China has become the world’s second largest creditor country, as the
United States has become its largest debtor. But numerous other emerging
Perhaps most dramatic of all,
markets have also piled up massive levels of foreign currency, much of which they then lend
back to us: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Korea, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand,
Algeria, Mexico, and Malaysia all fall solidly into this category with reserves exceeding $100
world of finance has turned topsy-turvy on the back of the role
reversal in global growth.
billion. The
1NC Cartels
Mexico is stable now
Bates 14 (Theunis, "A Mexican drug cartel's rise to dominance," The Week, January 25,
theweek.com/article/index/255503/a-mexican-drug-cartels-rise-to-dominance)
The Mexican crime syndicate is the world's most powerful drug trafficking organization, and
the biggest supplier of illegal narcotics in the U.S. About half of the estimated $65 billion worth of cocaine,
heroin, and other illegal drugs that American users buy each year enters the U.S. via Mexico. Sinaloa — which is named after its
home state in western Mexico — controls more than half of that cross-border trade, from which
it earns at least $3 billion a year. U.S. law--enforcement officials say the group has a
presence in all major American cities, and a near monopoly on the wholesale distribution of heroin and cocaine in
Chicago. The city's Crime Commission has branded Sinaloa's elusive leader, Joaquín Guzmán, also known as El Chapo (or Shorty),
Public Enemy No. 1 — a title last held by Al Capone.
"What Al Capone was to beer and whiskey," said
commission member Arthur Bilek, " Guzmán is to narcotics."¶ How did the cartel get started?¶ Mexican smugglers
have long trafficked homegrown heroin and marijuana to the U.S. But in the 1980s, Mexico also became the primary route for
Colombian cocaine bound for the U.S. At the time, U.S. law enforcement was cracking down on the Colombian drug producers'
attempts to ship the lucrative drug into Florida by boats and planes. So the Colombians hired Mexico's Guadalajara cartel to
smuggle drugs across the border, and paid them in cocaine, which allowed the Mexicans to build their own drug networks in the
U.S. Before long, the Mexicans were the senior partners in the relationship. When Guadalajara's leader was arrested in 1989, the
group's remaining capos, including a young Guzmán, divided up its trafficking routes, creating the Sinaloa, Juárez, and Tijuana
cartels. These gangs soon became locked in a series of turf wars that have killed more than 60,000 people. But throughout the
bloodshed, El Chapo's organization has continued to grow.¶ Why has Sinaloa succeeded?¶ The 5-foot-6 Guzmán may be a grade
school dropout, but he's also "a logistical genius," said Jack Riley, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Chicago
division. He's trafficked cocaine from Colombia to Mexico in small private planes, in the luggage of airline passengers, and on the
cartel's own 747s. Sinaloa has also moved cocaine on custom-built $1 million submarines. El Chapo, 56, has shown similar
ingenuity moving drugs from Mexico to the U.S. He's built scores of tunnels under the border, some of which are air-conditioned
and boast half-mile-long trolley lines. He's sent drugs through U.S. checkpoints in hidden car compartments, in cans of jalapeños,
and in the bellies of frozen shark carcasses. Once in the U.S., the drugs are ferried to warehouses in Chicago — which Guzmán has
called his "home port" — before being divided up and distributed across the nation.¶ Why Chicago?¶ It's the transportation hub of
America. The city is located within a day's drive of 70 percent of the nation's population, and is crisscrossed by major interstate
highways and railway lines. Chicago is also a huge drug market in its own right. Some 86 percent of people arrested in Cook County
in 2012 tested positive for at least one illegal narcotic — the highest percentage of any big U.S. city. With his monopoly in the city,
Guzmán doubled wholesale heroin prices, thus cutting profit margins for street dealers. That fueled greater competition for turf and
exacerbated Chicago's epidemic of gang violence. "It used to be honor among thieves," said Harold Ward, a former gang member
turned anti-violence campaigner. "Now, it's by any means necessary."¶ How violent is the cartel?¶ Sinaloa can be exceedingly
brutal — it left 14 severed heads in iceboxes outside a mayor's office in the northern Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo in 2012. But
compared with other cartel leaders, El Chapo is a practical businessman who prefers "bribe over bullet." He invests millions in
corrupting police and government officials in Mexico rather than intimidating them with violence. "There is a level-headedness
about [Sinaloa's] leadership that the other groups lack," said Malcolm Beith, author of a book on Guzmán titled The Last Narco.
A
2010 National Public Radio investigation of Mexican arrest records noted that Sinaloa had
suffered notably fewer arrests than other cartels. U.S. court documents also show that top Sinaloa
officials regularly met with DEA agents between 2006 and 2012 and fed them intelligence
about rival cartels, helping law enforcement crush their competitors. U.S. and Mexican officials
Some observers claim that this fact has led both Mexican and U.S. authorities to go easy on Sinaloa.¶ Is that allegation true?¶
have denied showing any favoritism toward Sinaloa, and the DEA has arrested several high-ranking cartel members in recent years,
including Jesús Vicente Zambada Niebla, the son of the organization's No. 2 leader, Ismael Zambada. In a rare 2010 interview,
the senior Zambada said that such arrests had no effect on the cartel , and that its drugs
would keep flowing north even if El Chapo were brought down . "When it comes to the capos, jailed, dead,
or extradited," he said, "their replacements are ready."
Legalization causes cartels to compete over new revenue streams
Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow with the Center for 21st Century Security and
Intelligence in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She is an expert on international
and internal conflicts and nontraditional security threats, including insurgency, organized
crime, urban violence and illicit economies, “Law Enforcement Actions in Urban Spaces
Governed by Violent Non-State Entities: Lessons from Latin America,” September ‘11
Often, criminal groups function as security providers (suboptimal as they are), regulating
and punishing theft, robberies, extortions, rapes and murders and dispensing their rules and
punishments for transgressions. The removal of the criminal gangs often results in a rise of
street crime that can become a critical nuisance to the community and discredit the
presence of the State and its law enforcement. That has in fact been the case in both
Medellín in the post-Don Berna order as well as in the pacified favelas of Rio.14 Especially in
areas where police have been trained as light counterinsurgency forces (in Latin America,
unlike South Asia, this is more often a problem in rural areas rather than in urban spaces)
they may be undertrained, under-resourced, and not focused on addressing street crime.
Even community-policing forces may have little capacity to undertake criminal
investigations that lead to meaningful prosecution, yet police units specialized in criminal
investigations may continue to be too far away and have limited access to a pacified urban
space to conduct investigations that reduce street crime. Providing training to community
police forces for tackling at least some street crime and streamlining and facilitating the
presence of specialized criminal investigation units, such as homicide squads and
prosecutors, are of critical importance for improving public safety for the community and for
anchoring State presence in the pacified areas. Under some circumstances, law enforcement
actions against the governing criminal entity may give rise to intense turf warfare among
other criminal groups over the spoils of the criminal market. After Don Berna was extradited
to the United States, for example, many criminal gangs in and around Medellín, including
two large ones led by Sebastian and Valenciano, began fighting each other over smuggling
routes, local drug distribution, prostitution enterprises, and protection rackets. The turf war
triggered extensive violence, including homicide rates in over 100per 100,000 in the late
2000s and on par with those before the FARC was defeated in the city, and Don Berna
established his “narco-peace”.15 Similarly in Mexico, law enforcement actions against
established DTOs triggered intense violence among splinter groups and new gangs, such
as in the Mexican state of Michoacán where interdiction operations against La Familia
Michoacana have given rise to Los Templarios. That criminal gang has since been battling
with Los Zetas, another of Mexican DTOs originating as splinter group, over control of
criminal markets in the state. Such turf wars can compromise the physical and
economic security of local communities far more than even the previous criminal
order. In some circumstances, an urban area to which State presence has been extended
may even suffer a peace deficit. Along with or instead of the hoped-for peace dividend of
legal businesses moving into the urban space and providing legal jobs and income, the new
areas may be attractive as a source of new land to be taken over by nefarious land
developers. Such demands for land in the newly “pacified” urban areas may generate new
forced land displacement, instead of benevolent gentrification. In rural spaces, the cause
of such new illegal displacement may be the presence of profitable resources, such as gold,
coal, and others, or the agricultural potential of the land, such as for African oil palm
plantations. In urban spaces, housing development and real estate speculation may well
drive such illegal displacement. Competition over State resources inserted to “pacified”
areas, such as for socio-economic development, may generate new temptations of illegal
behavior. Militias or new criminal groups seeking to set up new protection rackets and usurp
the inserted State resources may well emerge. Many urban spaces in Colombia suffer from
such old-new criminality today, as they have historically. Local community forces, even
while effective at keeping the old criminals out, may not have the capacity to prevent such
nefarious activities cloaked as legal development. At the same time, criminal units
specializing in white-collar organized crime and asset expropriation are often located in the
city center of a State capital far away from the “pacified” slums and may be paying little
attention to such phenomena in the newly-liberated spaces. Moreover, since such land
takeover and asset expropriation may well be linked to legal and politically-powerful
developers, municipal authorities may lack the motivation to pay close attention to such
criminal developments in the “pacified” urban areas. Yet without diligent and concerted law
enforcement actions against such new crime, the benefits of the complex and costly State
interventions in the marginalized urban areas may be altogether lost. Instead of
addressing the causes of illegal economies and violent organized crime by strengthening
effective and accountable State presence, the State intervention may ultimately only alter
the manifestation of illegality and displace existing problems to other areas. Not
only criminality and criminal gangs, but also the marginalized residents of the urban
shantytowns themselves may merely be forced out to other slums.
Legalizing causes a net increase in cartel violence – shift to other revenue streams
that affect more citizens
Corcoran 13 (Patrick, MA Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, "Mexico's shifting
criminal landscape: changes in gang operation and structure during the past century," InSightCrime.org
http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/700/art%253A10.1007%252Fs12117-013-91908.pdf?auth66=1407004616_6fa114f7864b91ac4d7579906bea212c&ext=.pdf 3/1/13)
The changing nature of Mexico’s trafficking industry offers policy-makers a handful of suggestions and cautionary
notes. One is that the security challenge is no longer limited to the drug trade. As noted above, many of the
newer gangs increasingly rely on revenues from alternative activities rather than
the drug trade. The most notable of these are extortion and kidnapping. These crimes
are qualitatively different from the rest because, by design, they prey on successful, lawabiding citizens. For all but the unluckiest Mexicans, avoiding the ill effects of the
drug trade is simply a matter of not becoming a drug trafficker. However, running
a thriving legitimate business today makes one a target for extortion and
kidnapping, which is to say, these crimes punish the very ingredients of a prosperous
society . This indicates that two of the solutions most frequently offered—demand reduction and
legalization—would not be sufficient to address Mexico’s current problems. In the
long run, driving down the total amount of money available to criminal groups would almost
certainly reduce their threat, but such a transition would not happen overnight. The estimated 500,000
Mexicans who currently make their living off of the drug trade, many of them violent actors, would seek to replace
Because the most logical substitutes for drug trafficking are other
illicit activities— such as extortion, kidnapping and bank-robbery—that often have a greater
impact on civilians, suddenly reducing demand or legalizing drugs may even have
the income. 139
a short-term perverse effect of increasing the chaos .
Legalization is the only scenario for violence to spread – the aff can only
lead to net more violence
Charles D. “Cully” Stimson 10 is a Senior Legal Fellow in the Center for Legal & Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Before joining The Heritage Foundation, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense; as a local, state, federal, and military
prosecutor; and as a defense attorney and law professor. “Legalizing Marijuana: Why Citizens Should Just Say No” Legal
Memorandum #56 on Legal Issues September 13, 2010. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/09/legalizing-marijuanawhy-citizens-should-just-say-no ac 6-18
Violent, brutal, and ruthless, Mexican DTOs will work to maintain their black-market profits at the expense of
American citizens’ safety. Every week, there are news articles cataloguing the murders, kidnappings, robberies, and other thuggish
brutality employed by Mexican drug gangs along the border .
It is nonsensical to argue that these gangs will
simply give up producing marijuana when it is legalized; indeed, their profits might soar,
depending on the actual tax in California and the economics of the interstate trade. While such
profits might not be possible if marijuana was legalized at the national level and these gangs were undercut by mass production,
that is unlikely ever to happen. Nor does anyone really believe that the gangs will subject themselves to state and local regulation,
including taxation. And since the California ballot does nothing to eliminate the black market for marijuana—quite the opposite, in
fact—legalizing
marijuana will only incentivize Mexican DTOs to grow more marijuana to
feed the demand and exploit the black market. Furthermore, should California legalize
marijuana, other entrepreneurs will inevitably attempt to enter the marketplace and game
the system. In doing so, they will compete with Mexican DTOs and other criminal
organizations. Inevitably, violence will follow, and unlike now, that violence will not be
confined to the border as large-scale growers seek to protect their turf—turf that
will necessarily include anywhere they grow, harvest, process, or sell marijuana. While this
may sound far-fetched, Californians in Alameda County are already experiencing the reality
of cartel-run marijuana farms on sometimes stolen land,[54] protected by “guys [who] are
pretty heavily armed and willing to protect their merchandise.”[55] It is not uncommon for
drugs with large illegal markets to be controlled by cartels despite attempts to roll them into
the normal medical control scheme. For instance, cocaine has a medical purpose and can be
prescribed by doctors as Erythroxylum coca, yet its true production and distribution are controlled
by drug cartels and organized crime.[56] As competition from growers and dispensaries
authorized by the RCTCA cuts further into the Mexican DTOs’ business, Californians will face
a real possibility of bloodshed on their own soil as the cartels’ profit-protection measures
turn from defensive to offensive. Thus, marijuana legalization will increase crime, drug use,
and social dislocation across the state of California—the exact opposite of what pro-legalization advocates promise.
There’s no correlation between hegemony and stability
Fettweis, PoliSci Prof @ Tulane, ’10
[Christopher J. Fettweis, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tulane University, “Threat
and Anxiety in US Foreign Policy,” Survival, 52:2, 59-82, March 25th 2010,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00396331003764603]
One potential explanation for the growth of global peace can be dismissed
fairly quickly: US actions do not seem to have contributed much. The limited
evidence suggests that there is little reason to believe in the stabilising
power of the US hegemon, and that there is no relation between the relative
level of American activism and international stability. During the 1990s, the
United States cut back on its defence spending fairly substantially. By 1998, the
United States was spending $100 billion less on defence in real terms than it had in 1990, a 25% reduction.29 To
internationalists, defence hawks and other believers in hegemonic stability, this
irresponsible ‘peace dividend’ endangered both national and global security.
‘No serious analyst of American military capabilities’, argued neo-conservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan in
1996, ‘doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet America’s responsibilities to itself and to
And yet the verdict from the 1990s is fairly plain: the world grew
more peaceful while the United States cut its forces. No state seemed to
believe that its security was endangered by a less-capable US military, or at
least none took any action that would suggest such a belief. No militaries
were enhanced to address power vacuums; no security dilemmas drove
insecurity or arms races; no regional balancing occurred once the stabilising
presence of the US military was diminished. The rest of the world acted as if
the threat of international war was not a pressing concern, despite the
reduction in US military capabilities. Most of all, the United States was no less
safe. The incidence and magnitude of global conflict declined while the United
States cut its military spending under President Bill Clinton, and kept declining as
the George W. Bush administration ramped the spending back up. Complex
world peace’.30
statistical analysis is unnecessary to reach the conclusion that world peace
and US military expenditure are unrelated.
No proxy terrorism impact---Iran’s attempt to contact the cartels was
laughably poor
Steven Dudley 11, Director/ Head of Research Mexico, Central America and Caribbean at
InSight Crime, senior fellow at American University's Center for Latin American and Latino
Studies, 11/12/11, “'Iran-Zetas Plot' Reveals Sketchy Knowledge of Mexican Underworld,”
http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/iran-zetas-plot-reveals-sketchy-knowledge-ofmexican-underworld
The alleged Iranian plot to pay the Zetas drug gang to murder a Washington ambassador sounds like
the idea of someone who has little knowledge and even less contact with criminal groups in
Mexico.
The story would be almost comical, if it did not threaten to destabilize the Middle East. It is filled with holes,
beginning with the Iranian spies who, if the U.S. is to be believed, did not do their homework about
undercover operations or the Zetas or Mexico or drug trafficking or criminal groups, or indeed
much of anything.
The indictment (available for download here) says that an Iranian-American car dealer, Manssor Arbabsiar, based
in Corpus Christi, Texas, was moonlighting as a spy for the Qods Force, a special operations unit of the Iranian
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Specifically, it says, he was working with someone described as his "cousin,"
Gholam Shakuri, who is presumably a member of the Qods with access to a lot of money to pay assassins via wire
transfers.
At some point (the indictment does not say), Arbabsiar met a man he took for a member of the Zetas cartel, who
turned out to be a Drug Enforcement Administration informant. The two then met numerous times in Reynosa,
according to an ABC news account, where they hatched a plan to kill the Saudi Ambassador to Washington DC for a
fee of $1.5 million.
Reynosa, as a quick Google search will tell you, is not Zetas but Gulf Cartel territory. But neither Arbabsiar or the
Qods appear to be avid readers of InSight Crime, Southern Pulse, Borderland Beat, Molly's Frontera List or any
other of the sites that cover this type of criminal organization.
neither the Zetas, nor any other Mexian criminal
group for that matter, are really interested in committing acts of political violence on U.S.
soil, much less ones involving foreign governments . They are interested in committing
criminal acts, mostly in Mexico.
"I find it hard to belive that Los Zetas would entertain the thought of bombing a target on
U.S. soil ," Southern Pulse's Director Samuel Logan told InSight Crime in an online chat. "They and other
Mexican organized criminal groups use street gangs for their U.S. operations precisely
because they respect the FBI and the U.S. justice system. If it's true that Los Zetas agreed to target
If they were, they would have also known that
a foreign national on U.S. soil, with a bomb no less, this group is either more stupid or more desperate than we
thought - or both."
no one is saying that the Zetas were involved in the plot ; the core issue is whether
the Iranian government thought the Zetas would be involved, which speaks to the lack of
understanding or contact they have with the Mexican underworld.
To be fair,
Hezbollah is even less likely to form alliances with cartels
John F. Nolden 11, Lieutenant Colonel , United States Army, 10/28/11, “Mexican Drug
Cartels and al Qaeda: Credible Link or Impracticable Alliance?,” www.dtic.mil/cgibin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA555399
A prevailing assumption identifies al Qaeda as the predominant threat in conducting
terrorist operations and attacking targets within the U.S. homeland. After ten years of
degradation, al Qaeda stills maintains a desire and credible capability unlike any other
Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) to conduct terrorist operations aimed at the U.S. within
its borders. AQAM’s aspiration is well documented in this area. The intent is not to ignore
other FTOs, such as Hezbollah, who exhibit significant operations in Latin America and less
visible activities in Mexico. Hezbollah’s goals in the region appear to be focused more on the
criminal financing lines of operation such as money laundering, arms smuggling, drug
trafficking, and human trafficking, rather than on conducting terrorism within the United
States.3 For this reason, this paper’s focus is on al Qaeda/AQAM and Mexican drug cartels
because of their potentially direct threat to the U.S. homeland. Most agree that a cartelterrorist relationship is possible. However, when it comes to the extent of potential
cooperation, there are two competing analytical approaches to the problem.
Mexico not key to heg --- energy reform now key since we have domestic
supplies
Joe Barnes 11, the Bonner Means Baker Fellow, James A. Baker III Institute for Public
Policy, Rice University, 4/29/11, “Oil and U.S.-Mexico Bilateral Relations,”
http://www.bakerinstitute.org/publications/EF-pub-BarnesBilateral-04292011.pdf
The U.S.-Mexico relationship has traditionally
ranked rather low as a U.S. policy priority . All recent incoming U.S.
presidents offer rhetorical tribute to the centrality of U.S.-Mexico ties. All find themselves
consumed by other foreign policy issues. President Obama is a case
in point. He met Mexican president Felipe Calderon before his inauguration. He visited Mexico in April 2009; Calderon visited the
United States the next month. They have continued to meet; they keep in regular contact. But there is little doubt that
the
Obama administration's foreign policy focus is
elsewhere. The ongoing economic downturn has put
cooperation with other major economies at the
very top of the Obama administration's agenda. U.S.
combat forces are engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States is conducting
military missions in Yemen and Pakistan. Washington is
leading an international effort to halt Iran from developing nuclear
weapons. The Obama administration has launched yet another round of Israeli-Palestinian talks. Popular unrest has swept much of
the Arab world, toppling dictatorships and creating huge uncertainty in the region and in the United States. And, as this paper goes
the United States has intervened in Libya's nascent civil war on behalf of
opponents of the Gaddafi regime. From Washington's perspective, U.S.Mexico relations simply lack the urgency of these
and many other issues.
to print,
No collapse
Neil Couch 12, Brigadier in the British Army, July 2012, “’Mexico in Danger of Rapid
Collapse’: Reality or Exaggeration?”
http://www.da.mod.uk/colleges/rcds/publications/seaford-house-papers/2012-seafordhouse-papers/SHP-2012-Couch.pdf/view
A ‘collapsed’ state, however, as postulated in the Pentagon JOE paper, suggests
‘a total vacuum of authority’, the state having become a ‘mere geographical expression’.16
Such an extreme hypothesis of Mexico disappearing
like those earlier European states seems
implausible for a country that currently has the
world’s 14th largest economy and higher predicted
growth than either the UK, Germany or the USA;
that has no external threat from aggressive neighbours, which was the ‘one
constant’ in the European experience according to Tilly; and does not suffer the
‘disharmony between communities’ that Rotberg says is a feature
common amongst failed states.17,18¶ A review of the literature does not reveal why the JOE paper might have
Crime and
corruption tend to be described not as causes but
as symptoms demonstrating failure. For example, a study for Defense Research and Development
suggested criminal gangs and drug cartels as direct causes leading to state collapse.
Canada attempting to build a predictive model for proximates of state failure barely mentions either.19 One of the
in failed states, ‘corruption
flourishes’ and ‘gangs and criminal syndicates
assume control of the streets’, but again as effect
rather than trigger.20 The Fund for Peace Failed States
Index, does not use either of them as a ‘headline’
indicator, though both are used as contributory factors. This absence may reflect an assessment that
numerous states suffer high levels of organised
crime and corruption and nevertheless do not fail.
Mandel describes the corruption and extreme violence of the Chinese Triads, Italian
Mafia, Japanese Yakuza and the Russian Mob that, in some cases, has continued for
centuries.21 Yet none of these countries were singled
out as potential collapsed or failed states in the
Pentagon’s paper. Indeed, thousands of Americans were
killed in gang warfare during Prohibition and many people ‘knew
principal scholars on the subject, Rotberg, says that
¶
or at least suspected that politicians, judges, lawyers, bankers and business concerns collected many millions of
dollars from frauds, bribes and various forms of extortion’.22
Organised crime and
corruption were the norm in the political, business, and judicial systems and police
Neither the violence
nor the corruption led to state failure.
forces ran their own ‘rackets’ rather than enforcing the law.23
2NC
Conditionality Good 2NC
First our offense1- Critical thinking- Reacting to multiple attacks increases aff ability to
evaluate their best arguments and collapsing down teaches the neg to
make strategic, reactive decisions- that’s key to decisionmaking skills
2- Negative flexibility- The aff gets to parametricize the rez by picking one
example- its an inherent advantage because they know way more about
their one aff than the neg who has to be prepared for every aff- the only
check is to advance multiple cps
Now our defense1- Not “infinitely” regressive- time limits and quality of argument create a
limit. Our interp is: _______________________________________
2- Ground- Aff can always make “aff key” args and addons- it’s offense
against any and all CPs
3- Strat and time skew are inev- The alternative to multiple advocacies is
more T and Das- those require just as many answers and create strategic
double binds too
4- CPs aren’t uniquely complex and perms check the advantages of neg
fiat- a SKFTA CP is way less threatening than a SKFTA DA because you can
perm it
5- To vote aff you have to believe the debate is irreparably damaged by
conditionality- it might make debate hard but not impossible
6- Don’t be fooled by “reciprocity”- the aff’s job is to pick the question of
debate and the neg’s is to find a way to disprove it- that’s why stability is
important for the aff and flexibility is key for the neg
AT: Kleiman – Can’t Reschedule
Kleiman misunderstands administrative law – the DEA has broad discretion
Kreit 14, Law Professor at Thomas Jefferson (Alex, 2/5, Marijuana rescheduling and the
"potential for abuse" factor, lawprofessors.typepad.com/marijuana_law/2014/02/marijuanarescheduling-and-the-potential-for-abuse-factor.html)
Putting the question of what impact rescheduling might have aside, however, I just saw an update to Kleiman's
Kleiman claims that marijuana could not be moved
below Schedule II because "more than 2 million people in the U.S. meet diagnostic criteria
for cannabis abuse or dependency at any one time." Kleiman's position stems from the federal
Controlled Substances Act's three scheduling criteria, one of which is a substance's relative
"potential for abuse." The law provides that substances in Schedules I and II are those with a high potential
for abuse. Schedule III substances have a potential for abuse less than those in Schedules I and II and so on. The
trouble is, the CSA does not define the term "potential for abuse." (In fact, the only term in the
CSA's scheduling criteria that is expressly defined, is "United States.") The result--as anyone with a basic
familiarity with administrative law can guess--is that the DEA has enjoyed incredibly broad
discretion to interpret and define "potential for abuse" and other scheduling criteria. And
here's where Kleiman's position is not as air-tight as he seems to think it is. Currently, the DEA defines
"potential for abuse" in a way that equates, roughly, to overall use rates. And if we apply this
definition (as the DEA does), Kleiamn is right: marijuana's abuse potential would place it in Schedules I or II. But
there are plenty of other reasonable ways to define "potential for abuse." And the only thing
stopping the DEA from adopting a different definition of "potential for abuse" is, well, the
DEA. Instead of focusing on the total number of users, for example, we might define
"potential for abuse" based on the percentage of users who become addicted to a substance
or based on the ancillary harms that come from regular use. (Indeed, many people seem to think
post that struck me as misguided. In the update,
idea that marijuana's abuse potential is the same as heroin's is pretty ridiculous. Presumably, folks in this category
think that there are other measures of abuse potential than Kleiman's/the DEAs.) This is not to say that marijuana
would necessarily end up with a lower abuse potential rating if the DEA decided to revise its definition of the term.
My point is only that it could and that there are certainly reasonable definitions of "potential for abuse" in which it
Kleiman's position that marijuana's abuse potential means it must
remain in Schedule I or II misunderstands the way administrative law works and
the DEA's power to interpret "potential for abuse."
almost surely would.
AT: Can’t Solve - FDA
The counterplan ensures FDA approval for marijuana research
Sullum 14, Senior editor at Reason magazine (Jacob, 2/10, Why Reschedule Marijuana?,
reason.com/archives/2014/02/10/why-reschedule-marijuana)
In any case, rescheduling marijuana might make it easier to conduct research on the plant’s
medical utility, which could lead to cannabis-derived medications that would pass muster
with the FDA. “The biggest obstacle, at least historically, to doing research on marijuana
to prove its medical benefit is that it’s in Schedule I,” Riffle says. “So you had that Catch22, where marijuana is a Schedule I drug because there’s no evidence, and there’s no
evidence because marijuana is a Schedule I drug.” Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon,
co-author of Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine and a leading expert on cannabis, agrees
that marijuana’s Schedule I status has impeded research. “Since 1970,” he says, “it has
been the major reason why the kinds of large double-blind studies which have been the
basis for FDA approval of medicines since the mid-1960s have been impossible to pursue in
this country.” Dale Gieringer, who runs the California chapter of the National Organization
for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, notes that “there are very burdensome registration
requirements and regulations regarding Schedule I substances.” Although “most of them
also apply to Schedule II,” he says, they do not apply to substances in Schedules III
through V, which are deemed to have progressively lower potential for abuse.
2NC Say Yes
The CP results in an amended treaty—there’s a global surge in support for
an alternative to cannabis prohibition that the CP capitalizes on—that’s
Don
Framing issues—
a. Threshold low—none of their evidence assumes inter se agreements—
amendments can be passed between parties where only the parties that
want to legalize marijuana sign on to the amended version of the treaty—
this is enabled by the single convention and means only one country has to
approve the amendment before the US can legalize without violating the
treaty—that’s Don
Full consensus isn’t necessary for an amendment
Jelsma 14
[10/17/14, Martin Jelsma is the Director, Drugs and Democracy Program Transnational
Institute, “The Brookings Institution International Impacts Of the U.S. Trend Towards Legal
“ Marijuana,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/events/2014/10/17%20international%20impacts%20m
arijuana/20141017_legal_marijuana_transcript.pdf]
there are also options for adaptation in the regime that do not require a full
consensus of all the parties. Now, the WHO review is already one example, because if the WHO
would recommend a de-scheduling of cannabis, it is -- a decision like that is taken by a
simple majority, not consensus. There is also the possibility of countries individually or in group to
And secondly,
withdraw from the treaties and re-adhere with certain reservations. That’s a path that Bolivia has taken in the case
And there is the possibility also, that a group of countries can sign an
inter se agreement, where they you know, agree among themselves that the treaty
is applied in a different way, while they still maintain their full obligations to all the treaty
parties that are not part of the inter se agreement.
of in (Inaudible).
b. US influence—US support for prohibition is what sustains an oppositional
bloc—US influence the other way ensures amendment passage
Kumah-Abiwu 14
[Felix Kumah-Abiwu is a Professor of Africana Studies @ Eastern Illinois UniversityDr. Felix
Kumah-Abiwu received his PhD in Political Science (International Relations,
Comparative/African Politics and Public Policy) from West Virginia University. He also
studied at Ohio University and the Legon Center for International Affairs and Diplomacy,
University of Ghana, “The Quest for Global Narcotics Policy Change: Does the United States
Matter?” International Journal of Public Administration, 37: (2014) pg. 53–64]
the US has a strong influence in many issue
areas, including narcotics within the global system. Bullington (2004, p. 690) captures this assumption
by noting that: The United States had been the prime mover of this early anti-drug legislation,
relying on diplomatic pressure and arm twisting to forge a shaky consensus among
nations that were generally much less convinced of the need for international controls. This
US NARCOTICS POLICY TOOLS OF INFLUENCE Clearly,
American triumph signaled the beginning of nearly a century during which America literally dominated the direction
of drug control and drug policy in the international arena. For Levine (2003, p. 148),
the global narcotics
regime has been sustained for many years because the “US has used the UN as the
international agency to create, spread, and supervise world-wide prohibition.” In a
similar argument, Bewley-Taylor (1999a) observes that the US employs key policy tools of influence in
its effort to globalize the prohibition approach to narcotics control. As previously noted, this article
argues that the US to some extent shapes the global narcotics policy through four major policy tools of influence.
the US employs diplomacy (bilateral and multilateral)
as a key policy tool of influence in shaping the global narcotics regime (Bullington, 2004; Levine,
2003). For Bewley-Taylor (1999a), the US employs its diplomatic strength within the UN to
pressure other countries in supporting its preferred prohibition approach to narcotics
control. In fact, Bewley-Taylor’s (1999a) classic example is worth reiterating in support of my argument.
Table 3 provides a summary of the policy tools. First,
According to him, an independent research on the usefulness of drugs (legal and non-legal) was conducted
between 1992 and 1994 by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Program on Substance Abuse (PSA) in
conjunction with the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI). Surprisingly, the findings of
the study show greater health problems associated with the use of legal drugs than with occasional use of some
narcotic drugs Fearing that the findings might undermine the existing prohibition approach, the UN was pressured
by the US to issue a disclaimer on the report (Bewley-Taylor, 1999a, p. 169; Kumah-Abiwu, 2012). In fact, one of
The US plays very dominant
role and has provided an enormous amount of funding to UN anti-drug efforts. At one point
the experts interviewed for this study shares a similar view by indicating that:
when the World Health Organization (WHO) was planning to issue a report on the lack of dangerousness of
cannabis, the US pressured the WHO to kill the report . . . . At another point when the Liberal government of
Canada under Prime Minister Chretien proposed to decriminalize marijuana, the Bush Administration’s drug czar,
John Walters, threatened trade retaliation against Canada regarding timber, fish, and other issues. (An official
interviewed at the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. Also see Kumah-Abiwu, 2012) In the words of another policy
Latin American lawmakers, for instance, have moved intellectually and also policy wise
toward decriminalization in recent years, but have feared going far because of their
northern neighbor. In recent years, the US has also pressured Canada and the UK from
moving ahead with radical policy changes that would shift away from criminalization . The US
expert:
fears that a radical drug policy change would compromise the UN conventions. (An official interviewed at the Drug
Derivative control is another policy tool of influence at
the disposal of the US. One of the ways the US employs this policy tool is to link nonnarcotic issues with narcotic ones at the UN. Explaining the policy, Bewley-Taylor (1999b, p. 151)
observes that: By tying the acquiescence of other nations in the Commission on Narcotic Drugs
to American economic aid and political support in other areas , the US was able to dominate
the decision-making process and play a central role in the instigation and design of
anti-narcotics legislation. The third policy instrument is the certification policy. The policy
Policy Alliance. Also see Kumah-Abiwu, 2012)
mandates every US president to present a yearly report to Congress on the status of drug-producing countries. Any
country, especially in the Andean region, that falls within the decertified category could face serious sanctions from
These sanctions
range from the withdrawal of US foreign aid, which may or not be directly linked to counternarcotics policy issues (Bouley, 2001; Falcon, 1996). The US could also employ its influence to
prevent loans from multilateral development agencies to the so-called countries that fall
within the decertified category (Spencer, 1998). The final policy tool of influence is the financial
leverage of the US on many UN agencies, including the UNODC. Essentially, the US is one of the
top financial contributors to the operations of many agencies within the UN system (Bewleythe US (Bewley-Taylor, 1999a; Chepesiuk, 1999, p. 34; Hinojosa, 2007; Kumah-Abiwu, 2012).
Taylor, 1999a). The Better World Campaign (BWC) notes that the financial contribution of the US to major UN
activities in 2011 alone was substantial as compared to others. For instance, the US contributed about $1.884
billion toward peacekeeping operations, $516 million for UN regular budgets, and $354 million (Kumah-Abiwu,
2012) toward other agencies including the UNODC (Bruun, Lynn, & Ingemar, 1975; BWC, 2012). Another
interesting example that supports US dominance over the UNODC is worth mentioning as well. According to
Bewley-Taylor (2005, p. 429), the former Executive Director of the UNODC, Mr. Antonio Costa, met with Mr. Robert
Charles, head of the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) in 2004 to discuss the
Fearing a possible threat to its
preferred prohibition approach, the head of the US Narcotics Bureau threatened to
possibility of a public health approach to global narcotics control.
drastically reduce the US financial support to the UNODC , unless Mr. Costa withdraws support of the
UNODC for any public health approach to global narcotics control. Mindful of a drastic cut in funding from
the US, the head of the UNODC was said to have succumbed to the US demands (BewleyTaylor, 2005, p. 429; Kumah-Abiwu, 2012). This case provides another good example of how
the US continues to employ its policy tools of influence in shaping the global
narcotics regime (Andreas & Nadelmann, 2006; Bullington, 2004). Pg. 59-60
2NC Rescheduling
Solve every advantage – rescheduling shifts DEA focus and also allows
banking
Rescheduling results in federal and state marijuana legalization which
means that even if there are solvency deficits to rescheduling on its own
the counterplan still solves 100% of the case because it results in the aff
but in a way that avoids the net benefits.
Rescheduling will lead to legalization for three reasons:
1) Honest communication – Government agencies like the Office of
National Drug Control Policy are unable to speak freely about the minimal
harms of marijuana and the potential benefits because they are required
by law to oppose legalization of any Schedule I substance. Acknowledging
that the panic over marijuana is overblown will significantly affect the
conversation by drawing attention to unfair drug laws. This will “pave the
way” for legalization at both the federal and state level. That’s all in our
1NC Sullum evidence
2) Research – Rescheduling marijuana allows new research that
contradicts the official narrative – pro legalization forces will effectively
capitalize
Murray 14, Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute (David, Hard to Study: The Difficulty in
Measuring Marijuana’s Value, www.hudson.org/research/10604-hard-to-study-the-difficultyin-measuring-marijuana-s-value)
Second, if marijuana were placed in Schedule II, the increased access might abet agendadriven research and publications by advocacy organizations that conduct “science by press
release.” Those seeking to sway public opinion in favor of marijuana’s supposed benefits
would likely capitalize on the opportunity, generating careless studies that would not withstand
rigorous scientific review but would suffice to create positive headlines, softening up public
opinion in favor of legalization.
3) States – rescheduling would increase support for legalization even in
hard sell states like Alabama, that’s in our 1NC Sullum evidence.
Increased state legalization leads to federal legalization
Somin 14, Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, (Ilya, 29,
Prospects for marijuana legalization in 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokhconspiracy/wp/2014/02/09/prospects-for-marijuana-legalization-in-2014/)
Not all of these laws are likely to pass. But if a large number do, it could greatly accelerate the trend
towards marijuana legalization. This is especially true if legalization hits large states such as
California, where a legalization ballot initiative narrowly failed in 2010; public opinion in both California and the
nation as a whole has become more favorable to legalization since then. Even many conservatives have begun to
rethink the War on Drugs. Even if numerous states legalize marijuana, the drug will still be illegal under federal
law. In its badly misguided decision in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the Supreme Court ruled that Congress’ power to
regulate interstate commerce allows it to ban the possession of marijuana even in cases where the marijuana in
Obama administration has
taken a very equivocal position on the question of whether federal prosecutions for marijuana
distributors will continue in states that legalize marijuana under their own laws. However, widespread
legalization at the state level will put pressure on the federal government to
repeal the federal ban. Even if it does not, federal law enforcement resources are
extremely limited, and it will be difficult or impossible for the feds to enforce a marijuana
ban without state cooperation. If marijuana legalization does sweep the nation over the next
few years, perhaps it will also lead more people to reconsider the War on Drugs as a whole.
question has never crossed state lines or been sold in an market anywhere. The
Sinaloa
B. Violence is decreasing now – statistics prove cartel related murders and
kidnappings have substantially declined
Z News 9/2/14 ("Mexico Touts Progress Against Drug Violence")
Mexico City: Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto touted Monday a sharp drop in drugrelated murders, fewer kidnappings and a tougher crackdown on money laundering in his
second state of the nation report.¶ Pena Nieto, who vowed to combat everyday violence
plaguing Mexicans when he took office in December 2012, said homicides linked to
organized crime dropped by 36 percent between September 2013 and July this year.¶ The
number of kidnappings, which had soared to record numbers in the past year, fell by 6.8
percent in the first seven months of this year compared to the same period in 2013. More
than 80,000 people are estimated to have been killed in drug turf wars and battles with
security forces since Pena Nieto`s predecessor Felipe Calderon deployed tens of thousands
of troops to combat drug cartels in 2006.
2. History---no attack has ever come from the Mexican border
Scott Stewart 14, supervises Stratfor's analysis of terrorism and security issues, former
special agent with the US State Department involved in hundreds of terrorism
investigations, “Examining The Terrorist Threat From America’s Southern Border”, 7/24/14,
http://www.mackenzieinstitute.com/examining-terrorist-threat-americas-southern-border/
However, an examination of all jihadist plots since the first such attack in the United
States — the November 1990 assassination of the radical founder of the Jewish Defense League, Meir Kahane —
shows that none had any U.S.-Mexico border link. Indeed, as we’ve noted elsewhere, there
have been more plots against the U.S. homeland that have involved the U.S.-Canada
border, including the 1997 plot to bomb the New York Subway and the Millennium Bomb Plot. But by and large,
most terrorists, including those behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks, have
entered the United States by flying directly to the country. There is not one jihadist attack or
thwarted plot in which Mexican criminal organizations smuggled the operative into the United
States.¶ There was one bumbling plot by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in which Manssor
Arbabsiar, a U.S. citizen born in Iran and residing in Texas, traveled to Mexico in an attempt to contract
a team of Mexican cartel hit men to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. Instead of
Los Zetas, he encountered a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration informant and was set up for a
sting. There is no evidence that an actual Mexican cartel leader would have accepted the money Arbabsiar offered
for the assassination.
Violence from the drug war is on the decline now – crime rate statistics prove that
Nieto’s reforms are working
Zabludovsky 7/23/14 (Karla Zabludovsky covers Latin America for Newsweek. “Murders in Mexico Down From Height
of the Drug War, But Violence Persists” Filed: 7/23/ 14 at 6:42 PM http://www.newsweek.com/murders-mexico-down-heightdrug-war-violence-persists-260990
Some of the Mexican states where drug war–related violence has been most intense, like
Coahuila, Guerrero and Tamaulipas, showed a decreased homicide rate. In Durango, part
of the Mexican “golden triangle,” an area notorious for drug trafficking, homicides
decreased by nearly half in 2013 as compared to the previous year.¶ ADVERTISEMENT¶ It is
unclear what percentage of recorded homicides are related to organized crime since the government modified the classification in
Aware of the
war weariness felt among many in Mexico, Pena Nieto ran on the promise that, if elected,
his government would shift the focus from capturing drug kingpins, like Calderon had, to
making daily life for ordinary Mexicans safer.¶ "With this new strategy, I commit myself to significantly lowering
October, doing away with a separate category for drug war–related deaths, instead lumping them all together.¶
the homicide rate, the number of kidnappings in the country, the extortions and the human trafficking," wrote Pena Nieto in a
Since taking office in December 2012, Pena Nieto has largely
eliminated talk of security from his agenda except when large outbreaks of violence have
forced him otherwise, focusing instead on the economy and his legislative reforms,
including sweeping overhauls to education and energy. And while the country appears to be less violent now than during Calderon’s
newspaper editorial during his presidential campaign.¶
war on drugs, the climate of press freedom, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, remains “perilous.”
Drug shift – economic strain causes crime shift that is destabilizing
Murray et. al 11 (Chad Murray, Ashlee Jackson Amanda C. Miralrío, Nicolas Eiden, April 26th 2011,Elliott School of
International Affairs/Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission: Capstone Report,
https://elliott.gwu.edu/sites/elliott.gwu.edu/files/downloads/acad/lahs/mexico-marijuana-071111.pdf, Mexican Drug Trafficking
Organizations and Marijuana: The Potential Effects of U.S. Legalization)
Mexican DT Os would likely branch into other avenues of crime. Perhaps the most obvious
short-¶ tenn effect of marijuana legalization is that this would rob the Sinaloa and Tijuana
cartels of up¶ to half of their total revenue.l 17 The economic strain placed on the Sinaloa
cartel and Tijuana¶ cartel may not necessarily help Mexico in the short term. The shortterm 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, illega immigrant smuggling, extortion, theft of oil and other items, loan-sharking,
prostitution, selling¶ protection, etc.”l 8 This means that if the social and economic enviromnent remains the same¶ then “they are
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.
not going to return to the licit world.”l 19
Legalization is the only scenario for spread into the US
Charles D. “Cully” Stimson 10 is a Senior Legal Fellow in the Center for Legal & Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Before joining The Heritage Foundation, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense; as a local, state, federal, and military
prosecutor; and as a defense attorney and law professor. “Legalizing Marijuana: Why Citizens Should Just Say No” Legal
Memorandum #56 on Legal Issues September 13, 2010. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/09/legalizing-marijuanawhy-citizens-should-just-say-no ac 6-18
Violent, brutal, and ruthless, Mexican DTOs will work to maintain their black-market profits at the expense of
American citizens’ safety. Every week, there are news articles cataloguing the murders, kidnappings, robberies, and other thuggish
brutality employed by Mexican drug gangs along the border .
It is nonsensical to argue that these gangs will
simply give up producing marijuana when it is legalized; indeed, their profits might soar,
depending on the actual tax in California and the economics of the interstate trade. While such
profits might not be possible if marijuana was legalized at the national level and these gangs were undercut by mass production,
that is unlikely ever to happen. Nor does anyone really believe that the gangs will subject themselves to state and local regulation,
including taxation. And since the California ballot does nothing to eliminate the black market for marijuana—quite the opposite, in
fact—legalizing
marijuana will only incentivize Mexican DTOs to grow more marijuana to
feed the demand and exploit the black market. Furthermore, should California legalize
marijuana, other entrepreneurs will inevitably attempt to enter the marketplace and game
the system. In doing so, they will compete with Mexican DTOs and other criminal
organizations. Inevitably, violence will follow, and unlike now, that violence will not be
confined to the border as large-scale growers seek to protect their turf—turf that
will necessarily include anywhere they grow, harvest, process, or sell marijuana. While this
may sound far-fetched, Californians in Alameda County are already experiencing the reality
of cartel-run marijuana farms on sometimes stolen land,[54] protected by “guys [who] are
pretty heavily armed and willing to protect their merchandise.”[55] It is not uncommon for
drugs with large illegal markets to be controlled by cartels despite attempts to roll them into
the normal medical control scheme. For instance, cocaine has a medical purpose and can be
prescribed by doctors as Erythroxylum coca, yet its true production and distribution are controlled
by drug cartels and organized crime.[56] As competition from growers and dispensaries
authorized by the RCTCA cuts further into the Mexican DTOs’ business, Californians will face
a real possibility of bloodshed on their own soil as the cartels’ profit-protection measures
turn from defensive to offensive. Thus, marijuana legalization will increase crime, drug use,
and social dislocation across the state of California—the exact opposite of what pro-legalization advocates promise.
**Cartels are diversified and resilient
Longmire 11 a former officer and investigative special agent in the Air Force,
“Legalization Won’t Kill the Cartels” By SYLVIA LONGMIRE Published: June 18, 2011 New
York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/opinion/19longmire.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc
=rss ac 6-22
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Marijuana legalization has many merits, but it would do
little to hinder the long-term economics of the cartels — and the violent toll they take
on Mexican society.¶ For one thing, if marijuana makes up 60 percent of the cartels’ profits,
that still leaves another 40 percent, which includes the sale of methamphetamine, cocaine,
and brown-powder and black-tar heroin. If marijuana were legalized, the cartels would still
make huge profits from the sale of these other drugs.¶ Plus, there’s no reason the cartels
couldn’t enter the legal market for the sale of marijuana, as organized crime groups did in
the United States after the repeal of Prohibition.¶ Still, legalization would deliver a significant
short-term hit to the cartels — if drug trafficking were the only activity they were engaged
in. But cartels derive a growing slice of their income from other illegal activities. Some
experts on organized crime in Latin America, like Edgardo Buscaglia, say that cartels earn
just half their income from drugs.¶ Indeed, in recent years cartels have used an extensive
portfolio of rackets and scams to diversify their income. For example, they used to kidnap
rivals, informants and incompetent subordinates to punish, exact revenge or send a
message. Now that they have seen that people are willing to pay heavy ransoms,
kidnapping has become their second-most-lucrative venture, with the targets ranging from
businessmen to migrants.¶ Another new source of cartel revenue is oil theft, long a problem
for the Mexican government. The national oil company, Pemex, loses hundreds of millions of
dollars’ worth of petroleum every year to bandits and criminal gangs who tap into pipelines
and siphon it off. Now the cartels are getting involved in this business, working with
associates north of the border to sell the oil to American companies at huge markups. ¶ In
2009 a federal court convicted an American businessman of helping to funnel $2 million in
petroleum products stolen from Pemex by a Mexican cartel, eventually selling it to a Texas
chemical plant owned by the German chemical company BASF. The chemical company
claims never to have known where the products came from.¶ Cartels are also moving into
the market in pirated goods in Latin America. The market used to be dominated by
terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, who operated in the triborder area of Argentina,
Brazil and Paraguay. Now the field is being overtaken by Mexican cartels, which already
have so much control over the sale of pirated CDs, DVDs and software that many legitimate
companies no longer even bother to distribute their full-price products in parts of Mexico.¶
Taking another page from traditional organized crime, cartels are also moving into
extortion. A cartel representative will approach the owner of a business — whether a
pharmacy or a taco stand — demanding a monthly stipend for “protection.” If those
payments aren’t made on time, the business is often burned to the ground, or the owner is
threatened, kidnapped or killed.¶ A popular cartel racket involves branded products. For
example, a cartel member — most often from Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana, two of
the largest and most diversified cartels — will tell a music-store owner that he has to sell
CDs with the Zetas logo stamped on them, with the cartel taking a 25 percent cut of the
profits. Noncompliance isn’t an option.¶ With so many lines of business, it’s unlikely that
Mexican cartels would close up shop in the event of legalization, even if it meant a
serious drop in profits from their most successful product. Cartels are economic entities,
and like any legitimate company the best are able to adapt in the face of a changing
market.¶ This is not to say that drug legalization shouldn’t be considered for other reasons.
We need to stop viewing casual users as criminals, and we need to treat addicts as people
with health and emotional problems. Doing so would free up a significant amount of jail
space, court time and law enforcement resources. What it won’t do, though, is stop the
violence in Mexico.
1NR
2NC AT W/Win
Prioritization’s key – capital’s finite
Rutledge & Larsen 8-13, Paul E. Rutledge is an assistant professor at the University of
West Georgia. His research interests are the American presidency, agenda setting, and
public policy. His research has appeared in Political Research Quarterly and Congress and
the Presidency, and Georgia Journal of Public Policy. Heather A. Larsen Price is upper school
teacher at the Lausanne Collegiate School. Her research interests are the American
presidency, agenda setting, and public policy. Her research has appeared in American
Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Congress and the
Presidency, and Policy Studies Journal, The President as Agenda Setter-in-Chief: The
Dynamics of Congressional and Presidential Agenda Setting, UC E-links
The findings in the area of health care, macroeconomics, and defense suggest that as Congress increases
attention, the president responds by decreasing attention to each issue area. Although this finding warrants further
explanation and exploration, we are careful not to overstate the case. Although we find that Congress has a
negative impact on presidential attention in health care, macroeconomics, and defense, each of the negative
results are substantively small. The president's significant and positive impact on Congress in each of the issue
areas is substantively much greater, with the possible exception of environmental policy. That said, one possible
explanation for the findings in health care and macroeconomics is an attention trade-off. Presidents have a limited
In
order to be successful, presidents must advance a policy agenda with careful consideration
of their prospects for success in mind (Neustadt, 1990). Furthermore, presidents must move
quickly, as political capital fades quickly throughout the early portions of a president's term, with
amount of political capital to expend, and come to office with an expansive list of policy goals (Light, 1999).
honeymoon periods quickly dissipating (Light, 1999). With these considerations in mind, it makes sense that a
president would work to get his top legislative priorities onto the congressional agenda, but then move quickly to
focusing attention on other policy priorities after Congress begins consideration of the president's proposal. This
does not mean that presidents will completely ignore the original policy proposal. Indeed we expect that the
president will continue to work to get a policy passed in Congress even after getting the policy on the agenda.
However, if a president continues to focus too much attention on one policy area to the exclusion of others, the
prospects for achieving success on other policy priorities fades. The politics of the modern presidency compel a
president to quickly shift from one priority to another before windows of opportunity close (Kingdon, 1995; Light,
Based on what we know about the fleeting opportunities for presidential success in
Congress, the attention trade-off makes sense. We urge further investigation of our speculative
assessment of these intriguing results in three of the six issue areas. Despite this emerging puzzle, this paper
contributes substantial evidence that presidential leadership is strong and
consistent at the agenda-setting stage. Such a finding is particularly important for the prospects of
1999).
presidential success, which are much less likely at latter stages of the policy process.
PC finite- legislative wins don’t spillover --- empirics prove, true for
Obama, too polarized
Eberly 1/21 Todd Eberly is coordinator of Public Policy Studies and assistant professor in
the Department of Political Science at St. Mary's College of Maryland. His email is
teeberly@smcm.edu. This article is excerpted from his book, co-authored with Steven
Schier, "American Government and Popular Discontent: Stability without Success," to
published later this year by Routledge Press., 1-21-2013
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-01-21/news/bs-ed-political-capital20130121_1_political-system-party-support-public-opinion/2
As Barack Obama prepares to be sworn in for the second time as president of the United States, he faces the
stark reality that little of what he hopes to accomplish in a second term will likely come to
pass. Mr. Obama occupies an office that many assume to be all powerful, but like so many of his
recent predecessors, the president knows better. He faces a political capital problem and a power
trap.¶ In the post-1960s American political system, presidents have found the exercise of effective
leadership a difficult task. To lead well, a president needs support — or at least permission — from
federal courts and Congress; steady allegiance from public opinion and fellow partisans in the electorate; backing
from powerful, entrenched interest groups; and accordance with contemporary public opinion about the proper size
If presidents fail to satisfy these
they face the prospect of inadequate political support or political capital to back their
power assertions.¶ What was so crucial about the 1960s? We can trace so much of what defines contemporary
and scope of government. This is a long list of requirements.
requirements,
politics to trends that emerged then. Americans' confidence in government began a precipitous decline as the
tumult and tragedies of the 1960s gave way to the scandals and economic uncertainties of the 1970s. Longstanding party coalitions began to fray as the New Deal coalition, which had elected Franklin Roosevelt to four
terms and made Democrats the indisputable majority party, faded into history. The election of Richard Nixon in
two parties began
ideologically divergent journeys that resulted in intense polarization in Congress, diminishing the
possibility of bipartisan compromise. These changes, combined with the growing influence of money and
interest groups and the steady "thickening" of the federal bureaucracy, introduced significant challenges to
presidential leadership.¶ Political capital can best be understood as a combination of the president's party
1968 marked the beginning of an unprecedented era of divided government. Finally, the
support in Congress, public approval of his job performance, and the president's electoral victory margin. The
components of political capital are central to the fate of presidencies. It is difficult to claim warrants for leadership
in an era when job approval, congressional support and partisan affiliation provide less backing for a president than
In recent years, presidents' political capital has shrunk while their power
assertions have grown, making the president a volatile player in the national political system.¶ Jimmy
in times past.
Carter and George H.W. Bush joined the small ranks of incumbents defeated while seeking a second term. Ronald
Reagan was elected in two landslides, yet his most successful year for domestic policy was his first year in office.
Bill Clinton was twice elected by a comfortable margin, but with less than majority support, and despite a strong
economy during his second term, his greatest legislative successes came during his first year with the passage of a
controversial but crucial budget bill, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the North American Free Trade
Agreement. George W. Bush won election in 2000 having lost the popular vote, and though his impact on national
security policy after the Sept. 11 attacks was far reaching, his greatest domestic policy successes came during
2001. Ambitious plans for Social Security reform, following his narrow re-election in 2004, went nowhere.¶ Faced
with obstacles to successful leadership, recent presidents have come to rely more on their formal powers. The
number of important executive orders has increased significantly since the 1960s, as have the issuance of
presidential signing statements. Both are used by presidents in an attempt to shape and direct policy on their
terms. Presidents have had to rely more on recess appointments as well, appointing individuals to important
positions during a congressional recess (even a weekend recess) to avoid delays and obstruction often encountered
in the Senate. Such power assertions typically elicit close media scrutiny and often further erode political capital. ¶
Barack Obama's election in 2008 seemed to signal a change. Mr. Obama's popular vote majority was the largest for
any president since 1988, and he was the first Democrat to clear the 50 percent mark since Lyndon Johnson. The
president initially enjoyed strong public approval and, with a Democratic Congress, was able to produce an
impressive string of legislative accomplishments during his first year and early into his second, capped by
enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. But with each legislative battle and success, his
political capital waned. His impressive successes with Congress in 2009 and 2010 were accompanied by a shift in
the public mood against him, evident in the rise of the tea party movement, the collapse in his approval rating, and
the large GOP gains in the 2010 elections, which brought a return to divided government.¶ By mid-2011, Mr.
Obama's job approval had slipped well below its initial levels, and Congress was proving increasingly intransigent.
In the face of declining public support and rising congressional opposition, Mr. Obama, like his predecessors,
looked to the energetic use of executive power. In 2012, the president relied on executive discretion and legal
ambiguity to allow homeowners to more easily refinance federally backed mortgages, to help veterans find
employment and to make it easier for college graduates to consolidate federal student loan debt. He issued several
executive orders effecting change in the nation's enforcement of existing immigration laws. He used an executive
order to authorize the Department of Education to grant states waivers from the requirements of the No Child Left
Behind Act — though the enacting legislation makes no accommodation for such waivers. Contrary to the outcry
from partisan opponents, Mr. Obama's actions were hardly unprecedented or imperial. Rather, they represented a
rather typical power assertion from a contemporary president.¶ Many looked to the 2012 election as a means to
Obama's narrow re-election victory, coupled with the re-election of a
hardly signals a grand
resurgence of his political capital. The president's recent issuance of multiple executive orders to deal with
break present trends. But Barack
somewhat-diminished Republican majority House and Democratic majority Senate,
the issue of gun violence is further evidence of his power trap. Faced with the likelihood of legislative defeat in
Congress, the president must rely on claims of unilateral power. But such claims are not without limit or cost and
will likely further erode his political capital.¶ Only by solving the problem of political capital is a president likely to
Presidents in recent years have been unable to prevent their political
capital from eroding. When it did, their power assertions often got them into further political trouble.
avoid a power trap.
Through leveraging public support, presidents have at times been able to overcome contemporary leadership
challenges by adopting as their own issues that the public already supports. Bill Clinton's centrist "triangulation"
and George W. Bush's careful issue selection early in his presidency allowed them to secure important policy
changes — in Mr. Clinton's case, welfare reform and budget balance, in Mr. Bush's tax cuts and education reform —
short-term legislative strategies may win policy
success for a president but do not serve as an antidote to declining political capital over time, as
that at the time received popular approval.¶ However,
the difficult final years of both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies demonstrate. None of Barack
the political capital problem or avoided the power trap. It is the
central political challenge confronted by modern presidents and one that will likely weigh heavily on
Obama's recent predecessors solved
the current president's mind today as he takes his second oath of office.
Can’t regain capital with an oppositional Congress
Tarigopula 11, staff writer for Harvard Political Review, Rajiv, President Obama’s Political
Capital, http://harvardpolitics.com/online/hprgument-blog/president-obamas-politicalcapital/
In a post 2010-midterm election world, Republicans not only functionally have the numbers to kill President
Obama’s policymaking agenda, but American public support for the President and his party continues to diminish
each day. Distress and discontent with a stagnant economy, flip-flops on campaign promises, uncontrollable and
excessive spending, and incoherent foreign policy decisions have decimated Obama’s political capital amongst the
With Republican congressmen vowing to
obstruct at great cost, the GOP’s confidence and momentum following the midterms, and the
surprisingly productive but ultimately ideologically unsatisfactory lame-duck session of Congress have made the
situation impossible for President Obama to gain any meaningful political capital through
bipartisanship. Quite frankly, through a pragmatic lens, Obama will undoubtedly be unable to
yield or generate sufficient political capital to pass his agenda items at least in the next year.
American populace and especially amongst policymakers.
Wrong political strategy --- commitment to cooperation is key to securing
passage
Collinson, 13 (Stephen, 3/7/2013, Agence France Presse, “Obama tries new tack -talking to Republicans,” Factiva))
President Barack Obama has hit on a novel antidote to Washington's endless cycle of political
crises: breaking bread with Republicans.¶ Since his re-election triumph in November, Obama has
used his political capital to harangue his foes, holding rallies across the country at which he accused
rival Republicans of obstructing legislation and serving the rich.¶ His strategy worked up to a point -- securing new
higher tax rates for the wealthy as he pocketed a political win in December over the fiscal cliff showdown. ¶ But with
the glow of his re-election waning, Obama came up short in the sequester clash last week as Republicans refused
to bend on raising taxes -- and $85 billion in economy-sapping austerity was set in motion.¶ Two years of incessant
budget melodrama between Obama and his foes on Capitol Hill have poisoned the political well but done little to
tackle the debt load endangering America's future prosperity.¶ Now, Obama and conservative Republicans in the
Since Obama's
ambitious second term agenda must clear a divided Congress, the onus is on the president
to plot a way through Washington's dysfunction.¶ So Obama, who disdains the superficiality of
backslapping politics, has embarked on a charm offensive -- and on Wednesday night he bought
House of Representatives are left staring across a seemingly unbridgeable ideological divide.¶
dinner for a dozen Republican senators out of his own pocket.¶ At an expensive hotel, Obama supped with senators
John McCain, Lindsey Graham and others, vocal foes who have also expressed frustration at being stuck in the
political purgatory of a Washington where nothing gets done.¶ Next week, the president will make a rare foray into
For now, Obama
appears to have dropped the "outside" game of campaigning to move public opinion against
Republicans, instead probing whether there is any space for a deal on key issues .¶ Steven Smith,
enemy territory on Capitol Hill to address Republicans from both the Senate and the House.¶
a former congressional staffer who is now a professor of political science at Washington University, St Louis, said
the president had little choice but to try to change the political climate in Washington.¶ "If you can't deal with the
House Republicans in the current political environment -- see if you can change the political environment," he
said.¶ "What (Obama) is hoping is that Republicans in the Senate can start serving almost as opinion leaders for a
Obama is courting Republican senators who may be
willing to deal on issues like the national debt, the deficit and growing costs threatening entitlement
new way of tackling these fiscal challenges."¶
programs like health care for the elderly.¶ "The President is interested in finding the members of the 'caucus of
common sense,'" said White House spokesman Jay Carney.¶ A person familiar with Obama's thinking said the
White House believes there may be a window for action since -- after the sequester and fiscal cliff dramas -Washington is finally not on the cusp of an immediate crisis.¶ Obama aides also think some Senate Republicans
may be ready to compromise -- a feeling bolstered by Graham's recent comment that he would swap $600 billion
in new revenues in return for entitlement reform.¶ It is not the first time that Obama has tried dialogue with
Republicans -- he tried unsuccessfully to conclude a grand bargain with House Speaker John Boehner aimed at $4
trillion in deficit reduction during his first term.¶ Obama says that offer is still on the table, but so frayed are his
relations with Boehner that it seems doubtful the two of them share the necessary trust to strike a bargain.¶
Should he fare better with Senate Republicans, Obama hopes his new dance partners can
build pressure on their brethren in the House to compromise, which might also ease the
way for other top initiatives, like immigration reform.¶ Republicans, who have long
accused Obama of hectoring them, welcome his change of tone.¶ "Where this goes, I don't
know," said Graham, who recently met Obama along with McCain at the White House.¶ "I do believe (in) what the
president has been doing lately, getting off the campaign trail (and) back into the normal way of doing business up
for
the first time in a very long time, the president appears to be doing some outreach to both
Republicans and Democrats, and that's long overdue," she said.¶ Wednesday's dinner might have been a
here, of talking to each other."¶ Moderate Republican Senator Susan Collins agreed.¶ "The important thing is,
good start, but such is the philosophical gulf between Obama and Republicans that any deal still seems a long
shot.¶ And with mid-term congressional elections in 2014, the window for bipartisan comity is short.¶ But
Wednesday night's dinner did provide an unusual spectacle in Washington these days -- political foes actually
talking to one another.
Winners win is wrong
Jackie Calmes, "In Debt Talks, Obama Is Ready to Go Beyond Beltway," NEW YORK
TIMES, 11--12--12, LN.
That story line, stoked by Republicans but shared by some Democrats, holds that Mr.
Obama is too passive and deferential to Congress, a legislative naïf who does little to
nurture personal relationships with potential allies - in short, not a particularly strong
leader. Even as voters re-elected Mr. Obama, those who said in surveys afterward that
strong leadership was the most important quality for a president overwhelmingly chose Mr.
Romney. George C. Edwards III, a leading scholar of the presidency at Texas A & M
University who is currently teaching at Oxford University, dismissed such criticisms as
shallow and generally wrong. Yet Mr. Edwards, whose book on Mr. Obama's presidency is
titled "Overreach," said, "He didn't understand the limits of what he could do." "They
thought they could continuously create opportunities and they would succeed, and then
there would be more success and more success, and we'd build this advancing-tide theory
of legislation," Mr. Edwards said. "And that was very naïve, very silly. Well, they've learned
a lot, I think." "Effective leaders," he added, "exploit opportunities rather than create them."
The budget showdown is an opportunity. But like many, it holds risks as well as potential
rewards. "This election is the second chance to be what he promised in 2008, and that is to
break the gridlock in Washington," said Kenneth M. Duberstein, a Reagan White House chief
of staff, who voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 and later expressed disappointment. "But it
seems like this is a replay of 2009 and 2010, when he had huge majorities in the House and
Senate, rather than recognizing that 'we've got to figure out ways to work together and it's
not just what I want.' " For now, at least, Republican lawmakers say they may be open to
raising the tax bill for some earners. "We can increase revenue without increasing the tax
rates on anybody in this country," said Representative Tom Price, Republican of Georgia and
a leader of House conservatives, on "Fox News Sunday." "We can lower the rates, broaden
the base, close the loopholes." The challenge for Mr. Obama is to use his postelection
leverage to persuade Republicans - or to help Speaker John A. Boehner persuade
Republicans - that a tax compromise is in their party's political interest since most
Americans favor compromise and higher taxes on the wealthy to reduce annual deficits.
Some of the business leaders the president will meet with on Wednesday are members of
the new Fix the Debt coalition, which has raised about $40 million to urge lawmakers and
their constituents to support a plan that combines spending cuts with new revenue. That
session will follow Mr. Obama's meeting with labor leaders on Tuesday. His first trip outside
Washington to engage the public will come after Thanksgiving, since Mr. Obama is
scheduled to leave next weekend on a diplomatic trip to Asia. Travel plans are still sketchy,
partly because his December calendar is full of the traditional holiday parties. Democrats
said the White House's strategy of focusing both inside and outside of Washington was
smart. "You want to avoid getting sucked into the Beltway inside-baseball games," said Joel
Johnson, a former adviser in the Clinton White House and the Senate. "You can still work
toward solutions, but make sure you get out of Washington while you are doing that." The
president must use his leverage soon, some Democrats added, because it could quickly
wane as Republicans look to the 2014 midterm elections, when the opposition typically
takes seats from the president's party in Congress.
2nc—MJ Link Wall
Our Sullivan evidence says the plan is quote a “waste of political capital”
that Obama wants to dodge because it’s a “political landmine”—only our ev
cites empirics and Obama’s internal calculus
The plan drains capital
MPP, 9—“Obama's 100-Day Grade on Marijuana Policy: Incomplete,”
http://www.mpp.org/media/op-eds/obamas-100-day-grade-on.html -- br
Meanwhile, there have been increasing stirrings of support for broader marijuana law reform,
as it has become apparent that our modern-day prohibition has multiple pernicious effects: It deprives government
of billions of dollars in tax revenues from the marijuana industry while handing this very large market to criminals,
But when the issue
was raised at an online town hall in March, Obama dismissed it in a hurry. The most striking
thing about Obama’s response was how much effort the president — who may be the most
thorough policy wonk ever to hold the office — seemed to put into avoiding the substance of the
question. The whole exercise had the air of a skilled politician trying to get away from an
uncomfortable subject as fast as possible. While we have a pretty good idea of where
Obama is heading on issues like the economy and health care, his direction on marijuana and
drug policy remains unclear. His drug czar designate, Seattle Chief of Police Gil Kerlikowski, is no reformer,
including the brutal Mexican drug gangs murdering thousands along our southern border.
but neither is he an anti-marijuana fanatic like Bush’s drug czar, John Walters. Many in the drug policy reform
we
really know thus far is that President Obama is reluctant to spend political capital early in his
term on marijuana issues. There are enough good reasons to rethink our nation’s approach to marijuana that
community have expressed disappointment as the new administration reaches the 100-day mark, but all
we remain hopeful that this calmly charismatic president will eventually lead America to policies that make sense.
But
for now, we’re still waiting.
We’ll quantify the link—the plans costs an EXTRAORDINARY amount of
political capital
Daw, 12—Jeremy, JD @ Harvard Law, “What Obama and the Feds Will Do About
Washington and Colorado Legalization – Expert Analysis,” San Francisco Gate,
http://blog.sfgate.com/smellthetruth/2012/11/13/what-obama-and-the-feds-will-do-aboutwashington-and-colorado-legalization-expert-analysis/ --br
6. Reschedule cannabis, or encourage the courts to “force” him to. There’s an optimist’s case that Obama’s
ultimate goal is to significantly reform federal cannabis laws. The case is based more in personal narrative than in
first-term policy: as a racial minority who enjoyed cannabis in his youth and could have very easily watched his
Obama is presumably sympathetic on a personal level to
advocates who point out glaring racial disparities in the enforcement of cannabis laws, as well
career ruined by getting caught, Barack
as to those who decry harsh penalties for a relatively harmless drug on principle. Perhaps, goes the theory, the
“tough on crime” posturing of his first term was only a political ploy to ease his reelection, and now that he has
But there are plenty of other caveats to
consider. As much as he may want to reform drug laws on a personal level, Obama is
nonetheless hampered by the heritage of an ugly racial history entwined with those same
laws since their inception (see discussion above). Given this history, the president would risk an
extraordinary level of political capital on any proposed easing of federal law through
legislative channels; and other issues, such as healthcare, the environment, and above all jobs appear to rank
higher on his list of legislative priorities. If Obama really does want to end pot prohibition but
doesn’t want to take such a large risk, he has an alternate strategy which he could play
through the courts. At this very moment, two historic lawsuits are working their way through the federal court
won a second term, Obama will show his true stripes. Perhaps.
system: a petition by Americans for Safe Access to reschedule cannabis, and a sought injunction by the City of
Oakland against federal action to shut down Harborside Health Center, a significant source of the struggling city’s
tax revenue. Obama could – as he did with the Defense of Marriage Act – instruct his attorneys not to defend the
government’s position in federal court, essentially handing the plaintiffs a win by forfeit. But
such a strategy
would likely be just as injurious to his political capital as proposing a change of law in Congress or
ordering the DEA to reschedule directly. So if he means to legalize cannabis through the courts, he must be more
subtle.
Legalization requires tons of PC—empirics prove
Bender 12, Law prof at Seattle (Steven, Run for the Border: Vice and Virtue in U.S.Mexico Border Crossings, pg. 182)
Still, the prospects are slight for federal domestic and international (the United States is party to a host of
drug treaty obligations) reform to fully legalize even the single drug of marijuana. Preoccupied with
fighting terrorism and growing the economy, congressional leaders likely will defer any talk
of drug reform despite the potential to appropriate some drug profits for the treasury . The ice
is thawing some in progressive states such as California, where then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, while still
opposing legalization of marijuana, admitted in 2009 that it was time for a debate on drug legalization, adding, “I
think that we ought to study very carefully what other countries are doing that have legalized marijuana and other
drugs, what effect it had on those countries, and are they happy with that decision.” 30 Taking a step in this
direction, Schwarzenegger signed state legislation in 2010 reducing possession of small amounts of marijuana to
few federal and state leaders are willing to risk their
political capital on meaningful drug reform through legalization , despite the likelihood that many
of them used drugs themselves. Most remember how Dr. Joyce Elders, briefly the U.S. Surgeon
General under President Clinton, was literally run out of Washington, DC for her stance on controversial
issues, including suggesting we explore whether legalization of drugs might reduce crime. As long as
an infraction equivalent to a traffic ticket. But
enforcement campaigns target interdiction of Mexican drug cartels and black and Latino/a users, none of whom
holds much political clout, U.S. politics will be slow to move. Deborah Small, executive director of Break
the Chains, a drug reform organization working within communities of color, suggests change will take a U.S.
society that cares about the futures of black and Latino/a youth instead of criminalizing them. Given prevailing
negative stereotypes of these groups, either a sea change in attitude must occur or some significant interest
convergence must emerge. Possible catalysts include desperation for sources of government revenue or fear of the
spread of Mexican drug cartel violence into the United States. Thus far, cartel violence has plagued only Mexico,
while across the border in cities such as El Paso the streets are relatively quiet. Should drug violence on par with
bloodshed in Mexico reach U.S. streets, particularly those beyond neighborhoods of color, it is likely that U.S.
reaction will center more on enforcing the border then in curbing illicit demand.
convergence toward legalization, then, may prove daunting.
Generating interest
2NC AT UQ
Senate hawks are working to build a veto-proof Senate majority for new
sanctions but they can’t do it now because Obama’s successfully selling
lawmakers on diplomatic progress to persuade fence-sitters to avoid
sanctions that would derail diplomatic efforts—defer to Riechmann on both
snapshot vote count and long-term momentum
Sanctions push is top of the docket—no veto-proof majority now because
of Obama push-back—it’d tank the deal
Watkins, 1-5—Ali, WaPo (re-printed in HuffPo), “Republicans Return To Washington With
Iran Talks In Their Crosshairs,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/05/iran-congressdeal_n_6419674.html --BR
Republicans are returning to Washington this week with control over both houses of Congress, and they have
their sights set on one key Obama administration initiative: Iran. As the administration persists in
its efforts to reach an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have
made it clear that they're more skeptical of Tehran than the White House is. Many in Congress see the
administration as overly inclined to trust Iran, and have criticized the White House's good-faith lifting of debilitating
while the Democrat-led Senate was more inclined to let pending
sanctions legislation linger as a threat rather than passing it into law, the new Republican
majority isn't expected to be as understanding. According to Republican sources on Capitol
Hill, new Iran measures will be a top priority for the incoming majority. Chief among the
proposals being floated are a bipartisan measure from Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Bob Menendez
(D-N.J.) that threatens new sanctions if Iran violates any nuclear deal, as well as an additional proposal
economic sanctions. But
from Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and incoming Foreign Relations chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) that would
require lawmakers’ approval before the administration can move forward with any nuclear agreement. “You will see
a very vigorous Congress when it comes to Iran," Graham said in late December. "You will see a Congress wanting
But passing or even threatening new sanctions during the
incredibly delicate talks would pit Capitol Hill starkly against the Obama administration,
which has long said that any aggression towards Tehran could derail the already tentative hope
for a deal. “We have long believed that Congress should not consider any new sanctions while negotiations are
to have any say about a final deal.”
underway, in order to give our negotiators the time and space they need to fully test the current diplomatic
opportunity,” said a senior administration official familiar with the negotiation process. “New sanctions threaten the
The White House’s biggest headache would be for the new
Congress to pass an Iran measure with a veto-proof majority. That isn’t necessarily out of the
realm of possibility, as Kirk pointed out on Fox News last month. Given that a handful of powerful, returning
diplomatic process currently underway.”
Democrats signed onto the Menendez-Kirk bill early last year, he may be right.
Sanctions push is ToD—only Obama holds off a veto-proof majority
POLITICO, 12-29—Burgess Everett, “GOP to move on Iran sanctions legislation,”
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/gop-senate-iran-sanctions-bill113852.html#ixzz3NKQEhX91 –BR
Congressional Republicans are setting up early challenges to President Barack Obama in January,
preparing to move forward quickly on new Iran sanctions legislation following on the heels of a
vote on a bill approving the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Republican-controlled Senate is expected to
vote on legislation that would impose additional economic penalties on Iran in the first few
weeks of next year, according to Republican senators and aides. The starting point would be a bill
written a year ago by Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) that managed
to accrue the support of 60 senators in both parties despite opposition from the White
House. Kirk and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said over the weekend that an Iran vote could occur in January
after a vote on Keystone, which is the first bill the Republican Senate will take up and is also opposed by President
Republican leaders have not yet finalized their legislative schedule, but the
bipartisan Iran proposal is supported by incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
(R-Ky.) and all of his leadership team. And taking a confrontational stance toward Iran as
diplomatic negotiations continue with a group of Western nations appears to be top of
mind for the new Senate Republican majority. “It’s an important issue, a priority, and
has wide bipartisan support in the Senate,” said McConnell spokesman Don Stewart on Monday. The
Barack Obama.
Republican House overwhelmingly passed a sanctions bill targeting Iran’s energy industry in 2013, though that
legislation was never taken up by the Senate. The Kirk-Menendez legislation would tighten economic sanctions on
Iran if the country walks away from ongoing negotiations over nuclear enrichment or reneges on an interim
agreement that has frozen some of Iran’s nuclear activities in return for unwinding some sanctions. In November,
Western and Iranians negotiators extended that interim deal until July as they attempt to hammer out a permanent
deal that would curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions and relax sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy and isolated
the country globally. A separate bill written by Graham and incoming Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob
Corker (R-Tenn.) would require Congress to approve of any final deal and could figure into the GOP’s plans next
year. “You will see a very vigorous Congress when it comes to Iran. You will see a Congress making sure that
sanctions are real and will be reimposed at the drop of a hat. You will see a Congress wanting to have any say
A
dozen returning Senate Democrats officially signed on in support of the Kirk-Menendez
legislation in 2014, though President Barack Obama’s administration convinced other on-thefence members to hold off public support after warning that voting on that legislation could
upset ongoing negotiations. While the Kirk-Menendez legislation could very well accrue 60 votes to clear the
about a final deal,” Graham said at a weekend press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Senate in the new Congress, Democratic aides on Monday declined to estimate the level of enthusiasm for fresh
the largest challenge for both supporters of Iran sanctions and
the Keystone pipeline is building veto-proof levels of support in Congress that would require
dozens of Democrats in the House and Senate to oppose the White House. White House press
sanctions in the new year. Indeed,
secretary Josh Earnest said in November that new penalties during negotiations would be “counterproductive.”
Garnering 67 votes in the Senate for the Kirk-Menendez bill could be a steep task, given the
defeat of several moderate Democratic supporters, opposition from Obama and lack of unanimous support
in the GOP. But Kirk said on Sunday in an interview with Fox news that he expects “really bipartisan votes” and
predicted having a “shot of even getting to a veto-proof majority in the Senate.”
Top of the docket—Obama holds it back
Roll Call, 12-27—“Graham Says Iran Sanctions Vote Will Come in January,”
http://blogs.rollcall.com/wgdb/graham-says-iran-sanctions-vote-will-come-in-januaryvideo/?dcz= --BR
Sen. Lindsey Graham said Saturday that a vote on legislation providing for more stringent
conditional sanctions against Iran would be among the first items of business for the
114th Congress. The South Carolina Republican made his comments during a joint appearance Saturday in
Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I’m here to tell you, Mr. Prime Minister, that the Congress will
follow your lead. In January of next year, there will be a vote on the Kirk-Menendez bill, bipartisan sanction
legislation that says, if Iran walks away from the table, sanctions will be re-imposed; if Iran cheats regarding any
deal that we enter to the Iranians, sanctions will be re-imposed,” Graham said, according to an official transcript.
“It is important to let the Iranians know that from an American point of view, sanctions are alive and well. So we
The legislation
would allow for tougher sanctions
in the event talks about the Iranian nuclear program are not successful, providing additional
tools to strengthen the U.S. negotiation position in the P5+1 talks with Iran. But the Obama
administration has cautioned that the measure itself could undermine the negotiations, and
supporters of the sanctions bill were stymied in attempts to get a vote in the Democratic-led
will be following your counsel and advice. Congress will pursue sanctions for the bigger.”
spearheaded by Sens. Mark S. Kirk, R-Ill., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J.,
Senate of the 113th Congress. Graham also highlighted a legislative proposal to require a congressional vote in
relation to any Iran agreement, should one be reached.
Obama will fight the battle and win now but it’ll be tough
The Hill, 12-27—“Graham: Senate will vote on Iran sanctions legislation in January,”
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/228125-congress-set-to-take-up-iransanctions-bill-next-month-graham-says --BR
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Saturday that the Senate will take up an Iran sanctions bill in
January, setting up a tough vote for Democrats. During an appearance alongside Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Graham said there will be a vote on legislation drafted by Senate Foreign
Relations Chairman Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) in January. The measure would
impose additional sanctions on Iran if it violates the interim nuclear agreement or walks away from talks.
"I’m here to tell you, Mr. Prime Minister, that the Congress will follow your lead," Graham said. "In January of next
year, there will be a vote on the Kirk-Menendez bill, bipartisan sanction legislation that says, if Iran walks away
from the table, sanctions will be re-imposed; if Iran cheats regarding any deal that we enter to the Iranians,
The issue is a thorny one for Democrats. The bill gained 16
Democratic co-sponsors in the Congress that just ended. The Obama administration, though, is
opposed to new sanctions as negotiations with Iran continue. Those negotiations were be extended
for the second time last month. "We continue to believe that adding on sanctions while negotiations are
ongoing would be counterproductive," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said last month after the
talks were extended. The Obama administration is trying to reach a deal that would curtail Iran's nuclear
sanctions will be re-imposed."
program in exchange for easing the sanctions that are already in place. Graham, a leading foreign policy hawk,
offered strong words in support of Israel during his appearance. Netanyahu has been a tough critic of the Obama
administration's Iran policy. "I would love nothing better than a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear
ambitions," Graham said. "I support the Administration’s effort to try to bring this to a peaceful conclusion. But you
[Netanyahu], above all others, have said that sanctions are what got Iran to the table, and it will be the only thing
that brings them to a deal that we can all live with." He also expressed hope that his bill with Sen. Bob Corker (R-
With Republicans
taking over both chambers of Congress next month, Iran is just one area that could bring a clash with
the White House. "You will see a very vigorous Congress, when it comes to Iran," Graham
Tenn.) to require congressional approval of a deal with Iran would have bipartisan support.
said. "You will see a Congress making sure sanctions are real and will be re-imposed at the drop of a hat. You will
see Congress wanting to have a say about any final deal."
2NC Case
Legalization kills growth and ruins lives—IQ, health effects, workplace
productivity, drugged driving
David G. Evans Special Adviser to the Drug Free America Foundation “Marijuana
Legalization's Costs Outweigh Its Benefits” Oct. 30, 2012
http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-marijuana-use-be-legalized/marijuanalegalizations-costs-outweigh-its-benefits
Legalization will cause a tremendous increase in marijuana use. Based on the experience
elsewhere, the number of users will double or triple. This means an additional 17 to 34
million young and adult users in the United States. Legalization will mean that marijuana
businesses can promote their products and package them in attractive ways to increase
their market share.¶ Increased marijuana use will mean millions more damaged young
people. Marijuana use can permanently impair brain development. Problem solving,
concentration, motivation, and memory are negatively affected. Teens who use
marijuana are more likely to engage in delinquent and dangerous behavior, and experience
increased risk of schizophrenia and depression, including being three times more likely to
have suicidal thoughts. Marijuana-using teens are more likely to have multiple sexual
partners and engage in unsafe sex.¶ [Read the U.S. News Debate: Should Welfare Recipients
Be Tested for Drugs?]¶ Marijuana use accounts for tens of thousands of marijuana related
complaints at emergency rooms throughout the United States each year. Over 99,000 are
young people.¶ Despite arguments by the drug culture to the contrary, marijuana is
addictive. The levels of THC (marijuana's psychoactive ingredient) have never been
higher. This is a major factor why marijuana is the number one drug causing young people
to enter treatment and why there has been a substantial increase in the people in treatment
for marijuana dependence.¶ Marijuana legalization means more drugged driving. Already,
13 percent of high school seniors said they drove after using marijuana while only 10
percent drove after having several drinks. Why run the risk of increasing marijuana use
among young drivers?¶ [See a collection of political cartoons on healthcare.]¶ Employees who
test positive for marijuana had 55 percent more industrial accidents and 85 percent more
injuries and they had absenteeism rates 75 percent higher than those that tested negative.
This damages our economy.
Bubble bursting tanks all marijuana related industries
Turpen 11, Aaron, professional writer, “The Green Bubble: the Explosive Budding of Marijuana Grow Ops,”
August 11th, http://cannacentral.com/news/the-green-bubble-the-explosive-budding-of-marijuana-grow-ops/
we’re seeing a Green Bubble with exactly the same characteristics. Only this bubble involves patients,
the (legal) marijuana cultivation and distribution
industry in places like California, Arizona, Montana, and other MMJ states is very new . Although the Tech and
Housing bubbles saw their fair share of wild entrepreneurship and crazy investment schemes, not
since the 1800s with the Gold Rush have we seen the kind of economic foolhardiness
that is going on today in the medical cannabis industry. Sadly, like the bubbles before it, the Green Bubble will also
lead to ruin and economic destruction for many people and possibly much of the
industry itself. If history is any lesson, in fact, only the big, powerful, robust conglomerates will really come out on top
Today,
caregivers, dispensaries, and marijuana growers. In relative terms,
when it’s all said and done. You think the still privately-owned mega-farms are something? Wait until the corporate giants of
the fundamental economic
principles that are largely ignored in the grow op portion of the MMJ market. Medical marijuana
agriculture get into MMJ. It’s only a matter of time. Potconomics Most of the problem lies in
dispensaries are largely run as businesses from the get-go and are providing a public, visible service. Their suppliers, however, are
of one of three breeds: 1) Long-time growers who’ve adjusted to the new, more open market now available to them. 2) Fly-bynight growers who have obtained a card and are growing surplus to sell, but are not reliable in their technique, product, or
Green Rush growers who have recently dived into the MMJ waters and are hoping to strike it rich
by growing “weeds for profit.” Of the three, it’s the third that is the poison arrow about to strike
the heel of the industry. Sure, the news and most editorial commentary talks about the feds ignoring state law and
prosecuting people in the medical cannabis industry. Those are great headlines. But they aren’t really the problem. The
problem is, quite frankly, cheap weed. A few minutes talking to any experienced grower makes this patently obvious. Ask
availability. 3)
what it costs to produce a pound of good buds and what they can sell that pound for to a dispensary and you’ll see that even
Walmart likely gets better profit margins. The general assumption the public has about marijuana growing is that it’s “just a weed”
and that it “grows anywhere.” As if all you need are a couple of pots, some dirt, and some seeds and you’re in business. While that
might be marginally true for the fly-by-night grower or the home gardener with a personal stash, it’s nowhere near the truth for the
commercial grower. A serious bud tender must produce consistent quality and do so in quantity. The grower faces three serious
risks associated with cannabis as a crop: the risk of theft or destruction (by legal or illegal entities), the risk of total crop loss due to
any of a number of agricultural problems, and the risk of loss of capital when either of these two things happen. Whatever your
notions of the medical cannabis industry are, one thing is clear: people do not get into growing, distributing, or supplying growers
and distributors simply because they are compassionate and care. The MMJ industry isn’t full of Mother Theresa’s out merely to help
the sick and injured. No, it’s full of entrepreneurs – people who, ultimately, are in it to make money. Like Everything Else, It’s
About Money Although most collectives and many grow ops are “non-profit”, like most other non-profit industries, this doesn’t
mean there isn’t money in it. The only difference between a for-profit corporation and a non-profit corporation, no matter the
business, is how the profit is distributed. Bud tenders, like any other specialized technicians, expect to be paid according to their
skill level and have rent to pay and mouths to feed like anyone else. Just because someone goes into the business of growing
marijuana instead of becoming a florist doesn’t mean they should have any lower expectation of making money. Whatever your
personal rose-colored glasses may say about MMJ, it’s a for-profit industry. So is cancer research (those researchers get paid),
mainstream medicine (doctors and nurses get paid), and so forth. The world works on profits. Once that is realized, then it’s
apparent that if there is no profit in the growing of cannabis, then those in the industry of growing it will leave for better pay.
Growing Ain’t Kind Now, back to those three risks mentioned earlier. The first risk is on the theft or destruction of the grower’s
crops and/or harvest due to legal or illegal actions. If marijuana were legalized tomorrow, the risk of theft would still remain, but
the risk of destruction or confiscation by authorities would not. That’s a big part of the risk associated with growing cannabis, but in
those areas where MMJ is legal, that risk has largely already been abated. It is not, however, the number one direct cost associated
with growing buds. In fact, in the prohibition market of illegal marijuana, the greatest risk associated with it is in distribution, not
cultivation. Most marijuana busts by police (federal or local) are capturing those moving the already-harvested marijuana, either
transporting it to another location or actually selling it. By comparison, grow ops are rarely caught. The second risk, the risk of
losing a crop or production due to mundane problems is far more real. Any number of things can affect a marijuana grow, whether
it’s indoors or out. Outdoor grows generally have less overhead associated with them – it’s cheaper to grow outdoors – but they
have higher risks of crop failure and destruction due to pests, disease, weather and climate, etc. Most grow ops are indoors, some
in greenhouses, some hydroponic. While the risk of diseases and weather is much lower, the overhead in maintaining the grow is
much, much higher. The equipment required to grow indoors is expensive and operating it (usually on electricity) is also not cheap.
Another cost that growers face is labor. There are no machines to automate the planting, trimming (there’s a lot of trimming), and
harvesting of MMJ. So while economies of scale may lower costs related to equipment (per pound produced), they will not lower
labor costs and may, in fact, add to them. About a year ago, the RAND Corporation made a splash when they claimed that
marijuana prices would drop more than 900% to about $38/ounce if cannabis were legalized. At that time, I described how the
Walmarts and Wild Oats of the pot industry would separate themselves through quality of product (vs. price). So while some costs
will definitely drop (and are dropping), most of those are to the benefit of the dispensary, not the grower or the patient. The
problem is, right now, no separation of the higher quality versus the lower cost stuff is being made. Today’s Chronic is Yesterday’s
Ragweed Many who have been in the cannabis cultivation industry for a long time are talking about the current influx of cheap, lowgrade buds that are filling the market. Like Japanese radios in the 1970s, this stuff is destroying the market for higher-quality,
better-grown chronic. Most buyers today are unaware of the difference, having been told that if it’s “purple” or “has a yellow tinge,”
it must be the good stuff. There’s more to it than that. Most growers agree that the best buds come from well-tended Sativa
strains. These, however, are generally the least productive of the marijuana plants. Those who merely make cookies or soda pop
out of their buds may not care how smooth and effective the buds are, but those who smoke it should. Smoother means: easier to
inhale, better absorption by your lungs and blood, faster effects, and longer benefit. The low-grade stuff will cause you to cough
(wasting medicine with early exhales and constricted vessels), takes longer to have an affect, and the effect doesn’t last as long
because the THC levels are lower and less is absorbed. In short, the better the bud, the more time and effort required to grow it
and the less of it that will be produced in the same amount of space. That means more expensive. In today’s market, those more
expensive strains are being pushed out by cheaper, less effective ones. For the grower, this means choosing between high-quality
that may not sell for the price it should or lower quality that will definitely sell, but may not be as good for the reputation. The
many with little or no experience in marijuana
cultivation are rushing in to cash in on the assumed paydays available for “growing weeds.” The growers
Green Rush What all of this culminates into is this:
who are coming into the industry with experience behind them are often experienced in growing only for the illicit market and
usually not on the scale that they plan to implement for the legal medical cannabis market. Most are entering the market with
With the influx of grow ops come the
investors. Those who don’t want to get hands-on with the MMJ industry, but who want to make money in it.
These investors mean a lot of money is circulating around many of the ops that are being put together.
unrealistic expectations about profit margins and wholesale prices.
Some of these grow ops are buying land and putting up buildings and purchasing equipment to the tune of millions of dollars.
Someone, somewhere, is banking on that money being returned from future profits. The trouble is, the cheaper cannabis on the
market is coming thanks to lower profits for the grower. For the most part, even with much of the risk removed for them,
dispensaries are still reaping high profits per sale. The reason for this is that although the risks have changed (little risk of being
busted by the cops), the costs associated with distribution and sales haven’t dropped. Dispensaries are store fronts, with all of the
costs and overhead that goes with that. So while Joe on the corner sold pot at a few bucks a gram, the now-legitimate Joe behind
the counter still has to sell at that price in order to turn an actual profit. But the demand from consumers is for cheaper product.
How do you get cheaper product? You purchase it (wholesale) from the lowest-priced supplier. Hence the industry is driving down
costs, but only at the expense of the grower and the strains of cannabis being produced, not because of any lower overhead for the
The Green Bubble is plunging headlong towards a needle. When the
burst comes, there will be a lot of collateral damage as investors, growers,
dispensaries, and perhaps even patients see much of the MMJ market crash around them.
industry itself. The Burst
Only slow growth is sustainable
Stillman 12, Jessica, professional writer, blogged for CBS MoneyWatch, GigaOM, and Brazen Careerist, “Slow
Business: The Case Against Fast Growth,” September 18th, http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/slowbusiness-fast-growth-is-not-good-for-the-company.html
meet "slow business." Recently, a handful of entrepreneurs have explained publically why they
take a slower, more deliberate approach to building their businesses, prizing long-term
stability over quick gains. Here's Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, for example, telling a Fast Company
Now
reporter (yes, it's a little bit ironic) why he's grown his highly successful company at a slower pace than its
We're about being in business for the long haul and keeping the team
together over the long haul. I would never trade a short-term burst for a long-term decline
in morale. That happens a lot in the tech business: They burn people out and get someone else. I like the
maximum potential:
people who work here too much. I don't want them to burn out. Lots of startups burn people out with 60, 70, 80
both the people or the company will flame out or be bought or
they just burn their resources. It's like drilling for as much oil as
hours of work per week. They know that
whatever, and they don't care,
you possibly can. You can look at people the same way. So you think there's a slash-and-burn mentality in the
tech world? For sure. I think there's a lot of lottery-playing going on right now. Companies staffing up, raising a
bunch of money, hiring a bunch of people, and burning them out in the hopes that they'll hit the lottery. Our
magazine is called Fast Company, but it sounds like you want to build a slow company. I'm a fan of growing slowly,
carefully, methodically, of not getting big just for the sake of getting big. I think that rapid growth is typically of
symptom of... there's a sickness there. There's a great quote by a guy named Ricardo Semler, author of the book
Maverick. He said that only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors. We have 35 employees
at 37signals. We could have hundreds of employees if we wanted to--our revenues and profits support that--but I
think we'd be worse off. Fried has many more interesting things to say in the interview, including why his cleaning
lady is his business model, but he's not the only one coming out in favor of a slower pace of entrepreneurship.
Forbes also recently profiled a daily deals site called Steals.com, giving the piece a telling title: " The
Tortoise Is
Still Right: Slow and Steady Can Win the Race." Rather than growth big fast like Groupon, Steals.com
has taken a steadier approach, according to Forbes, and it appears to be working: Instead of
bombarding potential customers with lots of deals every day, each site only offers two deals a day, products are in
stock with same-day shipping, and products are highlighted in a way that showcases their boutique-quality.
Importantly Steals.com has built a community of people who come to the site on a regular basis. Merchants who
sell their products via Steals.com have become real fans of this approach. Oh, yeah, Steals.com was also profitable
very early on. Of course, with only 74 employees, Steals.com is a much smaller company than the 10,000employee Groupon. Steals.com started with a mere $5,000 investment from Francis while Groupon got nearly a
billion in just one round of financing… Hindsight is 20/20. It looks like the planned slower-growth model of
Building fast for
both these companies seems to equate with constructing a shaky, less attractive structure,
and one that takes an unacceptable toll on the humans doing the building. Sacrificing some speed for a
healthier outlook long-term makes sense for them.
Steals.com versus the hyper-growth model of Groupon and others may be the right model.
Legalization causes the green bubble to burst
RT 14, “Marijuana - the new dot-com bubble?” January 27th, http://rt.com/business/marijuana-relatedbusiness-boom-246/
Legalization of marijuana for recreational and medical use in 20 US states has seen a boom in
cannabis-oriented businesses. Experts say the market can jump to $10.2 billion by 2018,
warning of a possible repetition of the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s. The legal pot industry in
the US might be making its first steps, but anyone trying to capitalize on its growth may find the
"virgin" market overheating. Gone are the days when a few entrepreneurs were helping pot legalization
enthusiasts raise money for their projects. The marijuana market is now swarming with investors
ready to risk money buying into cannabis industry companies. It is already developing its own
advertisement, insurance, logistics and security services. After Colorado marijuana shops got $1 million
on the first day of legal sales, the question of profitability appears to be settled. The legal marijuana market is
expected to grow from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $2.3 billion in 2014, predicts ArcView Market Research. It forecasts
the legal marijuana market reaching $10.2 billion by 2018. When the Wall Street Journal publishes articles
discussing fantastic pot shop revenues, companies like Seattle-based Privateer Holdings, which pioneered the
financial market for cannabis industry in 2010, are feeling the growing competitiveness within the industry. Though
the federal Controlled Substances Act still lists marijuana as a prohibited Schedule I drug, President Barack Obama
has practically blessed the cannabis industry, saying that smoking marijuana is “not very different from the
cigarettes” and “no more dangerous than alcohol”, and US authorities are likely to treat the industry like any other
legal business. Last week the Obama administration announced that marijuana-related businesses should have
access to the US banking system despite the fact that marijuana still remains illegal under federal law. This might
help US authorities get better control of the money flowing into the newborn industry which is currently operating
solely on a cash basis. It is unlikely that once legalized the pot industry could be reversed, as further legalization of
The web is full of articles
proclaiming “marijuana industry boom” and interviews with those harvesting first millions from the initial
cannabis market surge. Yet even the pot market "sharks" warn that this business is much more
complicated than it appears. No one can predict when the period of enthusiastic pot startups would end, giving way to big business with really big money, just like it happened with the dot-com bubble
marijuana in the US directly correlates with the results of future elections.
in the 1990s, which exploded to clear the turf for transnational corporations like Amazon, Google and Facebook.
Royal votes negative—star this card, it cites his conclusion
Royal, your author, ‘10—director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S.
Department of Defense (Jedediah, “Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the
Problem of Economic Crises”, published in Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal
and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 217, google books, AL)
There is, however, another trend at play. Economic crises tend to fragment regimes and
divide polities. A decrease in cohesion at the political leadership level and at the electorate level
reduces the ability of the state to coalesce a sufficiently strong political base required
to undertake costly balancing measures such as economic costly signals. Schweller (2006)
builds on earlier studies (sec, e.g., Christensen, 1996; Snyder, 2000) that link political
fragmentation with decisions not to balance against rising threats or to balance only in
minimal and ineffective ways to demonstrate a tendency for states to 'underbalance'. Where political and
social cohesion is strong, states are more likely to balance against rising threats in effective
and costly ways. However, 'unstable and fragmented regimes that rule over divided polities will
be significantly constrained in their ability to adapt to systemic incentives; they will be
least likely to enact bold and costly policies even when their nation's survival is at
stake and they are needed most' (Schweller, 2006, p. 130). Papayonaou (1997) observes this tendency in
British, French, and American behavior towards Germany in the 1930s. The Great Depression led
states to become inward looking, prioritizing domestic economic interests above
external national security threats. The inherent weakness in the disparate political
outlooks that coincided with the economic crisis hindered their ability to balance effectively
against Germany. Indeed, in the case of Great Britain Papayonaou indicates that even though
the political elite wanted to break Britain’s strong economic ties with Germany for fear of
a weak political base and relatively stronger interests in
domestic economic growth bound the hands of the British government. Great
Britain thus elected not to undertake economic costly signals despite the presence
of a clear and growing threat. Papayonaou (1997, pp. 114-115) concludes that when ‘status quo
‘sleeping with the enemy’,
powers have strong economic links with threatening powers, weaker balancing postures and conciliatory
policies by status quo powers, and aggression by aspiring revisionist powers, are more likely’.
Underbalancing (in this case, by not sending economic costly signals) during economic crises is
consistent with a growing body of literature on the influence of domestic ‘veto players’
on the decision to use force. Veto players are those vested interests within an electorate or selectorate that
The tendency to underbalance is
disproportionately strong in states with large numbers of veto players, a situation more
have the authority to resist change in status quo policies.
prevalent in democracies than autocracies. Where relatively higher numbers of veto players exist within a
polity, the opportunity to change status quo economic and trade policies, for example, through costly
signaling decreases (Tsebelis, 2002; Mansfield, Milner, & Pevehouse, 2008; St. Marie, Hansen, & Tuman,
In summary, I hypothesize that the occurrence of an
economic crisis increases the cost associated with ECST and thus decreases the
willingness of states to send economic costly signals. Although the fact that
increased costs should make the signal more effective, scholarship on underbalancing
theory and veto player theory provide rationale for why economic crises may
inhibit the use of economic costly signals, even in the face of a direct threat.
CONCLUSION The logic of ECST supports arguments for greater economic interdependence to reduce
2006; MacIntyre, 2001; Walsh, 2007).
the likelihood of conflict. This chapter does not argue against the utility of signaling theory. It does,
when considering the occurrence of and conditions created by
economic crises, ECST logic is dubious as an organizing principle for security
policymakers. The discussion pulls together some distinct areas of research that have not yet featured
prominently in the ECST literatures. Studies associating economic interdependence, economic
crises and the potential for external conflict indicate that global interdependence is
not necessarily a conflict-suppressing process and may be conflict-enhancing
at certain points. Furthermore, the conditions created by economic crises decrease
the willingness of states to send economic costly signals, even though such
signals may be most effective during an economic crises.
however, suggest that
c) Deterrence solves the impact
DEUDNEY 1999 (Daniel, Asst Prof of Poli Sci at Johns Hopkins, Contested Grounds:
Security and Conflict in the New Environmental Politics)
Part of the reason for this loosening of the link between economic and military power
has been the nuclear revolution, which has made it relatively cheap for the leading
states to deploy staggering levels of violence capacity. Given that the major states field
massively oversufficient nuclear forces at the cost of a few percent of their GDP ,
environmentally induced economic decline would have to be extreme before their ability to
field a minimum nuclear deterrent would be jeopardized. A stark example of this new
pattern is the fact that the precipitious decline in Russia's economy and defense
spending in the 1990s has not diminished Russia's ability to deter great power attack.
And, our data is better—their pre WW2 empirics don’t apply
Deudney, ’91 (Daniel, Hewlett Fellow in Science, Technology, and Society at the Center
for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University, Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, April)
Poverty wars. First cause internal turmoil, then war. If groups at all levels of affluence protect their
standard of living by pushing deprivation on other groups, class war and revolutionary upheavals
could result. Faced with these pressures, liberal democracy and free market systems could
increasingly be replaced by authoritarian systems capable of maintaining minimum order. If
authoritarian regimes are more war-prone because they lack democratic control, and
if revolutionary regimes are war-prone because of their ideological fervor and
isolation, then the world is likely to become more violent. The record of previous depressions
supports the proposition that widespread economic stagnation and unmet economic expectations contribute
Although initially compelling, this scenario has major flaws . One is
arguably based on unsound economic theory. Wealth is formed not so much by
the availability of cheap natural resources as by capital formation through savings and
more efficient production. Many resource-poor countries, like Japan, are very wealthy,
while many countries with more extensive resources are poor. Environmental
constraints require an end to economic growth based on growing use of raw materials,
but not necessarily an end to growth in the production of goods and services . In
addition, economic decline does not necessarily produce conflict. How societies respond
to economic decline may largely depend upon the rate at which such declines occur.
And as people get poorer, they may become less willing to spend scarce resources for military forces. As
Bernard Brodie observed about the modern era, “The predisposing factors to military
aggression are full bellies, not empty ones.” The experience of economic depressions
over the last two centuries may be irrelevant, because such depressions were
characterized by under-utilized production capacity and falling resource prices. In the
1930's, increased military spending stimulated economies, but if economic growth is
retarded by environmental constraints, military spending will exacerbate the problem.
to international conflict.
that it is
Economic decline doesn’t lead to war
Blackwill 2009 – former associate dean of the Kennedy School of Government and
Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic
Planning (Robert, RAND, “The Geopolitical Consequences of the World Economic Recession—
A Caution”, http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2009/RAND_OP275.pdf, WEA)
But it is worth asking, as the magisterial American soldier/statesman George Marshall often did, “Why might
If the global economic numbers continue to decline next year and the year
after, one must wonder whether any region would remain stable— whether China would
I be wrong?”
maintain internal stability, whether the United States would continue as the pillar of international order, and
whether the European Union would hold together. In that same vein, it is unclear today what eff ect, if any,
the reckless financial lending and huge public debt that the United States is accumulating, as well as current
massive governmental fiscal and monetary intervention in the American economy, will have on U.S.
economic dynamism, entrepreneurial creativity, and, consequently, power projection over the very long
term. One can only speculate on that issue at present, but it is certainly worth worrying about, and it is the
perhaps the Chinese
Party’s grip on China is more fragile than posited here, and possibly Pakistan and
Mexico are much more vulnerable to failed-state outcomes primarily because of the economic
most important “known unknown”27 regarding this subject.28 In addition,
Communist
downturn than anticipated in this essay. While it seems unlikely that these worst-case scenarios will
eventuate as a result of the world recession, they do illustrate again that crucial uncertainties in this
analysis are the global downturn’s length and severity and the long-term effects of the Obama
why not? If the world is in the most
severe international economic crisis since the 1930s, why is it not producing structural
changes in the global order? A brief answer is that the transcendent geopolitical
elements have not altered in substantial ways with regard to individual nations in the two
years since the economic crisis began. What are those enduring geopolitical elements? For any
given country, they include the following: • Geographic location, topography, and climate. As Robert
Administration’s policies on the U.S. economy. Finally, if not,
Kaplan puts it, “to embrace geography is not to accept it as an implacable force against which humankind is
powerless. Rather, it serves to qualify human freedom and choice with a modest acceptance of fate.”29 In
this connection, see in particular the works of Sir Halford John Mackinder and his The Geographical Pivot of
History (1904)30, and Alfred Th ayer Mahan, The Infl uence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783
(1890).31 • Demography—the size, birth rate, growth, density, ethnicity, literacy, religions,
migration/emigration/ assimilation/absorption, and industriousness of the population. • The histories,
foreign and defense policy tendencies, cultural determinants, and domestic politics of individual
countries. • The size and strength of the domestic economy. • The quality and pace of technology. • The
natural resources. • The character, capabilities, and policies of neighboring states. For the
countries that matter most in the global order, perhaps unsurprisingly, none of these decisive
variables have changed very much since the global downturn began, except for nations’
weaker economic performances. That single factor is not likely to trump all these other
abiding geopolitical determinants and therefore produce international structural
change. Moreover, the fundamental power relationships between and among the world’s
foremost countries have also not altered, nor have those nations’ perceptions of their vital
presence of
national interests and how best to promote and defend them. To sum up this pivotal concept, in the absence
the powerful
abiding conditions just listed do not evolve much except over the very long term, and
thus neither do countries’ strategic intent and core external policie s— even, as today, in
the face of world economic trials. This point was made earlier about Russia’s enduring national
of war, revolution, or other extreme international or domestic disruptions, for nation-states,
security goals, which go back hundreds of years. Similarly, a Gulf monarch recently advised—with respect to
Iran—not to fasten on the views of President Ahmadinejad or Supreme Leader Khamenei. Rather, he
counseled that, to best understand contemporary Iranian policy, one should more usefully read the
histories, objectives, and strategies of the Persian kings Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, who successively ruled a
vast empire around 500 BC.32 The American filmmaker Orson Welles once opined that “To
give an
accurate description of what never happened is the proper occupation of the historian.” 33
Perhaps the same is occasionally true of pundits.
Third, they can win their all arguments and there’s no impact—even if the
economic crisis increases the motivators for conflict, it overall doesn’t
result in actual conflict—countries can’t afford it
Apps, ‘10 [6/8/10, Peter Apps is a Political Risk Correspondent and writer for Reuters,
“Crisis fuels unrest, crime, but war risk eases,”
http://in.reuters.com/article/2010/06/08/idINIndia-49123220100608]
(Reuters) The global financial crisis has made the world less peaceful by fuelling crime
and civil unrest, a worldwide study showed on Tuesday, but the risk of outright armed
conflict appears to be falling. Perhaps as a result of the more cash-strapped times,
defence spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was down to its lowest in
four years with countries also showing generally better relations with their neighbours.
"In most areas of the world, war risk seems to be declining," he said. "That is very
important." A 25 percent reduction in violence would save about $1.7 trillion a year,
enough to pay off Greece's debt, fund the United Nations millennium development goals and
pay for the European Union to reach its 2020 climate and carbon targets. The struggling euro zone
economies of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain showed a particular rise in unrest risks, while Africa
and the Middle East were the only two regions to have become safer since the survey began in 2007.
Africa had seen a drastic fall in the number of armed conflicts and an
improvement in relations between neighbours, he said, overshadowing the impact of
greater crime. Better ratings for the Middle East and North Africa came primarily from
improving relations between nations.