Round 5Aff vs Emory KS

1AC

PLAN
The United States should make legal, and establish non-federally enforced
regulations for, nearly all prohibited cannabis sativa in the United States.

ADV 1
Advantage one is Mexico The war on drugs fails legalization creates a regulated domestic industry to
displace cartels
Beckley Foundation, 11 [The Beckley Foundation policy programme is dedicated to
improving national and global drug policies, through research that increases understanding of
the health, social and fiscal implications of drug policy, Legalizing Marijuana: An Exit Strategy
from the War on Drugs, http://www.beckleyfoundation.org/2011/04/legalizing-marijuana-anexit-strategy-from-the-war-on-drugs/]
There are a few unknowns when it comes to the marijuana industryits effects on productivity and drug-related violence, for example. Experts need to examine these effects, and policymakers must open their
ears to these experts. A government-sponsored marijuana commission is not a new idea; in fact, Nixon established one in 1972 when he formed the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. When the
commission opposed Nixon by supporting decriminalization, he ignored their recommendations and instead intensified his efforts on the War on Drugs campaign. This tradition of adhering to popular and
personal beliefs instead of scientific facts is still common today. With the U.S. federal debt sky-high and drug-related violence in Mexico mounting, legalization is more relevant than ever and the topic is ripe for
debate. Here we explore the domestic costs and benefits that the legalization of marijuana would incur, how it might affect the marijuana industry in the Americas (particularly in Mexico), and aims to debunk the
multitude of popular falsehoods that surround marijuana. Why Current Policies Are Not Working Despite assurances from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) that the current drug policy is making headway,
there are clear signs that prohibition has not succeeded in diminishing drug supply or demand. Lowering demand for illegal drugs is the most effective way to lower illegal drug productionwhile vendors may not
respond to the threat of legal repercussions, they certainly respond to market forces. As the largest consumer of Mexican drugs, it is the responsibility of the U.S. to address its own demand for marijuana. But
American demand and accessibility to marijuana are not decreasing. In fact, marijuana use is currently on the rise and, although usage has oscillated in the past decades, the proportion of use among 12th graders
is only a few percentage points below what it was in 1974. Eighty-one percent of American 12th graders said marijuana was fairly easy or very easy to acquire in 2010.2 In a 2009 survey, 16.7 million Americans

While the U.S. may be unable to control its own

demand for marijuana, it could stop its contribution to drug cartel revenues by allowing a
domestic marijuana industry to thrive , shifting profits from cartels to U.S. growers. While figures on
over 12 years of age had used marijuana in the past monththats 6.6 percent of the total population.3

marijuana smuggling into the U.S. fail to provide conclusive evidence of how much of the drug is entering the country, marijuana seizures have been steady throughout the Americas in the past decade. However,
this says nothing certain about actual production numbers.4 Domestically, the task of restricting U.S. production is becoming more difficult. Indoor crops that use efficient hydroponic systems are becoming more
popular in the U.S. but pose a challenge to law enforcement agencies for a number of reasons. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), indoor systems: [have] the benefit of having
lower chances of detection, high yields with several harvests per year with high potency cannabis and elevated selling prices. The equipment, knowledge and seeds for indoor growing have become very accessible
[and] The costs of building an indoor growing site can be quickly recovered.5 Cultivating high-quality marijuana is becoming easier, less risky, and more profitable even for the casual grower. The rise of indoor
crops will pose a new obstacle to drug enforcement agencies in stopping marijuana production in the U.S. The UNODC outlines other negative unintended consequences that have resulted from the illegality of

when a good is forbidden, a black market inevitably rises. Black markets inherently
lack safety regulations and often finance other criminal activities. A second consequence is that treatment programs are often
underfunded when the bulk of any drug policy budget is spent on law enforcement. Two other consequences have been termed geographical and substance displacement. Both terms
involve the idea of the balloon effect: when an activity is suppressed in one area, it simply
reappears in another area. Geographical displacement can be illustrated by events in Colombia,
the Caribbean, and Mexico: as the U.S. cracked down on Colombian drug trafficking, smuggling
routes were shifted to Mexico and the Caribbean. Drug trafficking was not eliminated, but
simply moved from one site to another. Substance displacement is an even more disturbing repercussion: as availability of one drug is mitigated through
drugs. The first is obvious;

enforcement, consumers and suppliers flock to alternate drugs that are more accessible.6 While marijuana is not a harmless substance, most would agree that it is the least harmful of illicit drugs. Some drug users
may be pushed toward more dangerous substances, or hard drugs, because marijuana is too difficult to or dangerous to obtain. Conversely,

marijuana could pull users away from hard drugs.

raising the accessibility of

These ramifications of the current drug control system need to be taken into

account in the debate over legalization. A critical shortcoming of U.S. drug policy is that it treats drug addiction as a crime instead of a health matter. Almost 60 percent of the overall economic cost of drug abuse is
due to expenditures spent on drug crimethe sale, manufacture, and possession of drugs.7 There seems to be a wide consensus that at the very least, drug policy must shift its focus to treatment. Tarnishing
someones record for drug use makes no sense; it encourages criminal activity by obstructing job opportunities and it does nothing to address the factors that cause drug use. Additionally, treatment is not readily
accessible to those seeking help despite its efficacy in preventing future drug use. In 2009, 20.9 million Americans (8.3 percent of the total population over age 12) who needed treatment for drug or alcohol abuse
did not receive it in a specialty facilitya hospital, a rehab facility, or a mental health facility.8 This is an unacceptably high number. The U.S. overinvests in its prohibition strategy while severely underfunding
treatment options. Marijuana legalizations potential role in improving treatment options for all drugs will be discussed later in this article; for now, suffice it to say that the status quo is not producing the desired
results and requires modification. Legalization and The Mexican Drug War The issue of legalization has been brought to the forefront in recent years because of numerous calls by Latin American leaders to discuss
the matter as a viable policy option. Presidents Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Felipe Caldern of Mexico, while not personally advocating legalization, have publicly called for serious discussion of the
concept. Former Mexican President Vicente Fox, who previously took a hard line against drugs, has altered his public stance and now supports legalization of all drugs, especially marijuana. He argues that
prohibition does not work, that drug production ends up funding criminals, and that it is the responsibility of citizens to decide whether to use drugs or not.9 Former Presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of
Brazil, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, and Csar Gaviria of Colombia all supported in a report by The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy that the U.S. decriminalize marijuana use (Colombia and
Mexico have already done so).10 The U.S. has ignored these requests to place drug legalization or decriminalization on the policy agenda. Drug trafficking is not a national problem; it transcends country borders
and needs to be approached from a hemispheric perspective. Therefore, the United States needs to work with its southern neighbors to formulate a comprehensive drug policy. However, it is also telling that every
Latin American leader who has formally supported legalization or decriminalization has done so only after leaving office, indicating that such policies are not politically safe stances. The difference between

decriminalization permits drug use while legalization

permits both drug use and production . Those that favor decriminalization maintain that it would enable law enforcement agencies to shift resources from
prosecuting drug users to prosecuting drug suppliers. Decriminalization would also free up resources for effective drug treatment programs. Those that favor legalization go
one step further than decriminalization : in Vicente Foxs words, [W]e have to take all the production chain out of the hands of criminals and into
the hands of producersso there are farmers that produce marijuana and manufacturers that process it and distributors that distribute it, and shops that sell it.11 Legalization would
include the benefits of decriminalization , while also depriving gangs and cartels of a
lucrative product; if both the supply and demand sides are legitimate, a black market would
become obsolete. Legalizing marijuana in the United States, the largest buyer of Mexican
drugs, could potentially weaken drug cartels by limiting their sources of revenue. The UNODC has acknowledged
that this is a plausible way of reducing gang and cartel profits.12 Mexican and American Marijuana Markets Eliminating the marijuana market share of
decriminalization and legalization is in their degree of leniency towards drugs;

Mexican cartels would hit them especially hard because it serves as a steady, reliable source of
income and carries relatively little risk for them to produce . The percentage of total cartel drug revenues from marijuana is greatly debated
Mexican and American official figures range from 50-65 percent, but a study by the RAND Corporation suggests closer to 15-26 percent.13 Even the most conservative of
these estimatesroughly a fifth of revenuewould strike a blow to cartel profits if
eliminated. Marijuana is particularly valuable to cartels because they control the entire
production line; they both grow and distribute it themselves, making it more reliable and
less risky . Conversely, cocaine is imported to Mexico mostly from South America, heightening
the risk of smuggling it. More troubling is that cartels are now even growing marijuana on U.S. public lands, mostly throughout national parks and forests, in order to avoid the task of
smuggling drugs across the U.S.-Mexican border.14 If Mexico were to reach the point of legalizing marijuana, the U.S.
could continue to buy the drug legally from south of the border, like many other
consumer goods . But even if Mexico did not implement its own legalization, recent data
indicates that a domestic U.S. industry could fill the role of the supplier and eliminate the need
for Mexican marijuana. The drug is increasingly grown domestically15 and U.S. growers are already posing a threat to Mexican market share. Exact numbers are impossible to assess,
but figures of American domestic marijuana production range from 30-60 percent of the total consumed in the U.S.16 Additionally, a report by the RAND Corporation found that legalizing marijuana in California
alone (and a subsequent rise in state-wide marijuana production) could lower Mexican cartel marijuana revenues by 65-85 percent. This could occur if Californian marijuana were smuggled to the rest of the U.S.
where the drug would still be illegal. The marijuanas projected high quality and low price would make it an extremely competitive product.17 It seems reasonable to assume that if the drug were legalized in all fifty
states, the domestic market could easily overwhelm the Mexican market share. In terms of tangible effects on Mexican drug violence, the RAND Corporation and UNODC agree that removing U.S. demand for
illegal marijuana would increase violence in the short run because Mexican cartels would be fighting for dominance in a shrinking market.18 But in the long run, once U.S. demand is met by domestic supply,

The U.S. population is by far the largest drug market for

Mexico, making our action necessary for any transnational legalization to be effective. While
cocaine, methamphetamines, and heroin are still funding cartels, drug violence will not be
completely eliminated; but any move to starve their resources is a step forward in
weakening them and, ultimately, saving lives.
cartels would be financially debilitated and, most likely, some of the violence quelled.

Only the plan sufficiently limits cartel power

Carpenter, 11 [Undermining Mexicos Dangerous Drug Cartels by Ted Galen Carpenter, Ted
Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books and more than
500 articles and policy studies on international issues. His latest book, The Fire Next Door:
Mexicos Drug Violence and the Danger to America, is forthcoming in 2012]
unless the production and sale of drugs is also legalized , the black-market premium
will still exist and law-abiding businesses will still stay away from the trade. In other words, drug
commerce will remain in the hands of criminal elements that do not shrink from engaging
in bribery, intimidation, and murder. Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia OGrady aptly makes that distinction with respect to the drug-law reform that
Mexico enacted in 2009: Mexican consumers will now have less fear of penalties and, increasingly in the case of marijuana, thats true in the United States as well. But trafficking will
remain illegal, and to get their product past law enforcement the criminals will still have an
enormous incentive to bribe or to kill. Decriminalization will not take the money out of the
business, and therefore will not reduce corruption, cartel intimidation aimed at democraticgovernment authority or the terror heaped on local populations by drug lords.58 Because of its proximity to the huge
U.S. market, Mexico will continue to be a cockpit for that drug-related violence. By its domestic commitment to prohibition, the United States is
creating the risk that the drug cartels may become powerful enough to destabilize its southern
neighbor. Their impact on Mexicos government and society has already reached worrisome levels. Worst of all, the
Yet

carnage associated with the black-market trade in drugs does not respect national boundaries. The frightening violence now convulsing Mexico could become a feature of life in American communities, as the
cartels begin to flex their muscles north of the border. When the United States and other countries ponder whether to persist in a strategy of drug prohibition, they need to consider all of the potential societal
costs, both domestic and international. On the domestic front, Americans prisons are bulging with people who have run afoul of the drug laws. Approximately one-third of inmates in state prisons and nearly 60
percent of those in federal prisons are incarcerated for drug trafficking offenses. Most of those inmates are small-time dealers. Prohibition has created or exacerbated a variety of social pathologies, especially in
minority communities where drug use rates are higher than the national average and rates of arrests and imprisonment are dramatically higher. Those are all serious societal costs of prohibition. Conclusion

The most feasible and effective strategy to counter the mounting turmoil in Mexico is to
drastically reduce the potential revenue flows to the trafficking organizations. In other words, the
United States could substantially defund the cartels through the full legalization (including
manufacture and sale) of currently illegal drugs. If Washington abandoned the prohibition model, it is very
likely that other countries in the international community would do the same. The United States
exercises disproportionate influence on the issue of drug policy, as it does on so many other
international issues. If prohibition were rescinded, the profit margins for the drug trade would
be similar to the margins for other legal commodities, and legitimate businesses would become
the principal players. That is precisely what happened when the United States ended its quixotic

crusade against alcohol in 1933. To help reverse the burgeoning tragedy of drug-related violence in Mexico, Washington must seriously consider adopting a similar course today with
respect to currently illegal drugs. Even taking the first step away from prohibition by legalizing marijuana , indisputably the
mildest and least harmful of the illegal drugs, could cause problems for the Mexican cartels. Experts provide a wide range
of estimates about how important the marijuana trade is to those organizations. The high-end estimate, from a
former DEA official, is that marijuana accounts for approximately 55 percent of total revenues. Other experts dispute that figure.
Edgardo Buscaglia, who was a research scholar at the conservative Hoover Institution until 2008, provides the low-end estimate, contending that the drug amounts to less than 10 percent of total revenues.

the marijuana business is financially

important to the cartels. The Mexican marijuana trade is already under pressure from
competitors in the United States. One study concluded that the annual harvest in California alone equaled or exceeded the entire national production in Mexico, and that output for the
Officials in both the U.S. and Mexican governments contend that its more like 20 to 30 percent.59 Whatever the actual percentage,

United States was more than twice that of Mexico.60 As sentiment for hard-line prohibition policies fades in the United States, and the likelihood of prosecution diminishes, one could expect domestic growers,

Legalizing pot would strike a blow against Mexican

traffickers. It would be difficult for them to compete with American producers in the American
market, given the difference in transportation distances and other factors. There would be little
incentive for consumers to buy their product from unsavory Mexican criminal syndicates when
legitimate domestic firms could offer the drug at a competitive priceand advertise how they are honest enterprises. Indeed, for many
both large and small, to become bolder about starting or expanding their businesses.

Americans, they could just grow their own supplya cost advantage that the cartels could not hope to match. It is increasingly apparent, in any case, that both the U.S. and Mexican governments need to make
drastic changes in their efforts to combat Mexicos drug cartels. George Grayson aptly summarizes the fatal flaw in the existing strategy. It is extremely difficultprobably impossibleto eradicate the cartels.
They or their offshoots will fight to hold on to an enterprise that yields Croesus-like fortunes from illegal substances craved by millions of consumers.61 Felipe Calderns military-led offensive is not just a futile,

The most
effective way is to greatly reduce the Croesus-like fortunes available to the cartels. And the
only realistic way to do that is to bite the bullet and end the policy of drug prohibition,
preferably in whole, but at least in part, starting with the legalization of marijuana. A failure to move away
from prohibition in the United States creates the risk that the already nasty corruption and violence
next door in Mexico may get even worse. The danger grows that our southern neighbor could
become, if not a full-blown failed state, at least a de-facto narco-state in which the leading drug
cartels exercise parallel or dual political sovereignty with the government of Mexico. We may eventually encounter a situationif we havent already
where the cartels are the real power in significant portions of the country. And we must worry that the disorder inside Mexico will
spill over the border into the United States to a much greater extent than it has to this point. The fire of drug-related
violence is flaring to an alarming extent in Mexico. U.S. leaders need to take constructive action now, before that fire consumes our neighbors home
and threatens our own. That means recognizing reality and ending the second failed prohibition crusade.
utopian crusade. That would be bad enough, but the reality is much worse. It is a futile, utopian crusade that has produced an array of ugly, bloody side effects. A different approach is needed.

Marijuana is the largest revenue sourceit directly contributes to wider cartel

influence
Valdez, 09 [Linda Valdez, Linda Valdez has been writing commentary for The Arizona
Republic since 1993. A graduate of the University of Arizona, she worked at The Arizona Daily
Star in Tucson before coming to the Republic. She has won numerous state and national writing
awards. In 2011, she won the Scripps Howard Walker Stone Award for editorial writing, and she
was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. She is author of a book, "A Doctor's Legacy," which
tells the life story of Merlin K. "Monte" DuVal, the man who founded Arizona's first medical
school at the University of Arizona. She has done commentaries on radio and television in
Tucson. - Mar. 15, 2009 12:00 AM, The Arizona Republic, Stem the violence, make marijuana
legal,
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/2009/03/14/20090314Valdez1
5-vip.html]
Mexico's drug cartels would continue to be, in the words of the Justice Department's National Drug Threat Assessment for 2009, "the
greatest drug-trafficking threat to the United States." Now, imagine a different weapon. Consider the impact of eliminating the most profitable
product the cartels sell. All we have to do is legalize marijuana. " Marijuana is the (Mexican cartels') cash crop, the cash
cow," says Brittany Brown of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Washington office, which does not advocate legalizing pot. Marijuana
is cheap to grow and requires no processing. More than a million pounds of it was seized in Arizona in each of the past two years, according
to figures provided by Ramona Sanchez of the DEA's Phoenix office. But those seizures were just a cost of doing business for multibillion-dollar drug lords. Marijuana continued

buying pot is easier than getting cigarettes or booze, says Bill

Some argue that if you
legalize marijuana there would still be a black market. They say that because the product is so cheap to produce, the black market could
to be widely available - and not just to adults. Teens tell researchers that

Piper, director of National Affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, which does advocate legalizing marijuana. Cannabis vs. alcohol

consider what we know about alcohol. First, Prohibition didn't work.

Second, even though alcohol sales are regulated, back-alley or school-yard sales of moonshine is not a billion-dollar
problem. Third, alcohol, like its addictive killer-cousin tobacco, is taxed, which helps cover its costs to society. Not
underprice legal pot and sell to kids. But

so with marijuana. After decades of anti-pot campaigns, from Reefer Madness to zero tolerance, so many Americans choose to smoke marijuana that the Mexican cartels have
become an international threat to law and order. Instead of paying taxes on their vice, pot smokers are enriching thugs and murderers. "People who smoke pot in the United

drug users help sharpen the knives

that cartel henchmen use to behead their enemies and terrorize Mexican border towns. Even marijuana
States don't think they are connected to the cartels," Brown says. "Actually, they are very connected." American

grown in the United States, increasingly in national parks and on other public lands, is often connected to Mexican cartels, Brown says. According to the Justice Department's
2009 assessment, cartels have "established varied transportation routes, advanced communications capabilities and strong affiliations with gangs in the United States" and

The DEA says cartels are

"poly-drug organizations" that routinely smuggle cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and precursor
chemicals through our state. "(But) marijuana generates the most profit," Sanchez says. Removing a cash cow Legalizing marijuana
would not stop pushers from selling other, more lethal poisons. But taking away their most profitable product would hurt
criminal organizations that have grown richer, more powerful and better armed during the socalled war on drugs that was first declared by President Richard Nixon. Today's Mexican cartels "are as ruthless and brutal as any terrorist organization," says Sen.
John McCain, R-Ariz., who is opposed to legalizing marijuana. Their brutality is destabilizing Mexico . Several years after Mexican President
Felipe Caldern bravely decided to take on the cartels, Mexico ranks with Pakistan as "weak and failing states" in a
recent report by the United States Joint Forces Command. Why? Because Mexico's "government,
its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug
cartels," the report says. While U.S. drug users enrich the cartels, the U.S. government pours huge amounts of money into defeating them. The Bush administration sold
"maintain drug-distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors in at least 230 U.S. cities." Including Phoenix and Tucson.

Congress on the Merida Initiative, a multiyear, $1.4 billion aid package designed to provide training and high-tech assistance to help a besieged Mexican government combat the
cartels. Even in these days of gazillion-dollar bailouts, that's a chunk of change. But consider this: According to a report last fall from the Government Accountability Office, the
United States has provided more than $6 billion to support Plan Colombia since fiscal 2000. The goal of reducing processing and distribution of illicit drugs (mostly cocaine) by
50 percent was not achieved, the GAO found. A GAO report from July 15, 2008, says that since fiscal 2003, the United States has provided more than $950 million to
counternarcotics efforts in the 6 million square-mile "transit zone" that includes Central America, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern Pacific Ocean. What did this
buy? "Despite gains in international cooperation, several factors, including resource limitations and lack of political will, have impeded U.S. progress in helping governments
become full and self-sustaining partners in the counternarcotics effort - a goal of U.S. assistance," the report said. Weary of the drug war Our southern neighbors are getting
tired of fighting our drug war. Last month, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy called for a shift from the "prohibitionist policies based on eradication,
interdiction and criminalization." Former Latin American Presidents Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico), Cesar Gaviria (Colombia) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil) said the drug
war has failed. It was a tragically costly failure. In testimony before Congress last June, Peter Reuter of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and department of
criminology, said, "It is likely that total expenditures for drug control, at all levels of government, totaled close to $40 billion in 2007." He said about 500,000 people are in
prison in the United States for drug offenses on any given day. Piper says 800,000 people a year are arrested on marijuana charges, the vast majority for simple possession.
Now, consider the possibilities of a new approach. In 2005, economist Jeffrey A. Miron put together a report suggesting that if marijuana were taxed at rates similar to alcohol
and tobacco, legal sales would raise $6.2 billion a year. California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a Democrat from San Francisco, is trying to get his state to legalize marijuana
for adult use, set up a state licensing system and levy a tax that some say could raise $1 billion a year. Let's be clear: Marijuana can cause dependency. It saps initiative and
energy. It is unhealthful and smelly. I don't use it. But a lot of people do like the effects of this intoxicant, and they believe they can control its addictive properties. This is exactly
why people drink margaritas during happy hour. This is also why a war on drugs is unwinnable. You'd think a country built on capitalism would understand basic laws of supply
and demand. Instead, a failed and irrational national policy blunders forward, costing billions, incarcerating large numbers of people and enriching ruthless crime syndicates.

The cartels are not stagnant. They are growing in power and influence. In Phoenix, Mexican cartels are blamed for a

dramatic rise in kidnapping and other violence. Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard says it may be only a matter of time before the kind of turf battles that are common in
Mexico erupt along drug-transit corridors in Arizona. Goddard, who does not support legalization, says, "I do support an intelligent dialogue (on legalization)." Brave but
hopeless fight Law enforcement has a smart-bomb approach to eliminating the bad guys. Last month, the DEA announced Operation Xcellerator, a 21-month multi-agency effort
aimed at the Sinaloan cartel. It culminated in more than 750 arrests and the seizure of 23 tons of drugs and $59.1 million in cash. The police work involved was smart and
courageous. After all, cartels torture and kill cops. But while police were putting their lives on the line for the war on drugs, U.S. drug users were helping the cartels make up for
any economic losses.

It's time to hit the bad guys where it really hurts. Take away their cash cow.

Reverse causalplan weakens cartels beyond return

McCardle, 11 [Megan McArdle is a columnist at Bloomberg View and a former senior editor
at The Atlantic. Her new book is The Up Side of Down. Legalizing Marijuana Could Save
Thousands of Lives Jun 23 2011,
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/legalizing-marijuana-could-savethousands-of-lives/240905/]
A recent op-ed in the New York Times by Sylvia Longmire tries to lower expectations for what legalization of
marijuana could accomplish. It's all fine and good and be realistic, but I think the author oversells her pessimism.

Here is her summary of the argument she is attempting to counter: "FOR a growing number of American policy makers, politicians and activists, the best answer to the spiraling
violence in Mexico is to legalize the marijuana that, they argue, fuels the country's vicious cartels and smugglers. After all, according to official estimates, marijuana constitutes
60 percent of cartels' drug profits. Legalization would move that trade into the open market, driving down the price and undermining the cartels' power and influence." There
are several debatable issues here, but she is mostly disagreeing with the notion that the "power and influence" of cartels would be "undermined" by legalization of marijuana.

Her main counterpoints can be summarized as: 1) They will still have 40% of their profits from
other activities. 2) They could enter the legal marijuana market. 3) A growing share of profits come
from other activities. 4) Given these other activities, "it's unlikely that Mexican cartels would close up shop in the event of legalization." The first thing to note is
that all of the above can be true, and we are still very short of showing that the power and influence of drug
cartels would not be weakened , and that killings would decline by a significant amount. Longmire doesn't
debate whether the cartels get 60% of their revenue from Marijuana, but there is a lot of uncertainty regarding this number. A recent Rand study highlights the difficulty here.
They find estimates of U.S. annual marijuana consumption ranging from 1,000 to 5,000 metric tons (MT), with one estimate as high as 9,830 MT. Then, they put the range for

the Mexican share of the U.S. market somewhere between 40% to 67%. Using these and a couple of other estimates, they peg the final Mexican exports to the U.S. as somewhere
between $1.1 billion to $2 billion. The Rand report also cites a range from the NDIC of $3.9 billion to $14.3 billion, so clearly the is much uncertainty here. In the end Rand

one could image the U.S. legalization

leading to Mexican cartels losing both their domestic market as well as the Canadian market ,
which would have a larger impact. The Rand report helps Longmire's case, and I don't point it out as an argument against her. But since Longmire
doesn't stop to question this number, I'm sort of--but not completely--going to sidestep the issue and grant that she is correct and the revenues are 60%. In any case
marijuana revenues mean a lot of money to cartels, but we don't have a very good idea how much. Moving on to her argument,
Longmire's second point strikes me as her weakest. Sure, cartels could enter the legal U.S. marijuana market, just as they could
enter the U.S. market for alcoholic beverages and tobacco. Likewise they could enter the market for
diapers, ballet shoes, or any product or services. Yet the major profit center for the cartels she lists are all illegal: kidnaping, oil theft, pirated goods, extortion.
concludes the revenues from marijuana in the U.S. are around 15% to 26% of cartel revenues. Of course

If cartels are capable of competing in legal markets against legitimate firms, she hasn't provided any examples. It's hard to see why this would be the case for marijuana. So if I'm
right and they won't be getting into the legal market, how would a revenue reduction of as much as 60% impact cartels operations? Longmire is skeptical it would do much,

it's hard to imagine

being sanguine about the long-term viability of any "legitimate company" in the face of losses
approaching 60% of revenues. Apple, for instance, get's around 50% of it's revenues from the iPhone. If this market were to evaporate, would it be fair
to say that it would probably "hinder" their "long-term economics"? Like cartels, it's probably true that Apple has a lot of other activities that represent profit
centers, and they would be unlikely to "close up shop" in the event of losing the iPhone market. But it is a far walk from
here to concluding that their "power and influence" (or whatever the comparable measures are for a legal company, maybe market cap?)
would not be severely weakened. I guess my question for Longmire is this: if a 60% decline in revenues wouldn't represent a significant blow to the
arguing: "Cartels are economic entities, and like any legitimate company the best are able to adapt in the face of a changing market." But

power and influence of cartels, what percentage would? 70%? 90%? Another important way cartels are similar to Apple is that there likely economies of scope and scale for

A decrease in marijuana revenues will take away resources they were using to build their
distribution networks and buy political and legal influence, both of which probably exhibit
economies of scale and are inputs for cartels in the production of their other elicit goods .
This means a decrease in marijuana revenue should decrease raise costs and thus decrease
profits in their other markets. This is in the same way that if the iPhone went away it would hurt Apple's sales of it's computers and software, and
cartels.

generally diminish its brand. Longmire ends her piece by listing reasons why marijuana should be legalized: "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

Say the higher end estimate of marijuana revenues from the Rand corporation is correct, and legalizing would reduce
cartel revenue by 26%, or that the 60% number is correct and they will make back an implausibly high 50% of their lost revenue in other activities. This means
do, though, is stop the violence in Mexico."

something like a 30% decrease in lost revenues. If this leads to a proportional decrease in long-run drug related murders in Mexico, then based on the 15,273 drug related deaths

there would be 4,580 fewer deaths each year. That's a huge gain in welfare even if it falls short of the quixotic goal of
The end of alcohol prohibition in the U.S. did not mean an end to the mafia, but it did lead
to a significant decline in murders and in their power. Longmire has not presented a convincing case
that the same would not be true in Mexico.
in 2010,

"killing the cartels".

Cartel influence determines the likelihood of state failure

Pedigo, 12 [David, The Drug War and State Failure in Mexico The Johns Hopkins University
- Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Beloit College Universidad San
Fransisco de Quito Cumbay The Drug War and State Failure in Mexico David Pedigo Beloit
College]
State failure is an imminent threat in Mexico but it is not inevitable. Even failed cities
are not unavoidable realities.
This goal must be to reduce the power of cartels so that the Mexican state
can gain a monopoly on the use of legitimate force throughout its territory. This monopoly
cannot be fully achieved through policies that aim to stop the flow of drugs or reduce short term
violence
indeed

characterize its border region

the

that have begun to

It is necessary, however, for policies to have the appropriate goals in mind, as well as a clear understanding of how those goals can be realistically

accomplished, before the current situation can be reversed.

; these are merely symptoms of cartel power. While statistics such as homicide rates and levels of drug trafficking are certainly indicative of cartel activity, they are not necessarily accurate indicators of cartel power. Indeed, over the short term,

spikes of violence may even signify the desperate attempts of cartels to assert their power when it is being threatened. While it may be more difficult to measure, a more relevant indicator of cartel power may be the frequency with which state actors such as mayors,
police chiefs, governors, etc. are forced out of their post or bribed by cartels. Bribery is never likely to stop outright, but it is not overly ambitious to aim to create a Mexico where cartels can no longer influence high ranking public officials by violence and
intimidation. Higher arrests and conviction rates would also be indicative of the states regained monopoly on the use of force. To put this in perspective, while the arrest rate in the United States is in the 90th percentile and the conviction rate is over 50 percent,102
the arrest rate in Mexico is 22 percent and the conviction rate is 1.5 percent.103 Mexico should by no means be expected to match these rates of its much more developed neighbor to the north, but this comparison shows that a dramatic increase is certainly needed.
This is no small task, and Mexico cannot do it alone; it will require substantial assistance from the United States. This means more than financial assistance; the United States must own up to its role in the drug war through implementing effective policies. U.S.

nothing
would more significantly impact the drug war in Mexico than the full legalization
of
drugs
it would completely change the dynamics of the drug trade and weaken the cartels
in a way that perhaps nothing else could.
cartel power is the principle threat to the
Mexican state,
intelligence networks in the DEA and other law enforcement bodies are much better established than their Mexican counterparts, and these networks will continue to be useful in the pursuit of cartel members in the future. However,

in the United States

at least some

. As mentioned earlier,

It should also be noted that while

reducing this power will not solve all of Mexicos ills, and crime and violence will most likely persist even after cartels are weakened. In Jamaica, for example, local gang bosses, or dons have continued to draw influence from

urban communities and engage in turf battles even after the shift of major drug flows to the Central American corridor. The dons in Jamaica are able to maintain their power networks because of a lack of alternative economic opportunities to crime.104 Undermining
the power of drug cartels in Mexico may help to avoid state failure, but the persistence of crime itself is an economic problem at heart. However, this is an entirely separate issue. Crippling the cartels in Mexico may also cause the drug trade to relocate once more, just
as it did after Plan Colombia. In fact, this has already begun to happen in Central America, which is now seeing increased levels of violence, with Honduras and El Salvador exhibiting the highest national homicide rates in the world (more than 60 murders a year per

every 100,000 people). 105 Unfortunately, given the history of the drug trade, this may simply be an unavoidable consequence. From the U.S. perspective, this at least means relocating the violence away from the border, but once again, this is a separate issue

The cartels of Mexico have created a

system that undermines the rule of law,
robs the Mexican state of its monopoly on the use of force, and threatens to turn Mexico into a
failed state.
doing nothing may create a failed state in Mexico
would have catastrophic results for both the United States and Mexico.
entirely.

n incredibly complex and dangerous

Destroying this power structure will be equally complex. It will take years, cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and may ultimately be an incomplete victory. Just as the drug trade will never be completely stopped, drug

traffickers will never completely lose power. Though it may seem to be a thankless struggle,

, which, as Mearsheimer and David

have both observed,

The impact is oil shocks and global economic collapse

Moran, 09 [Michael Moran, Policy Analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, 7-31-2009,
Six Crises, 2009: A Half-Dozen Ways Geopolitics Could Upset Global Recovery
http://afghanistanwar.edublogs.org/2009/07/31/rge-six-crises-2009-a-half-dozen-waysgeopolitics-could-upset-global-recovery/]
Risk 2: Mexico Drug Violence: At Stake: Oil prices, refugee flows, NAFTA, U.S. economic stability A story receiving more attention in the American media than Iraq these days is the horrific drug-related
violence across the northern states of Mexico, where Felipe Calderon has deployed the national army to combat two thriving drug cartels, which have compromised the national
police beyond redemption. The tales of carnage are horrific, to be sure: 30 people were killed in a 48 hour period last week in Cuidad Juarez alone, a city located directly across
the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. So far, the impact on the United States and beyond has been minimal. But there also isnt much sign that the army is winning, either, and

The CIAs worst nightmare during the Cold War (outside of an administration which forced
was the radicalization or collapse of Mexico. The template then was communism, but
narco-capitalism doesnt look much better. The prospect of a wholesale collapse that sent
millions upon millions of Mexican refugees fleeing across the northern border so far seems remote. But
Mexicos army has its own problems with corruption, and a sizeable number of Mexicans regard Calderons razor-thin 2006 electoral victory over a
leftist rival as illegitimate. With Mexicos economy reeling and the traditional safety valve of illegal immigration to America dwindling, the potential for
serious trouble exists. Meanwhile, Mexico ranks with Saudi Arabia and Canada as the three
suppliers of oil the United States could not do without. Should things come unglued there and
Pemex production shut down even temporarily, the shock on oil markets could be profound, again,
sending its waves throughout the global economy . Long-term, PEMEX production has been sliding anyway, thanks to
that raises a disturbing question: What if Calderon loses?
transparency on it, of course)

oil fields well-beyond their peak and restrictions on foreign investment. Domestically in the U.S., any trouble involving Mexico invariably will cause a bipartisan demand for more security on the southern border, inflame
anti-immigrant sentiment and possibly force Obama to remember his campaign promise to renegotiate NAFTA, a pledge he deftly sidestepped once in office.

Oil shocks cause nuclear war

Townsend 13private investor based in Hong Kong
(Erik, Why peak oil threatens the International Monetary System, http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-01-07/commentarywhy-peak-oil-threatens-the-international-monetary-system, dml)
While the

use of nuclear weapons in an offensive capacity might seem unthinkable today, the USA has
yet to endure significant economic hardship. $15/gallon gasoline from the next Peak Cheap Oil price shock
coupled with 15% treasury yields and a government operating in crisis mode just to hold off systemic
financial collapse in the face of rampant inflation would change the mood considerably. All the USA has
to do in order to secure an unlimited supply of $50/bbl imported oil is to threaten to nuke any country refusing to
sell oil to the U.S. for that price. Unthinkable today, but in times of national crisis, morals are
often the first thing to be forgotten. We like to tell ourselves that we would never allow economic hardship to cause us to
lose our morals. But just look at the YouTube videos of riots at Wal-Mart over nothing more than contention over a limited supply of
boxer shorts marked down 20% for Black Friday. What well do in a true crisis that threatens our very way of

life is anyones guess. If faced with the choice between a Soviet-style economic collapse and abusing
its military power, the USA just might resort to tactics previously thought unimaginable. Exactly
what those tactics might be and how it would play out are unknowable. The point is, this is a very complex problem, and a wide array
of factors including military capability will play a role in determining the ultimate outcome.

Economic decline causes great power war

Royal 10 Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S. Department of Defense
(Jedediah, Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises?
Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and
Brauer, p. 213-215, 2010)
Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict . Political science
literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defence behaviour

of interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable
contributions follow. First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's (1996) work on leadership cycle
theory, finding that rhythms in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power
and the often bloody

transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic
crises could usher in a redistribution of relative power (see also Gilpin, 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power
balances, increasing the risk of miscalc ulation (Fearon, 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of
power could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to challenge a
declining power (Werner, 1999). Separately, Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel
leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and
connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland's
(1996, 2000) theory of trade expectations suggests that 'future expectation of trade' is a significant variable in understanding
economic conditions and security behaviour of states. He argues that interdependent states are likely to gain pacific

benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade relations . However, if the
expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace items such as energy resources, the likelihood for
conflict increases , as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade expectations
either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states.4 Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed
conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during periods of economic
downturn. They write, The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal
conflict, which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the presence of a recession tends to amplify the extent to which international and external conflicts self-reinforce each
other. (Blomberg & Hess, 2002, p. 89) Economic decline has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess, & Weerapana, 2004), which has

'Diversionary
theory' suggests that, when facing unpopularity arising from economic decline, sitting governments
have increased incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a 'rally around the flag'
effect . Wang (1996), DeRouen (1995), and Blomberg, Hess, and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic
the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of a sitting government.

decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest
that the tendency towards diversionary tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic
leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack of domestic support. DeRouen (2000) has provided
evidence showing that periods

of weak economic performance in the United States, and thus weak Presidential
popularity, are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic
scholarship positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science
scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels.5 This implied connection between
integration, crises and armed conflict has not featured prominently in the economic-security debate and deserves more attention.
This observation is not contradictory to other perspectives that link economic interdependence with a decrease in the likelihood of
external conflict, such as those mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter. Those studies tend to focus on dyadic
interdependence instead of global interdependence and do not specifically consider the occurrence of and conditions created by
economic crises. As such, the view presented here should be considered ancillary to those views.

Cartel power causes regional destabilization and diverts resources necessary to

sustain heg
Krepinevich and Lindsey 13 President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, MPA and PhD from
Harvard/analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, MA in strategic studies and international economics at
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (Andrew F. Jr., and Eric, Hemispheric Defense in the 21 st Century, 2013;
<http://www.csbaonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Hemispheric-Defense-in-the-21st-Century.pdf>)//Beddow

Although the power and violent behavior of the cartels poses the
most immediate threat to U.S. security interests in Latin America, a number of
other actors have contributed signi ficantly to the regions growing instability over
the past decade. Among them are China, Iran, and Russia. While these external
powers all seek to avoid a direct confrontation with the United States, all appear to
have a common interest in seeing the United States influence in the region decline and
American military resources drawn away from their own regions by the worsening crisis in
Mexico. From within Latin America, members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) including Venezuela, Ecuador,
Foreign Interposition

Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba have persistently opposed U.S.-led efforts to improve regional security cooperation. Some of these
states have developed highly profitable relationships with the cartels and tacitly provided sanctuaries for drug traffickers, arms
dealers, and foreign agents within their borders. Chief among them is Venezuela, which, with the encouragement and tacit support
of Iran and Russia, has been a constant obstacle to U.S. policy in the region since the Chavez era. More recently, Nicaragua has
grown into a hub of illicit activity. Emboldened by an increasingly close security relationship with China and Russia, Caracas has
worked to undermine U.S. efforts to help stabilize democratic governments in Central America. Russia maintains its intelligence
listening station in Nicaragua. Beijing has deployed military training teams to that country along with security detachments (i.e., a
PLA military police brigade) to protect the recently completed grand canal that is co-owned and operated with the Nicaraguan

government. Beijing has warned that it would act strongly to meet any threat to the canal, a policy that some have dubbed the MiniMonroe Doctrine. Perhaps the most active external power in Latin America has been Iran. In return for military and developmental
assistance, members of the Bolivarian Alliance are believed to be providing access and bases of operations in the region to Irans
Quds Force. Since at least the early 2010s, when its agents plotted with a member of a Mexican

cartel to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States,13 Iran has been using
its presence in Latin America to develop cooperative relationships with criminal organizations in
the region. Together, Irans state and non-state partners have enabled it to launder money and
move personnel and weapons covertly through the region. Since the United States failed to take military action
following Irans nuclear weapons test in the 2018, Tehran has become increasingly aggressive in its support of its Latin American
partners and proxies. In what many analysts view as an effort to exacerbate the challenges that the United States faces at home and
distract it from Irans recent moves to undermine American influence in the Middle East, Iran has ramped up its use of surrogates
and proxies to carry out attacks on American interests around the world. Perhaps most significantly, Irans agents in Latin America
appear to have been selling or providing relatively high-end weapons to the cartels, including rocket launchers, mortars, shoulderfired surface-to-air missiles, guided anti-tank missiles, and even unmanned aerial vehicles. According to Mexican law enforcement,
officials the majority of the heavy weapons seized from the cartels have been sold or provided to them by Iran, typically via
middlemen based in Venezuela. Hezbollah, Tehrans principal proxy in the region, is also believed to have been assisting the cartels
in constructing semi-submersible craft and midget submarines while providing them with autonomous underwater vehicles for use
in drug running. Finally, Russia has continued playing its familiar role as the contrarian spoiler of U.S. foreign policy, providing
diplomatic and military assistance to the Bolivarian Alliance and obstructing U.S. efforts to work through the United Nations.

Mexico Unravels By the end 2021, the conflict among the cartel factions and
between the cartels and the Mexican government reached the levels of violence that
characterized the height of the First Narco War. Although support for the war among the Mexican population
hovered just above 50 percent, the joint U.S.-Mexican offensive appeared politically sustainable. This all changed in February 2022
when, eight thousand miles away, actions by Iran to subvert and destabilize the Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council along
the southern littoral of the Persian Gulf brought the Islamic Republic to the brink of conflict. In accordance with the United States
2015 Cooperative Security Agreement with the GCC states, U.S. military forces began deploying to the region in mid-November to
provide support for stability operations in these states and to deter Iran from engaging in more direct forms of aggression.
Escalating the conflict horizontally, Iran activated its global network of agents and proxies. In the Levant, Hezbollah and Hamas
unleashed a sustained barrage of attacks on Israeli territory beginning on February 7, 2021, while a suicide attack two days later by
Shia militiamen on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad claimed the lives of 20 U.S. personnel. Irans main effort, however, came in Latin
America. Exploiting their established relationships with the Mexican cartels, Iranian agents and

their Hezbollah proxies began providing weapons to the cartels in exchange for their agreement
to carry out attacks on U.S. citizens and interests in Mexico and to ramp up their attacks on the
Mexican government. Up to this point the larger cartels have been unwilling to risk
provoking the United States directly, preferring to focus their e fforts on
undermining the Mexican government. However, the Iranian o ffer appears to have
been taken up by some of the smaller cartels along with a number of rogue cartel
factions. Seemingly random acts of violence against American citizens in Mexico and Central America have spiked since the
start of this year as have the number and lethality of potshots taken at U.S. border guards from across the border. Most
provocatively, in February a car bomb exploded at a bus station in San Diego, killing 11 people and wounding several dozen more.
Later that month, three DEA agents embedded with the Mexican Federal Police were betrayed and murdered by their ostensible
colleagues. In March four Texas National Guardsmen were killed while patrolling the border when an anti-tank missile suspected to
be of Iranian origin was red at their vehicle from across the border. Less spectacular attacks have claimed the lives of more than
sixty other Americans in the past month. Although less lethal, another particularly dramatic series of attacks occurred over
seventeen days beginning on February 10, when a series of undersea explosions crippled and sank the Mexican state oil companys
newest and largest deep-water oil platform, an asset worth hundreds of millions of dollars.15 In the weeks since, undersea
explosions have also destroyed three undersea wellheads several miles of Mexicos Gulf coast, one of which is still leaking thousands
of barrels of oil into the Gulf each day. Exactly how these unprecedented attacks were carried out is not known, but experts from the
major oil firms say the explosives could have been emplaced by unmanned underwater vehicles commandeered from an oil company
or built by the cartels for drug running.16 To date no one has claimed responsibility for the attacks. Meanwhile, what appears to
have been another unprecedented attack occurred on February 23 when a massive blackout struck northern Mexico and more than
30 million Americans serviced by the Texas Interconnection power grid.17 Although the precise cause has not yet been
determined, the blackouts were traced to computer systems regulating the flow of electricity believed to have been corrupted
through cyber attacks.18 Again, no group has stepped forward to take credit for the cyber strike. By far the most significant attack,
however, was carried out on March 15. On that day, unknown assailants assassinated the Mexican president during his televised
speech in Mexico City. Using what Mexican authorities have identified as Russian-made GPS-guided mortar rounds, the assassins
fired four shells in rapid succession from an unknown location in central Mexico City. All four shells burst within ten meters of the
podium at which the president was speaking.19 Mortally wounded by shell fragments, the president died two days later.150 In the
three weeks since the assassination, the situation in Mexico has greatly deteriorated. Upon the presidents death, power passed to
Secretary of the Interior, a controversial figure who has been a key leader in the offensive against the cartels but has been accused of
corruption by the media and opposition. Immediately upon assuming power the new president, responding to the public outcry
following the assassination, ordered the military and police to surge operations against the cartels, driving the level of violence to
new heights. At the same time the assassination has prompted a widespread loss of confidence in the governments power, both
within the government itself and among the public. Vigilantism and rioting are becoming more widespread.

Military and police are struggling to control the chaos, but their forces are plagued by poor
morale, insubordination, and increasing problems with corruption. The growing disorder
threatens to produce a humanitarian crisis as essential services begin to break
down in parts of the country. Several hundred thousand Mexicans have become refugees in the past month alone.
Most are moving north in the hope of receiving humanitarian assistance and asylum in the United States. Some Mexicans are
working through official channels; however, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service is completely overwhelmed.
Thousands of others are attempting to cross the border illegally each day. Law enforcement officials and National Guardsmen are
struggling to control the flow, sometimes helped but more often hindered by armed, self-proclaimed U.S. border rangers operating
in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Summary Though clearly a dark scenario, the hypothetical events

outlined above draw on current trends and events to demonstrate howas has happened
repeatedly throughout U.S. historyLatin America can be transformed from a strategic
backwater into a significant threat when U.S. strategy for that region amounts to little more than
benign neglect. In particular, the scenario illustrates how powers external to the region could plausibly
exploit local instability to generate a major threat to U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere.
With this scenario serving as a cautionary tale, the following chapter outlines a U.S. strategy whose objective is to preserve regional
security while enabling Washington to avoid becoming overly involved in the affairs of its neighbors or distracted from its pressing
global responsibilities.

Heg is good
Ikenberry, et al 13 [Stephen, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, John
Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton
University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs, William C. Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor in the Department
of Government at Dartmouth College Dont Come Home America: The Case Against
Retrenchment, International Security, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Winter 2012/13), pp. 751]
A core premise of deep engagement is that it prevents the emergence of a far more dangerous global security environment.
For one thing, as noted above, the United States overseas presence gives it the leverage to restrain partners from taking
provocative action. Perhaps more important, its core alliance commitments also deter states with aspirations to regional hegemony
from contemplating expansion and make its partners more secure, reducing their incentive to adopt solutions to their security problems that threaten
others and thus stoke security dilemmas. The contention that engaged U.S. power dampens the baleful effects of anarchy is consistent with

influential variants of realist theory. Indeed, arguably the scariest portrayal of the war-prone world that would emerge absent the American Pacifier is provided in the works of

Mearsheimer, who forecasts dangerous multipolar regions replete with security competition,
arms races, nuclear proliferation and associated preventive war temptations, regional rivalries, and even runs at regional hegemony and full-scale great
power war. 72 How do retrenchment advocates, the bulk of whom are realists, discount this benefit? Their arguments are complicated, but two capture most of the
John

variation: (1) U.S. security guarantees are not necessary to prevent dangerous rivalries and conflict in Eurasia; or (2) prevention of rivalry and conflict in Eurasia is not a U.S.
interest. Each response is connected to a different theory or set of theories, which makes sense given that the whole debate hinges on a complex future counterfactual (what
would happen to Eurasias security setting if the United States truly disengaged?). Although a certain answer is impossible, each of these responses is nonetheless a weaker
argument for retrenchment than advocates acknowledge. The first response flows from defensive realism as well as other international relations theories that discount the
conflict-generating potential of anarchy under contemporary conditions. 73 Defensive realists maintain that the high expected costs of territorial conquest, defense dominance,
and an array of policies and practices that can be used credibly to signal benign intent, mean that Eurasias major states could manage regional multipolarity peacefully without
the American pacifier. Retrenchment would be a bet on this scholarship, particularly in regions where the kinds of stabilizers that nonrealist theories point tosuch as
democratic governance or dense institutional linkagesare either absent or weakly present. There are three other major bodies of scholarship, however, that might give decisionmakers pause before
making this bet. First is regional expertise. Needless to say, there is no consensus on the net security effects of U.S. withdrawal. Regarding each region, there are optimists and pessimists. Few experts expect a
return of intense great power competition in a post-American Europe, but many doubt European governments will pay the political costs of increased EU defense cooperation and the budgetary costs of increasing

Europe that is incapable of securing itself from various threats that could be
destabilizing within the region and beyond (e.g., a regional conflict akin to the 1990s Balkan wars), lacks capacity for global security missions in which U.S. leaders
military outlays. 74 The result might be a

might want European participation, and is vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers. What about the other parts of Eurasia where the United States has a substantial

Israel,
Egypt, and Saudi Arabiamight take actions upon U.S. retrenchment that would intensify security
dilemmas. And concerning East Asia, pessimism regarding the regions prospects without the American pacifier is pronounced. Arguably the principal concern
expressed by area experts is that Japan and South Korea are likely to obtain a nuclear capacity and increase their military commitments,
which could stoke a destabilizing reaction from China. It is notable that during the Cold War, both South Korea and Taiwan moved
military presence? Regarding the Middle East, the balance begins to swing toward pessimists concerned that states currently backed by Washington notably

to obtain a nuclear weapons capacity and were only constrained from doing so by a still-engaged United States. 75 The second body of scholarship casting doubt on the bet on
defensive realisms sanguine portrayal is all of the research that undermines its conception of state preferences. Defensive realisms optimism about what would happen if the United
States retrenched is very much dependent on its particularand highly restrictiveassumption about state preferences ; once we relax this assumption, then much of its basis for optimism vanishes.
Specifically, the prediction of post-American tranquility throughout Eurasia rests on the assumption that security is the only relevant state preference, with security defined
narrowly in terms of protection from violent external attacks on the homeland. Under that assumption, the security problem is largely solved as soon as offense and defense are

Burgeoning research across the social and other sciences,

undermines that core assumption: states have preferences not only for security but also for prestige,
status, and other aims, and they engage in trade-offs among the various objectives. 76 In addition, they define security not just in terms of territorial
clearly distinguishable, and offense is extremely expensive relative to defense.
however,

protection but in view of many and varied milieu goals. It follows that even states that are relatively secure may nevertheless engage in highly competitive behavior. Empirical
studies show that this is indeed sometimes the case. 77 In sum, a bet on a benign postretrenchment Eurasia is a bet that leaders of major countries will never allow these
nonsecurity preferences to influence their strategic choices. To the degree that these bodies of scholarly knowledge have predictive leverage, U.S. retrenchment would result in a

significant deterioration in the security environment in at least some of the worlds key regions. We have already mentioned the third, even more alarming body of scholarship.

the withdrawal of the American pacifier will yield either a competitive regional multipolarity
complete with associated insecurity, arms racing, crisis instability, nuclear proliferation, and the like, or bids for regional
Offensive realism predicts that

hegemony, which may be beyond the capacity of local great powers to contain (and which in any case would generate intensely competitive behavior, possibly including regional

great power war). Hence it is unsurprising that retrenchment advocates are prone to focus on the second argument noted above: that avoiding wars and security

dilemmas in the worlds core regions is not a U.S. national interest. Few doubt that the United States could survive the return of insecurity and conflict among Eurasian powers,
but at what cost? Much of the work in this area has focused on the economic externalities of a renewed threat of insecurity and war, which we discuss below. Focusing on the
pure security ramifications, there are two main reasons why decisionmakers may be rationally reluctant to run the retrenchment experiment. First, overall higher levels of

one would see overall higher levels of

proxy wars and arming of client states

conflict make the world a more dangerous place. Were Eurasia to return to higher levels of interstate military competition,

military spending and innovation and a higher likelihood of competitive regional

all of which would be
concerning, in part because it would promote a faster diffusion of military power away from the United States. Greater regional insecurity could well feed proliferation cascades,

Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia all might choose to create nuclear
forces. 78 It is unlikely that proliferation decisions by any of these actors would be the end of the game: they would likely generate pressure locally for more proliferation. Following
Kenneth Waltz, many retrenchment advocates are proliferation optimists, assuming that nuclear deterrence solves the security problem. 79 Usually carried out in dyadic terms, the debate
over the stability of proliferatio changes as the numbers go up. Proliferation optimism rests on
assumptions of rationality and narrow security preferences. In social science, however, such assumptions are inevitably
probabilistic. Optimists assume that most states are led by rational leaders, most will overcome organizational problems and resist the temptation to preempt before
feared neighbors nuclearize, and most pursue only security and are risk averse. Confidence in such probabilistic assumptions declines if the world
were to move from nine to twenty, thirty, or forty nuclear states. In addition, many of the other dangers noted by analysts who are
concerned about the destabilizing effects of nuclear proliferationincluding the risk of accidents and the prospects that some new nuclear
powers will not have truly survivable forcesseem prone to go up as the number of nuclear powers grows. 80 Moreover, the risk of
unforeseen crisis dynamics that could spin out of control is also higher as the number of nuclear powers increases. Finally, add to these
as states such as

concerns the enhanced danger of nuclear leakage, and a world with overall higher levels of security competition becomes yet more worrisome. The argument that maintaining
Eurasian peace is not a U.S. interest faces a second problem. On widely accepted realist assumptions, acknowledging that U.S. engagement preserves peace dramatically narrows
the difference between retrenchment and deep engagement. For many supporters of retrenchment, the optimal strategy for a power such as the United States, which has
attained regional hegemony and is separated from other great powers by oceans, is offshore balancing: stay over the horizon and pass the buck to local powers to do the
dangerous work of counterbalancing any local rising power. The United States should commit to onshore balancing only when local balancing is likely to fail and a great power
appears to be a credible contender for regional hegemony, as in the cases of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the midtwentieth century. The problem is that Chinas rise

The United States will have to play

a key role in countering China, because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves. 81 Therefore, unless Chinas rise stalls, the
puts the possibility of its attaining regional hegemony on the table, at least in the medium to long term. As Mearsheimer notes,

United States is likely to act toward China similar to the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. 82 It follows that the United States should take no action
that would compromise its capacity to move to onshore balancing in the future. It will need to maintain key alliance relationships in Asia as well as the formidably expensive
military capacity to intervene there. The implication is to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reduce the presence in Europe, and pivot to Asia just what the United States is doing.

the argument that U.S. security commitments are unnecessary for peace is countered by a lot of
scholarship, including highly influential realist scholarship. In addition, the argument that Eurasian peace is unnecessary for U.S. security is weakened by the potential
83 In sum,

for a large number of nasty security consequences as well as the need to retain a latent onshore balancing capacity that dramatically reduces the savings retrenchment might
bring. Moreover, switching between offshore and onshore balancing could well be difcult. Bringing together the thrust of many of the arguments discussed so far underlines the

the case for retrenchment misses the underlying logic of the deep engagement strategy. By supplying
the United States lowers security competition in the worlds key regions, thereby
preventing the emergence of a hothouse atmosphere for growing new military capabilities. Alliance ties dissuade partners
degree to which

reassurance, deterrence, and active management,

from ramping up and also provide leverage to prevent military transfers to potential rivals. On top of all this, the United States formidable military machine may deter entry by
potential rivals. Current great power military expenditures as a percentage of GDP are at historical lows, and thus far other major powers have shied away from seeking to match
top-end U.S. military capabilities. In addition, they have so far been careful to avoid attracting the focused enmity of the United States. 84 All of the worlds most modern
militaries are U.S. allies (Americas alliance system of more than sixty countries now accounts for some 80 percent of global military spending), and the gap between the U.S.
military capability and that of potential rivals is by many measures growing rather than shrinking. 85

It filters probability for every impactthe alternative to heg is China war and
global instability
Keck 14Managing Editor of The Diplomat
(Zachary, Americas Relative Decline: Should We Panic?, http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/americas-relative-decline-should-wepanic/, dml)

on balance , the U.S. has been a positive force in the world, especially for a unipolar power. Certainly,
its hard to imagine many other countries acting as benignly if they possessed the amount of relative power
Still,

America had at the end of the Cold War. Indeed, the British were not nearly as powerful as the U.S. in the 19th Century and they
incorporated most of the globe in their colonial empire. Even when it had to contend with another superpower, Russia occupied half
a continent by brutally suppressing its populace. Had the U.S. collapsed and the Soviet Union emerged as the Cold War victor,
Western Europe would likely be speaking Russian by now. Its

difficult to imagine China defending a rulebased , open international order if it were a unipolar power, much less making an effort to
uphold a minimum level of human rights in the world .
Regardless of your opinion on U.S. global leadership over the last two decades, however, there is good reason to fear its
relative decline compared with China and other emerging nations. To begin with, hegemonic transition

periods have historically been

the most destabilizing eras in history . This is not

Even if all the parties have benign,

peaceful intentions , the rise of new global powers necessitates revisions to the rules of the
road. This is nearly impossible to do in any organized fashion given the anarchic nature of
the international system, where there is no central authority that can govern interactions between states.
We are already starting to see the potential dangers of hegemonic transition periods in the AsiaPacific (and arguably the Middle East). As China grows more economically and militarily powerful, it has
unsurprisingly sought to expand its influence in East Asia. This necessarily has to come at the expense
of other powers, which so far has primarily meant the U.S., Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Naturally, these powers
have sought to resist Chinese encroachments on their territory and influence, and the situation
grows more tense with each passing day. Should China eventually emerge as a global power, or should nations in
only because of the malign intentions of the rising and established power(s).

other regions enjoy a similar rise as Kenny suggests, this situation will play itself out elsewhere in the years and decades ahead.
All of this highlights some of the advantages of a unipolar system. Namely, although the U.S. has

asserted military force quite frequently in the post-Cold War era, it has only fought weak powers and thus
its wars have been fairly limited in terms of the number of casualties involved. At the same time,
Americas preponderance of power has prevented a great power war , and even
restrained major regional powers from coming to blows. For instance, the past 25 years
havent seen any conflicts on par with the Israeli-Arab or Iran-Iraq wars of the Cold War. As the
unipolar era comes to a close, the possibility of great power conflict and especially major
regional wars rises dramatically . The world will also have to contend with
conventionally inferior powers like Japan acquiring nuclear weapons to protect their interests against
their newly empowered rivals.
But even if the transitions caused by Chinas and potentially other nations rises are

managed successfully, there

are still likely to be significant negative effects on international relations. In todays globalized world,
it is commonly asserted that many of the defining challenges of our era can only be solved
through multilateral cooperation. Examples of this include climate change, health pandemics, organized crime
and terrorism , global financial crises , and the prolif eration of weapons of mass
destruction, among many others.
A unipolar system, for all its limitations, is uniquely suited for organizing effective global action on
these transnational issues. This is because there is a clear global leader who can take the initiative
and, to some degree, compel others to fall in line. In addition, the unipoles preponderance of power
lessens the intensity of competition among the global players involved. Thus, while there are no
shortages of complaints about the limitations of global governance today, there is no question that global governance has
been many times more effective in the last 25 years than it was during the Cold War .
The rise of China and potentially other powers will create a new bipolar or multipolar order. This, in
turn, will make solving these transnational issues much more difficult . Despite the optimistic
rhetoric that emanates from official U.S.-China meetings, the reality is that Sino-American competition is
likely to overshadow an increasing number of global issues in the years ahead. If other countries
like India, Turkey, and Brazil also become significant global powers, this will only further dampen
the prospects for effective global governance.
China war goes nuclear
Goldstein, 13 Avery, David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations, Director of the Center for the
Study of Contemporary China, and Associate Director of the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics at the
University of Pennsylvania (First Things First: The Pressing Danger of Crisis Instability in U.S.-China Relations, International
Security, vol. 37, no. 4, Spring 2013, Muse //Red)
Two concerns have driven much of the debate about international security in the post-Cold War era. The first is the potentially deadly mix of nuclear
proliferation, rogue states, and international terrorists, a worry that became dominant after the terrorist attacks against the United States on September
11, 2001.1 The second concern, one whose prominence has waxed and waned since the mid-1990s, is the potentially disruptive impact that China will
have if it emerges as a peer competitor of the United States, challenging an international order established during the era of U.S. preponderance.2

Reflecting this second concern, some analysts have expressed reservations about the dominant post-September 11 security agenda, arguing that China
could challenge U.S. global interests in ways that terrorists and rogue states cannot. In this article, I raise a more pressing issue, one to which not
enough attention has been paid. For

at least the next decade, while China remains relatively weak, the gravest danger in
Sino-American relations is the possibility the two countries will find themselves in a crisis that
could escalate to open military conflict. In contrast to the long-term prospect of a new great power rivalry between the
United States and China, which ultimately rests on debatable claims about the intentions of the two countries and uncertain forecasts about big shifts in
their national capabilities, the

danger of instability in a crisis involving these two nuclear-armed states is a

tangible, near-term concern.3 Even if the probability of such a war-threatening crisis and its escalation to the use of significant military
force is low, the potentially catastrophic consequences of this scenario provide good reason for
analysts to better understand its dynamics and for policymakers to fully consider its implications. Moreover, events since
2010especially those relevant to disputes in the East and South China Seassuggest that the danger
of a military confrontation in the Western Pacific that could lead to a U.S.-China standoff
may be on the rise. In what follows, I identify not just pressures to use force preemptively that pose the most serious risk should a SinoAmerican confrontation unfold, but also related, if slightly less dramatic, incentives to initiate the limited use of force to gain bargaining leveragea
second trigger for potentially devastating instability during a crisis.4 My discussion proceeds in three sections. The first section explains why, during

the next decade or two, a serious U.S.-China crisis may be more likely than is currently recognized. The
second section examines the features of plausible Sino-American crises that may make them so dangerous. The third section considers general features
of crisis stability in asymmetric dyads such as the one in which a U.S. superpower would confront an increasingly capable but still thoroughly
overmatched Chinathe asymmetry that will prevail for at least the next decade. This more stylized discussion clarifies the inadequacy of focusing onesidedly on conventional forces, as has much of the current commentary about the modernization of China's military and the implications this has for
potential conflicts with the United States in the Western Pacific,5 or of focusing one-sidedly on China's nuclear forces, as a smaller slice of the
commentary has.6 An

assessment considering the interaction of conventional and nuclear forces

indicates why escalation resulting from crisis instability remains a devastating
possibility. Before proceeding, however, I would like to clarify my use of the terms "crisis" and "instability." For the purposes of this article, I

define a crisis as a confrontation between states involving a serious threat to vital national interests for both sides, in which there is the expectation of a
short time for resolution, and in which there is understood to be a sharply increased risk of war.7 This definition distinguishes crises from many
situations to which the label is sometimes applied, such as more protracted confrontations; sharp disagreements over important matters that are not
vital interests and in which military force seems irrelevant; and political disputes involving vital interests, even those with military components, that
present little immediate risk of war.8 I define instability as the temptation to resort to force in a crisis.9 Crisis stability is greatest when both sides
strongly prefer to continue bargaining; instability is greatest when they are strongly tempted to resort to the use of military force. Stability, then,
describes a spectrumfrom one extreme in which neither side sees much advantage to using force, through a range of situations in which the balance of
costs and benefits of using force varies for each side, to the other extreme in which the benefits of using force so greatly exceed the costs that striking
first looks nearly irresistible to both sides. Although the incentives to initiate the use of force may not reach this extreme level in a U.S. China crisis,

the capabilities that the two countries possess raise concerns that escalation pressures will exist
and that they may be highest early in a crisis, compressing the time frame for diplomacy to
avert military conflict.

ADV 2
Advantage two is Federalism Marijuana is a key battleground policy divergence wrecks legal
certainty necessary for a market
Chemerinsky, et al, 14 [Erwin Chemerinsky echemerinsky@law.uci.edu University of

California, Irvine ~ School of Law Jolene Forman jforman@aclunc.org American Civil Liberties
Union of Northern California Criminal Justice and Drug Policy Fellow Allen Hopper
ahopper@aclunc.org American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California Criminal Justice
and Drug Policy Director Sam Kamin skamin@law.du.edu University of Denver ~ Sturm College
of Law Professor and Director, Constitutional Rights and Remedies ProgramLegal Studies
Research Paper Series No. 2014-25 Cooperative Federalism and Marijuana Regulation, p. ssrn]
The struggle over marijuana
is one of the most important federalism conflicts
in a generation. Unprecedented public support for legalizing marijuana has
emboldened
experimentation across the country
regulation

Brandeisian

since 1996 twenty states have legalized marijuana for medical purposes2 and, in November

2013, Colorado and Washington state went even further, legalizing marijuana for adult recreational use.3 And, while the Obama administration has thus far utilized its enforcement discretion to allow those state policy experiments to play out, marijuana remains a

The clash over marijuana laws raises questions of tension and

cooperation between state and federal governments
Divergent federal and state laws also create debilitating instability and uncertainty
prohibited substance under federal law.

ongoing

, and forces policy-makers and courts to address the preemptive power of federal drug laws.
on the

ground in those states pioneering new approaches to marijuana control. In the fall of 2013, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it will not prioritize enforcement of federal marijuana laws in states with their own robust marijuana regulations,
specifying eight federal enforcement priorities to help guide state lawmaking.4 This announcement has been widely interpreted to signal that the federal government will not enforce its stricter marijuana laws against those complying with the new Washington and
Colorado laws so long as the new state regulatory regimes effectively prevent the harms the DOJ has identified as federal priorities. Yet even if the federal government voluntarily refrains from enforcing its drug laws against those complying with robust state
regulatory regimes, the ancillary consequences flowing from the continuing federal prohibition remain profound. We suggest an incremental and effective solution that would allow willing states to experiment with novel regulatory approaches while leaving the
federal prohibition intact for the remaining states. The federal government should adopt a cooperative federalism approach that allows states meeting specified federal criteria criteria along the lines that the DOJ has already set forth to opt out of the federal
Controlled Substances Act (CSA) provisions relating to marijuana. State law satisfying these federal guidelines would exclusively govern marijuana activities within those states opting out of the CSA while in those states content with the CSAs terms nothing would
change. Our article proceeds as follows. We begin in Part II with a brief overview of the history of marijuana regulation from the 1930s to the present, explaining how the current tension over the appropriate roles of the state and federal government arose. We then

in spite of the DOJs announced enforcement

leniency the continuing prohibition significantly hampers new state laws.
Banks, attorneys, insurance companies, potential investors, and numerous others
justifiably concerned about breaking law are reluctant to provide investment
capital , legal advice, or numerous other basic professional services necessary for
businesses to function and navigate
state and local regulations
catalog in Part III many of the problems flowing from the clash between federal and state laws, demonstrating that
,

federal

the

federal

complex

. Federal tax rules treat these marijuana business activities

like any other federal drug crime, which enormously increases tax liability by disallowing deductions for common business expenses. And those engaging in marijuana activity entirely legal under state law whether recreational or medical still risk losing their
jobs, parental rights, and many government benefits. Although President Obama has said state policy experiments in Washington and Colorado are important and should go forward,5 the continuing federal prohibition of marijuana substantially undermines these
new state laws. In Part IV we turn to a discussion of federal preemption law as it applies to the CSA. explain why, even if it wished to do so, the DOJ could not simply shut down all state marijuana legalization efforts using the federal governments preemption power
under the Supremacy Clause. We explain that while the courts have yet to establish the precise contours of federal preemption doctrine in this context, the preemptive reach of the CSA is relatively modest. Recognition of this legal reality likely played a significant
role in the recent DOJ decision 6 not to bring preemption challenges against the Colorado and Washington State ballot initiatives.

The plans regulatory mechanism bolsters federalism and reconciles

policy divergence
Grabarsky, 13 [Todd, associate in O'Melveny's Los Angeles office and a member of the
Litigation Department. Professional Activities Law Clerk, Honorable Edward J. Davila, US
District Court, Northern District of California Author, CONFLICTING FEDERAL AND STATE
MEDICAL MARIJUANA POLICIES: A THREAT TO COOPERATIVE FEDERALISM, 116 W. Va.
L. Rev. 1]
When it comes to enforcement of the CSA the federal government has extremely limited resources. As noted, federal law enforcement only accounts for approximately one percent of all drug-related arrests in this
country. Therefore, as the Ogden Memo indicated, the federal executive must choose to allocate its resources with the understanding that it simply will not be able to arrest and prosecute all offenders of federal
drug laws. The federal government has already conceded this: In both the Ogden and Cole Memos the Department of Justice acknowledged that its investigative and prosecutorial resources are limited and it

The federal government, in essence, relies on

the states to assist in the execution of the CSA . Because of this, instead of
attempting to subvert the state medical marijuana schemes, the federal government
should be engaging in a more cooperative federalism system by working with the states to prioritize federal
enforcement resources in a manner consistent with state policy and regulations. In order to achieve this balance between the state and federal enforcement policies
must therefore pick and choose which types of federal offenders are worth its resources.

and to restore cooperative federalism, the federal government needs to adopt an

enforcement policy with regards to medical marijuana that complies with the state laws and regulations. Calling for the federal
executive may prove to be futile, considering that in prosecuting those who violate the CSA by cultivating, possessing or distributing marijuana for medical purposeseven in compliance with state laws and
regulationsfederal law enforcement agents are acting wholly within the scope of their duties and obligation to enforce and uphold the federal CSA. After elaborating on the improbability of executive self-restraint
in Part V.A, Part V.B will propose that Congress acts to re-achieve the balance of cooperative federalism in the realm of nationwide drug enforcement. In order to do this, Congress needs to exempt the applicability
of the CSAs proscription of medical marijuana to those acting in compliance with state laws and regulations like those in California. A. The Futility of Internal Executive Restraint The Ogden MemoCole Memo
shift is a poignant illustration of the problems of assigning the task of preservation of cooperative federalismor federalism in general for that matterto the Executive Branch of the federal government.

The
federal executive policy can be characterized as spottily inconsistent at best and
whimsical at worst . In addition to the recent crackdowns in California, federal medical marijuana enforcement policy in Colorado is illustrative of the uncertainty. In a December
Seemingly on a whim, the Department of Justice and various United States Attorneys can focus and re-focus efforts on medical marijuana distributors acting in full compliance with state laws.

2011 questioning by the House Judiciary Committee to Attorney General Eric Holder, Representative Jared Polis of Colorado asked Holder the following series of questions: Polis: I wanted to see if I can get your
assurance that our definition of caregiver in our states constitution will be given some deference in the Attorney Generals office. Holder: What we said in the [Ogden] Memo we still intend, which is that given
the limited resources that we have, and if there are states that have medical marijuana provisions . . . if in fact people are not using the policy decision that we have made to use marijuana in a way that is not
consistent with the state statute we will not use our limited resources in that way. Polis: [Referring to the recent crackdown in California] Id like to ask whether our thoughtful state regulations . . . provide any
additional protection to Colorado from federalism intervention. Holder: Our thought was where a state has taken a position, as in passed a law, and people are acting in conformity with the lawnot abusing the
law, but acting in conformity with itand again given our limited resources that would not be an enforcement priority for the justice department. . . . Polis: Is there any intention of the DOJ to prosecute bankers
for doing business with licensed and regulated medical marijuana providers in the states? Holder: Again consistent with the notion on how we use our limited resources, again, if the bankers, the people seeking to
make the deposits are acting in conformity with state law would not be a priority for the Justice Department. Within three months after this direct assurance by the executive head of the Justice Department that
entities acting in compliance with state law would not be a federal law enforcement priority, a Colorado-based United States Attorney announced that there exists no safe harbor for medical marijuana
dispensaries acting in compliance with state law because their activities nonetheless remain illegal under federal law. While the issue being address concerned dispensaries located within 1,000 feet of schools, the
U.S. Attorneys office stated that it is not possible to answer whether a shop in compliance with state rules and regulations and not located near a school would still face any trouble. At best, the shift from the
Holder questioning to the latest Colorado U.S. Attorney letter can be viewed as confusion or uncertainty among the federal executive law enforcement; at worst it can be viewed as a blatant attempt to subvert state
medical marijuana laws. At worst, it can be seen as an attempt by the federal government to undermine popular state policies. However, notwithstanding specific policy-based law enforcement decisions made by
the Obama administration, it still remains the duty of the federal executive branch to uphold federal law. Ultimately, the CSA remains the law of the land; and the executive branch has the constitutional duty to
uphold that law. As such, that same governmental branch simply cannot be left to its own devices to preserve federalism and resolve the threat to cooperative federalism posed by the federal-state dichotomy in
medical marijuana laws. The experience of the federal executives inconsistent policy in Colorado, California, and other states with medical marijuana exemptions is a testament to that. B. A Congressional

This
Article proposes that Congress Act to reconcile the state-federal conflict of laws
regarding medical marijuana by creating an exemption from the CSA for medical marijuana
usage and distribution in compliance with approved state laws and regulatory scheme. At the
Exemption for Medical Marijuana in Compliance with State Law Because it appears that the federal executive could not viably preserve the federalism balance, this Article turns to Congress.

most, Congress could amend the CSA to expressly provide the exemption, or at least pass an act prohibiting the Executive from enforcing the CSAs medical marijuana proscription in states that permit it.

Such an exemption would allow states to proceed with their medical marijuana
programs while at the same time keeping the drug illegal at the federal level. The result would be that medical marijuana would be presumptively prohibited nationwide, except in states that take
affirmative legislative and administrative steps (as some have already done) to legalize it. It is extremely important to note that this proposal does not call for a federal exemption to the CSA for medical marijuana.

the proposed exemption would allow those states

legislation and regulation to operate unimpeded by federal disruption . This will also allow these states
On one hand, in states like California that elect to legalize medical marijuana,

to work with the federal authorities in focusing on the state-federal unity of interests in drug enforcement; for example California state agents will still be able and encouraged to work with their federal
counterparts to curb the distribution and possession of drugs that remain illegal on both the federal and California law books. On the other hand, in states that wish to keep medical marijuana prohibited, state

The reason why this compromise is

necessary stems from the so-called laboratories of experimentation notion of
federalism that a one-size-fits-all fix is not a viable or practicable solution to
address an issue that affects over 300 million people with hundreds if not
thousands of diverse values, principles, and beliefs. As mentioned supra, this Article does not purport to opine on the policy values
authorities will continue to cooperate with the federal government to execute the CSA and its state law counter.

of the legalization of medical marijuana. Rather, this Article argues that if the people or legislature of a state decide on a social issue like medical marijuana, then the federal should give some deference to those

When it comes to social issues, the state lawmaking processespecially in

states that pass laws through popular referendum is arguably better at achieving
the will of the people than is the federal government. State governments are more
localized, and thus more apt at deciding how to specifically address a problem that
is affective its citizens. The very existence of federalism acknowledges that one solution in one state might not be
best for another state let alone the rest of the country. A potential hurdle to this proposal would be the argument that this would
decisions.

create a federal scheme that would have different consequences in different states. For example, a medical marijuana dispensary in California would not be subject to federal prosecution as would its counterpart

such a
Congressional exemption to federal law where states adopt relevant programs of
their own design has been constitutionally implemented has been seen before,
namely in the realm of social security. In Charles C. Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Benjamin N.
(if such a thing exists) in, say, New York. This would, it can be argued, undermine the notion that federal laws are to be uniformly applied across the several states. However,

Cardozo, upheld a federal tax and spending unemployment compensation program to be applied across the nation as part of the Social Security Act. Built into the federal program was an exception for states that
adopted unemployment compensation programs of their own: employers in these states would receive a ninety percent federal tax credit; employers in states without such comparable programs would not. In
upholding the state-specific exemption program as constitutional, Justice Cardozo mused on the importance of having local solutions to local problems. The state-by-state exemption to the Social Security Actan
early example of cooperative federalism, perhapsshowed that Congress believed that the general welfare would better be promoted by relief through local units than by the system then in vogue . . . . If a state
Alabama, as was the case in Steward Machine Co.created an unemployment tax and spending scheme that was better tailored to fit the needs of its citizens, then Congress could very well have that program take
the place of the broader federal one. The cooperative federalism principles from the Steward Machine Co. opinion are easily applicable to the medical marijuana conflict and the state-specific Congressional

just like the Social Security Act, the CSA was meant to be a
cooperative effort between the federal government and the states. If various states
wish to experiment in unique ways to solve the problem of drugs yet fit the specific
needs of their citizens, then Congress indeed can and should defer to those states, just
exemption to the CSA that this Article proposes. Generally,

like Congress did with the unemployment tax exemptions at issue in Steward Machine Co. Such an exemption to the CSA will allow states to work with the federal government yet promote the general welfare
through local units. Such a proposal may already be gaining traction among circles of the federal legislature, especially in the aftermath of the 2012 election. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Chairman of
the Senate Judiciary Committee has announced that he will hold a hearing on how to reconcile the CSA with the various state medical and recreational marijuana allowances early in the term of the 113th Congress.
Among the avenues Senator Leahy has already suggested is the following, which essentially mirrors this Articles federal exception proposal: One option would be to amend the Federal Controlled Substances Act
to allow possession of up to one ounce of marijuana, at least in jurisdictions where it is legal under state law. In addition, Congresswoman Diana DeGette of Colorado has introduced a bipartisan bill which hints at
a similar exemption. The proposed Respect States and Citizens Rights Act of 2012 would amend the CSA to provide that federal law shall not preempt State law. While this bill would not affirmatively carve out
an exception to the CSA in states that have allowances for medical and recreational marijuana usage, it would definitively resolve a lingering preemption question. Interestingly, the bipartisan bill has received
support and sponsorship from Congressman Mike Coffman who was a staunch opponent of Amendment 64. I strongly oppose the legalization of marijuana, but I also have an obligation to respect the will of the
voters given the passage of this initiative, and so I feel obligated to support this legislation. This line of reasoning is one happily endorsed by this Article, which, as Rep. Coffman appears to do, does not place a

policy-judgment on state marijuana laws when analyzing the federalism concerns and quandaries they raise, and offering solutions as to how to reconcile the federal-state conflict. CONCLUSION: THE VIABILITY
OF A STATE-SPECIFIC FEDERAL EXEMPTION The idea of an exemption from enforcement of the CSA in states that allow for the limited usage of medical marijuana may not be so far-fetched. The expansion of
state-by-state medical marijuana exemptionsabout one-third of the states have legalized medical marijuana supports the notion that the national tide on the issue is shifting. Additionally, since the passage of
the CSA in the 1970s, popular support for medical marijuana exemptions has grown considerably: in several national polls, a strong majority of respondents support the legalization of marijuana for medical
purposes. Furthermore, it should be noted that in 2010 the District of Columbia Council approved a measure that that would allow patients to receive medical marijuana from state-regulated dispensaries. After
being signed into law by the Districts mayor, Congress did not exercise its power to block the law from taking effect as it had done after a similar measure was passed via referendum by sixty-nine percent of the
voters in 1998. On January 1, 2011, the Districts medical marijuana law went into effect. Since then, the Districts Health Department has selected and approved locations for the medical marijuana dispensaries.
From a cynical standpoint, the legality of medical marijuana in the seat of the federal government can be viewed as hypocritical: that Congress and the various executive law enforcement agencies that continue to
assert the illegality of the medical marijuana are turning a blind eye to its usage in its backyard. However, this Article takes that position that the Districts medical marijuana law illustrates a changing of the
mindset of Congress to one of cooperative federalism for drug regulation. Congress implicit approval of the Districts lawindeed, Congress had full authority to legitimately block it, like it did in 1998evinces a
recognition that a uniform drug policy that applies to each and every semi-autonomous subdivision of the United States may not be whats best for the general welfare. Hopefully, for indeed, Congress had full
authority to legitimately block it, like it did in 1998evinces a recognition that a uniform drug policy that applies to each and every semi-autonomous subdivision of the United States may not be whats best for the

for the sake of cooperative federalism, the next step will be for Congress to
officially make this recognition and enact an exemption to the federal ban on medical marijuana in states where its usage is
general welfare. Hopefully,

legal and regulated.

Plan spills over to all federalism disputesalt causes dont apply

Rauch 13guest scholar in Governance Studies at Brookings
(Jonathan, Washington Versus Washington (and Colorado): Why the States Should Lead on Marijuana Policy,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2013/3/26%20marijuana%20legalization%20localism
%20rauch/Washington%20Versus%20Washington%20and%20Colorado_Rauch_v17.pdf, dml)
In short, there

is no alternative to the exercise of political judgment. Mature people will have to make
The
stakes transcend drug policy proper : marijuana legalization, far from standing alone, is an
installment in a series . In the past several years, state-federal conflict has become a running theme
of the national debate, on multiple hot-button issues and in multiple permutations:
On immigration, the federal government demanded that the states follow federal policy. Arizona claimed a right to
conscious choices about how to manage social change and conflict with a minimum of unnecessary pain and disruption.

independently enforce federal law, even if its enforcement priorities differed from those of the federal government. It also asserted a
right to supplement federal policies with its own more stringent ones. The federal government objected, and the Supreme Court
delivered a mixed ruling which mostly favored the federal government.
On Obamacare (the 2010 Affordable Care Act), states demanded the right not to follow federal policy. They challenged the
laws expansion of Medicaid and its mandate to buy health insurance. The Supreme Court again delivered a mixed ruling, this time
leaning toward the states.
On gay marriage, states demanded that the federal government follow state policy. In suing to overturn the U.S. Defense of
Marriage Act, they claimed that Washington, D.C., had to follow states definitions of marriage rather than establish a separate
definition of its own. The Supreme Court, at this writing, has yet to rule.
Unlike the cases of immigration and Obamacare and the Defense of Marriage Act, marijuana involves not merely

friction between state and federal policy but something closer to outright defiance. Even in a context
of growing agitation in federal-state relations, this was putting a cat among the pigeons .
Avoiding conflict or even chaos is not going to be easy, and the outcome will affect not only drug

the way in which the country handles other federal-state

conflicts sure to emerge.
policy but

Effective cooperative federalism solves US water conservation effortsthe impact

is water shortages and algae blooms

Malloy 12

Bonnie A.
20
, University of Houston Law Center, TESTING COOPERATIVE FEDERALISM: WATER QUALITY
STANDARDS UNDER THE CLEAN WATER ACT http://goo.gl/VR7Nnx
A

nation that fails to plan intelligently for the development and protection of its precious
waters will be condemned to wither because of its shortsightedness. 1 Over forty years after this prophetic
statement by Lyndon B. Johnson, many countries are experiencing severe water quality problems,
including the U.S . 2 The Clean Water Act (CWA), which aims to restore and maintain the integrity of the nations
waters, 3 is the main regulatory structure for protecting water quality in the U.S. and may require modification. Although not in
express terms, the CWAs objective embraces the sustainability principle by seeking to preserve clean water for future generations
and rejects the myopic mentality warned of by President Johnson. To accomplish this goal, the CWA utilizes a

cooperative federalism structure to ensure all waters receive prompt protection . The CWAs failsafe
system gives the states the primary obligation to set water quality standards, but in the case they fail, mandates that the federal
government take control. 4 This guarantees that standards are set, which is the first step towards protecting water quality. As the

U.S. struggles to clean up its waters, it would be wise to analyze whether the CWAs structure

and implementation measure up to its sustainability goals. The next world war will likely
be fought over water 5 something most Americans may find unbelievable. Clean water from the kitchen faucet is
a daily reality in the United States, but this blessing may be obscuring the magnitude of the United
States water quality problems. Despite the current laws aimed to protect and improve U.S. waters, over half of Americas
wells are contaminated with carcinogenic pesticides and nitrates, 6 and most of Americas waters contain man-made chemicals and
toxins. 7 According to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control, 900 people die and 900,000 experience illness each year due to
pathogenic organisms in drinking water. 8 In addition to misconceptions about quality, water is not as abundant or

renewable as many believe. 9 This reduction in overall supply exacerbates water quality because there is less water to
dilute pollutants. Although water quantity raises equally important concerns, this article focuses on the CWAs ability to create
sustainable water quality measures. In 2004, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that 44% of assessed
rivers and 64% of assessed lakes were impaired. 10 One of the top contributors to impaired water quality in the United States is
nitrogen and phosphorus pollution (nutrient pollution), which mainly comes from wastewater discharge and agricultural runoff. 11
In fact, EPA has determined that it is the leading cause of impairment for lakes and coastal waters and second leading cause for
rivers and streams. 12 Nutrient pollution is responsible for dead zones and harmful algal blooms 13 that
can cause skin irritation, staph infections, allergic reactions, gastrointestinal upset, liver damage, and even death. 14 Besides being a
public health threat, algal blooms can also cause fish kills, close down water treatment plants , 15 and

devastate tourist-based economies due to beach closures and reduced freshwater recreation .
Algal blooms deplete the oxygen in the water, which then leads to a dead or hypoxic zone where
no living creature can survive. 16 Nutrients, described more aptly by Earthjustice attorney David Guest as fertilizer and
cow poop, 17 degrade water quality, destroy fish habitat and fisheries, and can even be toxic to people. Dead zones are frequently
occurring around the U.S. from the Gulf of Mexico to Long Island Sound to Washington State and severely hurting tourism and
fishing based economies along its path. 18 Surprisingly, nutrient pollution, which affects our health and economy, has managed to
escape most states strictest water quality standards. 19 A prime example is in Florida where several environmental groups sued EPA
for not setting stricter nutrient standards after Florida failed to act for over ten years. 20 Specifically, plaintiffs argued that EPA had
made a determination in 1998 that numeric nutrient criteria were necessary to meet the goals of the CWA thereby placing a
mandatory duty on EPA to set standards if Florida did not. Increasingly frequent toxic algae blooms throughout Florida from the St.
Johns River in the Northeast Region, the Caloosahatchee River in the Southwest Region, and the Peace and Kissimmee Rivers in the
Central Region prompted this lawsuit. 21 For example, in 2005 the St. Johns River in Jacksonville, Florida had an algae bloom
known as toxic blue-green algae. 22 Due to public health concerns, the County recommended no contact with the river until the
bloom disappeared, which took over three months. 23 Recently, EPA signed a consent decree to set numeric criteria and agreed that
these tougher standards were necessary. 24 Some Florida agencies, however, found EPAs intrusion unwarranted and appealed. 25
This conflict provides an ideal opportunity to critique the CWAs structure and its efficacy. As clean water becomes scarce, Congress
will need to enact new laws if the CWA cannot generate sustainable water management practices. In particular, the CWAs structure
for setting water quality standards must include safeguards to guarantee clean water for future generations. This article assesses the
role of federalism in achieving sustainable water quality measures under the CWA. After considering the potential for cooperative
federalism in this regard, the article focuses on the recent litigation in Florida to analyze whether the CWAs structure has enabled or
hindered the states and EPAs ability to respond to this emerging problem. Specifically, the Florida litigation offers an imperfect, but
effective example of cooperative federalism in practice that has far-reaching implications and lessons .
While cooperative federalism under the CWA provides vital checks and balances, I argue that the states have been non-responsive or
too slow to respond to federal mandates for action, which impedes the maintenance and improvement of water quality. I suggest
that the federal government needs to consistently utilize its authority to rectify state inaction by setting water quality standards to
ensure sustainable water quality. Part I of this article examines the history behind the CWA and water quality standards (WQS) to
uncover Congress vision of how WQS should operate. The article then describes WQS, the CWAs cooperative federalism structure,
and how the Supreme Court has interpreted the federal branchs authority. Understanding the foundation of the current structure
helps uncover some of the problems that arise when the federal government plays a lesser role and discredits arguments in favor of a
more decentralized structure. 26 Part II explains cooperative federalism and its resulting constitutional dilemmas. This section then
introduces the concept of sustainability and explores how cooperative federalism can help achieve sustainable

water quality measures. In discussing the arguments for and against cooperative federalism through a sustainability lens, I
argue that cooperative federalism overwhelmingly increases the chances of realizing
sustainable WQS. In Part III, the article evaluates whether cooperative federalism is being implemented under the CWA, and
if so, if it is successfully creating sustainable water quality measures by looking at the recent numeric nutrient criteria litigation
between Florida and the EPA. This part provides a brief overview of the litigation and addresses whether the EPA usurped state
authority by setting numeric nutrient criteria for Florida or merely followed the CWAs structural mandates. I conclude that this
case exemplifies the CWAs intended structure and illustrates the benefits of having cooperative federalism.
Lastly, Part III discusses the implications of EPAs and the states actions during the Florida litigation. I also propose
recommendations on how the CWAs implementation can be improved to better attain sustainable water quality standards.
Essentially, EPA must follow through on its promises and enforce timelines on states or take control in the face of their inaction.
EPA and citizen groups across the United States can use the Florida litigation as a prototype for setting water quality standards in
the future.

Specifically, the Colorado Rivers on the cusp of complete aquifer collapse

Snyder 13 Michael Snyder, JD, Attorney, Editor of American Dream, 30 Facts About The
Coming Water Crisis That Will Change The Lives Of Every Person On The Planet, 3-4,
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/30-facts-about-the-coming-water-crisis-thatwill-change-the-lives-of-every-person-on-the-planet
The world is rapidly running out of clean water. Some of the largest lakes and rivers on the globe
are being depleted at a very frightening pace, and many of the most important underground
aquifers that we depend on to irrigate our crops will soon be gone. At this point, approximately
40 percent of the entire population of the planet has little or no access to clean water, and it is
being projected that by 2025 two-thirds of humanity will live in "water-stressed" areas. But most
Americans are not too concerned about all of this because they assume that North America has
more fresh water than anyone else does. And actually they would be right about that, but the
truth is that even North America is rapidly running out of water and it is going to change all of
our lives. Today, the most important underground water source in America, the Ogallala
Aquifer, is rapidly running dry. The most important lake in the western United States, Lake
Mead, is rapidly running dry. The most important river in the western United States, the
Colorado River, is rapidly running dry . Putting our heads in the sand and pretending that we
are not on the verge of an absolutely horrific water crisis is not going to make it go away.
Without water, you cannot grow crops, you cannot raise livestock and you cannot support
modern cities. As this global water crisis gets worse, it is going to affect every single man,
woman and child on the planet. I encourage you to keep reading and learn more.
The U.S. intelligence community understands what is happening. According to one shocking
government report that was released last year, the global need for water will exceed the global
supply of water by 40 percent by the year 2030...
This sobering message emerges from the first U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment of
Global Water Security. The document predicts that by 2030 humanity's "annual global water
requirements" will exceed "current sustainable water supplies" by forty percent.
Oh, but our scientists will find a solution to our problems long before then, won't they?
But what if they don't?
Most Americans tend to think of a "water crisis" as something that happens in very dry places
such as Africa or the Middle East, but the truth is that almost the entire western half of the
United States is historically a very dry place. The western U.S. has been hit very hard by drought
in recent years, and many communities are on the verge of having to make some very hard
decisions. For example, just look at what is happening to Lake Mead. Scientists are projecting
that Lake Mead has a 50 percent chance of running dry by the year 2025. If that happens, it will
mean the end of Las Vegas as we know it. But the problems will not be limited just to Las Vegas.
The truth is that if Lake Mead runs dry, it will be a major disaster for that entire region of the
country. This was explained in a recent article by Alex Daley...
Way before people run out of drinking water, something else happens: When Lake Mead falls
below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam's turbines shut down less than four years from now, if the
current trend holds and in Vegas the lights start going out.
Ominously, these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts signed by President
Obama in December 2011, Nevada gets only 23.37% of the electricity generated by the Hoover
Dam. The other top recipients: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (28.53%);
state of Arizona (18.95%); city of Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California Edison (5.54%).
You can always build more power plants, but you can't build more rivers, and the mighty
Colorado carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the water needs of an area the size of
France, in which live 40 million people. In its natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acrefeet of water into the Gulf of California each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced

the flow to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it; at its
mouth, the riverbed is nothing but dust.
Nor is the decline in the water supply important only to the citizens of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and
Los Angeles. It's critical to the whole country . The Colorado is the sole source of water for
southeastern California's Imperial Valley, which has been made into one of the most productive
agricultural areas in the US despite receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.
Are you starting to get an idea of just how serious this all is?
But it is not just our lakes and our rivers that are going dry.
We are also depleting our groundwater at a very frightening pace as a recent Science Daily
article discussed...
Three results of the new study are particularly striking: First, during the most recent drought in
California's Central Valley, from 2006 to 2009, farmers in the south depleted enough
groundwater to fill the nation's largest human-made reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas -- a
level of groundwater depletion that is unsustainable at current recharge rates.
Second, a third of the groundwater depletion in the High Plains occurs in just 4% of the land
area. And third, the researchers project that if current trends continue some parts of the
southern High Plains that currently support irrigated agriculture, mostly in the Texas Panhandle
and western Kansas, will be unable to do so within a few decades.
In the United States we have massive underground aquifers that have allowed our nation to be
the breadbasket of the world . But once the water from those aquifers is gone, it is gone for
good . That is why what is happening to the Ogallala Aquifer is so alarming. The Ogallala
Aquifer is one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world, and U.S. farmers use water from
it to irrigate more than 15 million acres of crops each year. The Ogallala Aquifer covers more
than 100,000 square miles and it sits underneath the states of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma,
Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota. Most Americans have never even
heard of it, but it is absolutely crucial to our way of life. Sadly, it is being drained at a rate that is
almost unimaginable.
Itll deck U.S. agricultural production and cause spiraling blackouts
Snyder 13 Michael Snyder, JD, Attorney, Editor of American Dream, The Colorado River,
The High Plains Aquifer And The Entire Western Half Of The U.S. Are Rapidly Drying Up, 523, http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-colorado-river-the-high-plains-aquiferand-the-entire-western-half-of-the-u-s-are-rapidly-drying-up *Language Modified
To compensate, we are putting a tremendous burden on our fresh water resources. In
particular, the Colorado River is becoming increasingly strained . Without the Colorado
River, many of our largest cities simply would not be able to function. The following is
from a recent Stratfor article...
The Colorado River provides water for irrigation of roughly 15 percent of the crops in the
United States, including vegetables, fruits, cotton, alfalfa and hay. It also provides municipal
water supplies for large cities, such as Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, San Diego and Las Vegas,
accounting for more than half of the water supply in many of these areas.
In particular, water levels in Lake Mead (which supplies most of the water for Las Vegas) have
fallen dramatically over the past decade or so. The following is an excerpt from an article posted
on Smithsonian.com...
And boaters still roar across Nevada and Arizonas Lake Mead, 110 miles long and formed by the
Hoover Dam. But at the lakes edge they can see lines in the rock walls, distinct as bathtub rings,
showing the water level far lower than it once wassome 130feet lower, as it happens, since
2000. Water resource officials say some of the reservoirs fed by the riverwill never be full again.

Today, Lake Mead supplies approximately 85 percent of the water that Las Vegas uses, and since
1998 the water level in Lake Mead has dropped by about 5.6 trillion gallons.
So what happens if Lake Mead continues to dry up?
Well, the truth is that it would be a major disaster...
Way before people run out of drinking water, something else happens: When Lake Mead falls
below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam's turbines shut down less than four years from now, if the
current trend holds and in Vegas the lights start going out.
Ominously, these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts signed by President
Obama in December 2011, Nevada gets only 23.37% of the electricity generated by the Hoover
Dam. The other top recipients: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (28.53%);
state of Arizona (18.95%); city of Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California Edison (5.54%).
You can always build more power plants, but you can't build more rivers, and the mighty
Colorado carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the water needs of an area the size of
France, in which live 40 million people. In its natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acrefeet of water into the Gulf of California each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced
the flow to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it; at its
mouth, the riverbed is nothing but dust.
Nor is the decline in the water supply important only to the citizens of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and
Los Angeles. It's critical to the whole country . The Colorado is the sole source of water for
southeastern California's Imperial Valley, which has been made into one of the most productive
agricultural areas in the US despite receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.
You hardly ever hear about this on the news, but the reality is that this is a slow-motion
train wreck happening right in front of our eyes .
Today, the once mighty Colorado River runs dry about 50 miles north of the sea. The following
is an excerpt from an excellent article by Jonathan Waterman about what he found when he
went to investigate this...
Fifty miles from the sea, 1.5 miles south of the Mexican border, I saw a river evaporate into a
scum of phosphates and discarded water bottles. This dirty water sent me home with feet so
badly infected that I couldnt walk for a week. And a delta once renowned for its wildlife and
wetlands is now all but part of the surrounding and parched Sonoran Desert. According to
Mexican scientists whom I met with, the river has not flowed to the sea since 1998. If the
Endangered Species Act had any teeth in Mexico, we might have a chance to save the giant sea
bass (totoaba), clams, the Sea of Cortez shrimp fishery that depends upon freshwater returns,
and dozens of bird species.
So let this stand as an open invitation to the former Secretary of the Interior and all water
buffalos who insist upon telling us that there is no scarcity of water here or in the Mexican Delta.
Leave the sprinklered green lawns outside the Aspen conferences, come with me, and Ill show
you a Colorado River running dry from its headwaters to the sea. It is polluted and compromised
by industry and agriculture. It is overallocated, drought stricken, and soon to suffer greatly from
population growth. If other leaders in our administration continue the whitewash, the scarcity of
knowledge and lack of conservation measures will [collapse] cripple a western
civilization built upon water.
Further east, the major problem is the drying up of our underground water resources.
In the state of Kansas today, many farmers that used to be able to pump plenty of water to
irrigate their crops are discovering that the water underneath their land is now gone. The
following is an excerpt from a recent article in the New York Times...
Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In westcentral Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has
already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers peak
needs during Kansas scorching summers.

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require
hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.
So what is going to happen to "the breadbasket of the world" as this underground water
continues to dry up?
Most Americans have never even heard of the Ogallala Aquifer, but it is one of our most
important natural resources. It is one of the largest sources of fresh water on the entire planet,
and farmers use water from the Ogallala Aquifer to irrigate more than 15 million acres of crops
each year. It covers more than 100,000 square miles and it sits underneath the states of Texas,
New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota.
Unfortunately, today it is being drained dry at a staggering rate. The following are a few
statistics about this from one of my previous articles...
1. The Ogallala Aquifer is being drained at a rate of approximately 800 gallons per minute.
2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, "a volume equivalent to two-thirds of the water in
Lake Erie" has been permanently drained from the Ogallala Aquifer since 1940.
3. Decades ago, the Ogallala Aquifer had an average depth of approximately 240 feet, but today
the average depth is just 80 feet. In some areas of Texas, the water is gone completely.
So exactly what do we plan to do once the water is gone?
We won't be able to grow as many crops and we will not be able to support such large
cities in the Southwest.
If we have a few more summers of severe drought that are anything like last summer, we are
going to be staring a major emergency in the face very rapidly.
Blackouts cause extinction
Hecht 11 Editor in Chief @ 21st Century Magazine
Laurence, Solar Storm Threatening Power Grids Yet no Action Taken to Implement Defences,
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Solar-Storm-Threatening-Power-Grids%E2%80%93-Yet-no-Action-Taken-to-Implement-Defences.html *Language Modified
A prolonged lack of electricity in any of these areas would reduce the population to Dark Age-like
conditions . Drinking water supply would break down for lack of pumping, and sewage service would cease
shortly thereafter. For lack of refrigeration, the food chain would collapse , and medical supplies would
be lost. Fuel could not be pumped, and thus transportation would break down. Heating and air conditioning systems
would cease functioning. Communication would be [undermined] crippled by the lack of electricity as
well as from the direct damage to satellites and sensitive electronics which a solar storm producesperhaps no Internet and no cell

Modern life would come to an end , and a population and economic infrastructure
unprepared for a return to pre-electricity conditions could descend into chaos .
phones.

Ag collapse causes extinction

Lugar 4 (Richard G., U.S. Senator Indiana and Former Chair Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Plant Power, Our Planet, 14(3),
http://www.unep.org/ourplanet/imgversn/143/lugar.html)
In a world confronted by global terrorism, turmoil in the Middle East, burgeoning nuclear threats and other crises, it is easy to lose
sight of the long-range challenges. But we do so at our peril. One of the most daunting of them is meeting the

worlds need for food and energy in this century. At stake is not only preventing starvation and saving the
environment, but also world peace and security. History tells us that states may go to war over access to
resources, and that poverty and famine have often bred fanaticism and terrorism. Working to feed the
world will minimize factors that contribute to global instability and the proliferation of w eapons of m ass
d estruction.
With the world population expected to grow from 6 billion people today to 9 billion by mid-century, the demand for affordable

food will increase well beyond current international production levels. People in rapidly developing nations will have the
means greatly to improve their standard of living and caloric intake. Inevitably, that means eating more meat. This will raise demand
for feed grain at the same time that the growing world population will need vastly more basic food to eat.
Complicating a solution to this problem is a dynamic that must be better understood in the West: developing countries often use
limited arable land to expand cities to house their growing populations. As good land disappears, people destroy

timber resources and even rainforests as they try to create more arable land to feed themselves. The long-term
environmental consequences could be disastrous for the entire globe .
Productivity revolution

To meet the expected demand for food over the next 50 years, we in the U nited S tates will have to grow roughly
three times more food on the land we have. Thats a tall order. My farm in Marion County, Indiana, for example, yields on
average 8.3 to 8.6 tonnes of corn per hectare typical for a farm in central Indiana. To triple our production by 2050, we will have
to produce an annual average of 25 tonnes per hectare.
Can we possibly boost output that much? Well, its been done before. Advances in the use of fertilizer and water, improved

machinery and better tilling techniques combined to generate a threefold increase in yields since 1935 on our farm
back then, my dad produced 2.8 to 3 tonnes per hectare. Much US agriculture has seen similar increases.
But of course there is no guarantee that we can achieve those results again. Given the urgency of expanding food production to meet
world demand, we must invest much more in scientific research and target that money toward projects that promise to have
significant national and global impact. For the United States, that will mean a major shift in the way we conduct and fund agriculturl
science. Fundamental research will generate the innovations that will be necessary to feed the world.

The U nited S tates can take a leading position in a productivity revolution . And our success at
increasing food production may play a decisive humanitarian role in the survival of billions of people
and the health of our planet .
Uncontrolled algae blooms cause extinction
Science Daily 9they talk about science
(Killer Algae: Key Player In Mass Extinctions, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091019134716.htm, dml)
Supervolcanoes and cosmic impacts get all the terrible glory for causing mass extinctions, but a new theory suggests lowly

algae
may be the killer behind the world's great species annihilations.
Today, just about anywhere there is water, there can be toxic algae. The microscopic plants usually exist in
small concentrations, but a sudden warming in the water or an injection of dust or sediment from land can trigger a bloom
that kills thousands of fish, poisons shellfish, or even humans.
James Castle and John Rodgers of Clemson University think the same thing happened during the five
largest mass extinctions in Earth's history. Each time a large die off occurred, they found a
spike in the number of fossil algae mats called stromatolites strewn around the planet. Castle will be presenting the
research on October 19 at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.
"If you go through theories of mass extinctions , there are always some unanswered questions," Castle said. "For
example, an impact how does that cause species to go extinct? Is it climate change, dust in the atmosphere?
It's probably not going to kill off all these species on its own."
But as the nutrient-rich fallout from the disaster lands in the water, it becomes food for algae. They explode in

population, releasing chemicals that can act as anything from skin irritants to potent
neurotoxins. Plants on land can pick up the compounds in their roots, and pass them on to
herbivorous animals.
If the theory is right, it answers a lot of questions about how species died off in the ancient world. It
also raises concerns for how today's algae may damage the ecosystem in a warmer world.
"Algae growth is favored by warmer temperatures ," Castle said. "You get accelerated metabolism and
reproduction of these organisms, and the effect appears to be enhanced for species of toxin-producing cyanobacteria."
He added that toxic algae in the United States appear to be migrating slowly northward through the
country's ponds and lakes, and along the coast as temperatures creep upward. Their expanding range portends a
host of problems for fish and wildlife, but also for humans, as algae increasingly invade reservoirs
and other sources of drinking water.

Cooperative federalism key to species recovery

Fischman

Robert L.
200 ; Cooperative Federalism and Natural Resources Law Indiana University Maurer School of Law,
Research Paper Number 32 14 N.Y.U. E NVTL . L.J. 179 (2005) This paper can be downloaded without charge from the Social
Science Research Network electronic library at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=824385

Cooperative federalism highlights the split between pollution control and resource management
in environmental law; however, it also offers ways to bridge the divide. We are now seeing encouraging
movement past these historical differences and some application of the lessons from each side of
the environmental law field. It is my hope that this experimentation will continue to increase in the
future. The broader, collaborative approaches to cooperative federalism that have already left
their mark on natural resources law can boost the success of pollution control . And, as the
Puget Sound example shows, the pollution control model can link local land use control with national
species recovery goals. All of the cooperative federalism successes derive from patching together
some parts of the jurisdictional and geographic fragments of environmental law. Because many of the natural
resources tools are voluntary and soft on clear standards, they have received heightened attention during the George W. Bush
administration. But their use is not limited to a Republican or deregulatory agenda. The cross-cutting, current policy preference for
downsizing, outsourcing, and devolving federal environmental administration began before 2001 and will continue to drive new
forms of cooperative federalism. In particular, place-based collaboration will likely grow in importance. We will see more recovery
planning and other statutorily required plans in environmental law generated from the (state/local) ground u p, as the Puget Sound
Shared Strategy gains prominence as a model.

Extinction
Young, 10 Ph.D. in coastal marine ecology (Ruth, Biodiversity: what it is and why its
important, 2/9/2010, http://www.talkingnature.com/2010/02/biodiversity/biodiversity-whatand-why/)
Different species within ecosystems fill particular roles, they all have a function, they all have a niche . They
interact with each other and the physical environment to provide ecosystem services that are vital for our survival . For
example plant species convert carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and energy from the sun into useful things such
as food, medicines and timber. Pollination carried out by insects such as bees enables the production of of
our food crops. Diverse mangrove and coral reef ecosystems provide a wide variety of habitats that are essential
for many fishery species . To make it simpler for economists to comprehend the magnitude of services offered by biodiversity,
a team of researchers estimated their value it amounted to $US33 trillion per year. By protecting biodiversity we maintain
ecosystem services Certain

species play a keystone role in maintaining ecosystem services. Similar to the removal of
a keystone from an arch, the removal of these species can result in the collapse of an ecosystem and the
subsequent removal of ecosystem services. The most well known example of this occurred during the 19th century when
sea otters were almost hunted to extinction by fur traders along the west coast of the USA. This led to a population explosion in the
sea otters main source of prey, sea urchins. Because the urchins graze on kelp their booming population decimated the underwater
kelp forests. This loss of habitat led to declines in local fish populations. Sea otters are a keystone species once hunted for their fur
(Image: Mike Baird) Eventually a treaty protecting sea otters allowed the numbers of otters to increase which inturn controlled the
urchin population, leading to the recovery of the kelp forests and fish stocks. In other cases, ecosystem services are maintained by
entire functional groups, such as apex predators (See Jeremy Hances post at Mongabay). During the last 35 years, over fishing of
large shark species along the US Atlantic coast has led to a population explosion of skates and rays. These skates and rays eat bay
scallops and their out of control population has led to the closure of a century long scallop fishery. These are just two examples
demonstrating how biodiversity can maintain the services that ecosystems provide for us, such as fisheries. One could argue that to
maintain ecosystem services we dont need to protect biodiversity but rather, we only need to protect the species and functional
groups that fill the keystone roles. However, there are a couple of problems with this idea. First of all, for most ecosystems

we dont know which species are the keystones! Ecosystems are so complex that we are still discovering which

species play vital roles in maintaining them. In some cases its groups of species not just one species that are vital for the ecosystem.
Second, even if we did complete the enormous task of identifying and protecting all keystone species, what back-up plan

would we have if an unforseen event (e.g. pollution or disease) led to the demise of these keystone species?

Would there be another species to save the day and take over this role? Classifying some species as keystone implies that the others
are not important. This may lead to the non-keystone species being considered ecologically worthless and subsequently overexploited. Sometimes we may not even know which species are likely to fill the keystone roles. An example of this was discovered on
Australias Great Barrier Reef. This research examined what would happen to a coral reef if it were over-fished. The over-fishing
was simulated by fencing off coral bommies thereby excluding and removing fish from them for three years. By the end of the
experiment, the reefs had changed from a coral to an algae dominated ecosystem the coral became overgrown with algae. When
the time came to remove the fences the researchers expected herbivorous species of fish like the parrot fish (Scarus spp.) to eat the
algae and enable the reef to switch back to a coral dominated ecosystem. But, surprisingly, the shift back to coral was driven by a
supposed unimportant species the bat fish (Platax pinnatus). The bat fish was previously thought to feed on invertebrates small

crabs and shrimp, but when offered a big patch of algae it turned into a hungry herbivore a cow of the sea grazing the algae in no
time. So a fish previously thought to be unimportant is actually a keystone species in the recovery of coral reefs overgrown by algae!
Who knows how many other species are out there with unknown ecosystem roles! In some cases its easy to see who the keystone
species are but in many ecosystems seemingly unimportant or redundant species are also capable of changing niches and
maintaining ecosystems. The

more biodiverse an ecosystem is, the more likely these species will be present and the
more resilient an ecosystem is to future impacts. Presently were only scratching the surface of understanding the full
importance of biodiversity and how it helps maintain ecosystem function. The scope of this task is immense. In the meantime, a
wise insurance policy for maintaining ecosystem services would be to conserve biodiversity . In doing so, we
increase the chance of maintaining our ecosystem services in the event of future impacts such as disease, invasive species and of
course, climate change. This is the international year of biodiversity a time to recognize that biodiversity

makes our survival on this planet possible and that our protection of biodiversity maintains this service.

Plans key to cooperation and innovation

Shechtman, 12 [Matthew, JD, Roger Williams University School of Law, "Joint Authority?
The Case for State-Based Marijuana Regulation"
http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1135%26context=tjlp~~]

IV. Conclusion Currently, more than 24.8 million people are eligible to receive medical marijuana licenses under state laws, and
approximately 730,000 people actually do.180 Medical marijuana markets exist in seven states: California, Colorado, Michigan,
Montana, Oregon, Washington and New Mexico and five more will open this year in Arizona, Maine, New Jersey, Rhode Island and
the District of Columbia.' Economically speaking, the marijuana marketplace is projected to more than double within the next five
years.1 2 Outside of the capitalist retail market for marijuana, the question remains whether there is a viable market for innovative
state laws. As addressed in Part II.A.- B., the federal regime over marijuana laws is hampering

innovation and efficient policymaking , leaving overly harsh federal laws that go
largely unenforced in practice and by Executive Order. State legislators and enforcement
authorities are left in the dark , and United States citizens are faced with an unclear statefederal dichotomy by which distribution may be illegal but consumption is
decriminalized. Even more striking, dispensary operators may be legally licensed by the state and yet subject to federal
enforcement for violation of the Controlled Substances Act.183 Even outside the lack of clarity and poor
suitability of federal authority, we should expect a fairly robust "market" for
marijuana laws where there are competing interests , an informed and reactive populace, and a
primed state-to-state competition for economic growth and citizenry.184 Further, as discussed in
Part III.B, there does not seem to be reason to expect marijuana policies to be illsuited for efficient competition, by promoting a "Race to the Bottom" 85 through
imperfect information, negative externalities, or power inequalities between
suppliers and consumers of laws. 86 In addition, federalization as a remedy to an
unclear problem stifles innovation and experimentation , replacing jurisdictional
competition with regulatory oversight and unwavering rules.' 87 Most simply, a given legal
system would prefer state laws if the "market" has the ability to produce efficient laws and will not inflict market failures leading to
overly stringent or lax regulation.'8 In the market for marijuana laws, one would expect to encounter less need for consistency,
uniformity, and correction of market failure because jurisdictional "markets" in the drug trade will presumably be transparent and
consumers will have relatively full information, while states will have appropriate incentives to optimize laws.' 89 The legalization,
decriminalization, and medicalization of marijuana undoubtedly comprise a story in its early chapters. As states continue to adopt
progressive marijuana laws, the legal marijuana industry continues to grow, and the executive branch ignores the strictures of the

United States citizens are at a

crossroads of conflicting state and federal law and are waiting to see how the
policymaking game will play out. Interest groups and lobbyists are no strangers to this game, pitting Big
CSA, the structure of marijuana policy will begin to crystallize. Until then,

Tobacco, Big Pharma, the Prison Industrial Complex, and the Religious Right against a progressive populace and state legislators
looking to fill their recessionragged coffers while cutting back on drug-induced violence. The federal regulatory regime and the
politically motivated and maintained "War on Drugs" costs American taxpayers billions of dollars a year in a seemingly fruitless
attempt to rid the American populace of the social and moral hazards of drug use. Yet the social ills of marijuana use stem almost
entirely from its illicitness, 90 inducing violent organized crime but causing fewer deaths each year than alcoholl91 or tobacco
use;192 marijuana's addiction rate is also a mere pittance compared to nicotine addiction.' 9 3 The United States

system of federalism is premised on extensive state autonomy, leading to

experimentation and innovation in policymaking , concurrent with the citizenry's ability to choose the
laws they want applied by locating in a jurisdiction with the bundle of laws they find most appealing. In accordance with this

paradigm, we have already seen the bulwark of progressive marijuana laws enacted on the West Coast,194 and almost no innovation
in the Southeast, seemingly in line with population ideologies in those respective locales.' 95 Cutting the federal government entirely
out of marijuana regulation and enforcement is neither plausible, nor advisable. The drug trade is too international to limit federal
involvement and states rely on federal enforcement where distribution and trafficking crosses state lines. Economies of scale also
empower the federal government to utilize powerful resources in an effort to keep pace with well-funded drug syndicates. Further,
federal legislators have too much at stake in the drug debate to let it goentirely. As seen in the alcohol regulatory scheme, we can
expect to see Congress utilize its spending power to incentivize states to act in accordance with federal objectives.16 That being said,
two central arguments from the "Competitive Alternative" give informed guidance to Congress, arguing to reign back on forfeiture
laws and simultaneously cut spending on federal media campaigns against marijuana use.197 Ultimately, it seems the

marijuana train has left the station and has the momentum necessary to establish
its legitimacy in the United States. The million-dollar question then is how it will be
regulated. From the standpoint of history and logic, state authority is the best vehicle for public
welfare, citizen autonomy, and efficient regulation.

2AC

2AC AT: T
Marihuana is canna bis sativa
MTA 37Marihuana Tax Act
(THE MARIHUANA TAX ACT OF 1937,
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/taxact/mjtaxact.htm, dml)
The term "marihuana" means all parts of the plant Cannabis sativa L., whether growing or not;
the seeds thereof; the resin extracted from any part of such plant; and every compound,
manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such plant, its seeds, or resin- but shall
not include the mature stalks of such plant, fiber produced from such stalks, oil or cake made
from the seeds of such plant, any other compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or
preparation of such mature stalks (except the resin extracted therefrom), fiber, oil, or cake, or
the sterilized seed of such plant which is incapable of germination.
Alexanders not qualified, its an opinion piece based on legislative misreading
CSA goes affthis is from the biggest court case
Bowman 9senior federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
(Pasco, opinion in David Monson, Wayne Hauge, Appellants, v. Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Justice,
Appellees, UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT 589 F.3d 952, No. 07-3837, dml)

Under the CSA, marijuana is defined to include all Cannabis sativa L. plants,
regardless of THC concentration . See 21 U.S.C. 7 802(16). The CSA likewise makes no
distinction between cannabis grown for drug use and that grown for industrial
use. [Footnote 4] See id. In United States v. White Plume, 447 F.3d 1067, 1069 (8th Cir. 2006) (quoting ordinance) (alterations in
White Plume), we held that "industrial hemp," defined by tribal ordinance as "[a]ll parts and varieties of the
plant Cannabis sativa" that "contain a [THC] concentration of one percent or less by weight," was [*962]
subject to regulation as a Schedule I controlled substance under the CSA because as a species of
Cannabis sativa L., it fell squarely within the definition of marijuana set forth in the CSA.
We also noted that "[t]he language of the CSA unambiguously bans the growing of
marijuana, regardless of its use ," id. at 1072, and we concluded that "[b]ecause the CSA
does not distinguish between marijuana and hemp in its regulation, and because farming
hemp requires growing the entire marijuana plant which at some point contains
psychoactive levels of THC, the CSA regulates the farming of hemp ," id. at 1073. Considering the
legislative history of the CSA, we found " no evidence that Congress intended otherwise"
than to ban the growth of all varieties of the Cannabis sativa L. plant absent compliance with the registration
requirements of the CSA. Id. at 1072; see also N.H. Hemp Council, 203 F.3d at 6-8 (concluding that cannabis cultivated for
industrial use and possessing a low THC concentration is nevertheless marijuana under the CSA and is subject to regulation by the
DEA); cf. United States v. Curtis, 965 F.2d 610, 616 (8th Cir. 1992) (observing that male marijuana plants, which may

have lower THC concentrations than female plants, are still marijuana plants for
sentencing purposes).

2AC AT: CP
the first part of their counterplan is legalization, which also means
the counterplan text is incoherent
EMCCDA, 1 - European monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction,
Decriminalisation in Europe?: Recent developments in legal approaches to drug use
November 2001 http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/html.cfm/index5734EN.html)

Concept and Definition of Decriminalisation

Decriminalisation. Decriminalisation takes away the status of criminal law from those acts to
which it is applied. This means that certain acts no longer constitute criminal offences. With
regard to drugs, it is usually used to refer to demand; acts of acquisition, possession and
consumption. Following decriminalisation, it still is illegal to use, possess, acquire or in certain
cases import drugs, but those acts are no longer criminal offences. However, administrative
sanctions can still be applied; these can be a fine, suspension of the driving or firearms licence,
or just a warning. In contrast, legalisation is the process of bringing within the control of the law
a specified activity that was previously illegal and prohibited or strictly regulated.
Related to drugs, the term is most commonly applied to acts of supply; production, manufacture
or sale for non-medical use. Legalisation would mean that such activities, and use and
possession, would be regulated by states norms, in the same way that it is legal to use alcohol
and tobacco. There can still exist some administrative controls and regulations, which might
even be supported by criminal sanctions (e.g. when juveniles or road traffic are concerned).
From a legal point of view, any form of legalisation would be contrary to the current UN
conventions.
Doesnt solve retains every negative aspect of prohibition AND doesnt eliminate
criminal supply networks
Duncan, 09 [CONNECTICUT LAW REVIEW VOLUME 41 JULY 2009 NUMBER 5 Note THE
NEED FOR CHANGE: AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF MARIJUANA POLICY CYNTHIA S.
DUNCAN V. CONCLUSION,University of Colorado, B.A. 2006; University of Connecticut
School of Law, J.D. Candidate 2009, p. lexis]
Decriminalization of marijuana is a wholly unsatisfactory compromise between strict prohibition and legalization.132
Decriminalization carries with it many of the same societal costs associated with total
prohibition133 and retains almost every negative aspect associated with prohibition. 134
Decriminalization as it currently exists removes the criminal sanctions for possession of marijuana for personal use135 without providing
for a noncriminal method of obtaining it;136 therefore, all trafficking remains illegal. 137 The
enforcement and deterrence efforts aimed at trafficking remain the same as under strict prohibition,138 which
means that the racial and economic disparities associated with these methods are also retained. In addition, because decriminalization
offers no new methods of deterring underage use, there is no positive impact on the underage usage rates attributable to decriminalization.139 Although experience with decriminalization has shown it does not

Removing the
criminal sanctions for personal use does not dismantle the destructive and dangerous
criminal supply networks that have taken deep root in our own backyard.142 Not only does
decriminalization do nothing to remove the criminal networks, it may increase their
profits. 143 Thus, decriminalization is likely to prove to be the worst of all possible policies when
it comes to the drug-dealing aspect of the marijuana problem .144 Thirteen states have now adopted some form of decriminalization,145
have an appreciable effect on overall usage rates,140 any increase in demand associated with an easing of possession sanctions is still supplied entirely by the black market.141

but without decriminalization of marijuana at the federal level, this simply creates a system that puts state and local drug measures easing the restrictions on marijuana at odds with federal laws prohibiting all
marijuana use.146 Decriminalization at the federal level that mirrors decriminalization at the state level would only eliminate the conflict currently existing between federal law and state and local measures.147

decriminalization would produce no additional positive impact on the usage rates among young people, would do nothing to dismantle
illegal trafficking operations , and would maintain many of the racial and economic disparities associated with prohibition.148 For those opposed to strict prohibition,
decriminalization of personal use may be viewed as a positive step.149 However, because in many ways decriminalization is no better policy than prohibition, decriminalization as it
Federal

currently exists, whether at the state or federal level, is unsuitable as a long-term solution.
IV. LEGALIZATION & REGULATION There is certainly no consensus among American voters that recreational use of marijuana should be legalized,150 but given the growing reluctance to impose criminal

Legalizing marijuana
would eliminate the destructive and dangerous criminal supply networks of the marijuana
black market.153 It would also remove the direct and collateral sanctions that currently fall so harshly upon minority and low-income marijuana users. Putting an end to
government prohibition of marijuana would eliminate the need for both the billions of dollars
and the countless man-hours154 spent annually on what has proven to be a futile effort to appreciably
reduce the availability of marijuana.155 This Part considers a policy of legalization that would replace government prohibition with government regulation and
sanctions for personal recreational use, coupled with the support for legalized medical marijuana,151 marijuana legalization merits serious consideration.152

taxation.156 Two possible means of regulation are discussed briefly, but the primary focus is on the fundamental differences between legalization of marijuana and both prohibition and decriminalization.
Marijuana is by far the most widely used illicit drug in the United States.157 While those opposed to legalization point to the potential physical harms associated with smoking marijuana,158 one of the strongest
arguments in support of legalization is that arrest and criminal justice processing is for many users the most substantial risk of using marijuana.159 The success of the initiatives decriminalizing possession for
personal use reflects a growing reluctance to make criminals out of everyone who uses marijuana;160 however, the reality is that, notwithstanding those initiatives, every thirty-seven seconds someone is arrested

Legalization of marijuana would

represent a radical change in policy, but consideration of such a change is warranted because of the dismal showing of the prohibition policy in meeting its
for a marijuana offense.161 From this perspective, legalization is the best means for removing the most harmful element of marijuana use.

goals. Billions of dollars, millions of arrests, and nearly forty years of prohibition have not made marijuana go away.162 Instead, the drug has grown in popularity at a rate outpacing all others while
simultaneously enriching those willing to break the law.163 Legalization takes an entirely different approach. Legalization represents the if you cant beat em, join em attitude. Having failed to effectively exert

legalization exerts control from the insidereplacing

government prohibition of marijuana with government regulation.
control over marijuana availability and marijuana use from the outside through prohibition,

2AC AT: MIDTERMS DA

Democrats likely to retain Senate --- prefer conclusions that rely just on polling
data
Wang, 9/9/14 --- associate professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton
University and is a founder of the Princeton Election Consortium (Sam, Democrats Now Have a
Seventy-Per-Cent Chance of Retaining Control of the Senate,
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/democrats-seventy-per-cent-chance-retainingcontrol-senate, JMP)
Last weekend, the Sunday news shows were abuzz about the growing consensus in the
mainstream media that the G.O.P. holds a slight advantage in the battle for the Senate. This
forecast has come from the New York Times The Upshot, the Washington Posts The Monkey
Cage, and FiveThirtyEights Nate Silver, the nerd king of statistical analysis. All of these
predictions have one thing in common: they are based on more than pure polling data .
By considering other factors, these data journalists are putting their thumbs on the scale
lightly, but with consequential effects.
Here is a table of current polling data for the key Senate races, along with win probabilities
issued by various handicappers:*
[table omitted]
The first column of numbers lists the median lead by either candidate in the recent polls.* The
next three columns show Democratic win probabilities from sites that only rely on polling data:
the Princeton Election Consortium, which I founded; the Huffington Posts Pollster; and Daily
Koss Poll Explorer. Win probabilities higher than fifty-five per cent are colored blue if
Democrats are favored, and red if Republicans are. The rationale for these calculations is
straightforward: if a candidate is leading now, he or she is likely to win in November. The
discrepancies in these numbers come from the slightly different rules each organization uses to
average the poll results.
The colors change once we reach the Post, FiveThirtyEight, and the Times: a sea of red starts to
appear. Compared with the average probabilities from the first group, the Posts figures come
the closestwithin two percentage pointsbut they still favor the Republican candidate. The
Times leans farther right, by an average of six percentage points, and FiveThirtyEight veers the
hardest to the right, favoring the Republican candidate in nearly every race by an average of
twelve percentage points.
In addition to polling data, these analysts are taking into account fundamentalsfactors that
supposedly capture the state of the political playing fieldlike incumbency, campaign funding,
prior experience, and President Obamas job-approval rating.
Fundamentals can be useful when there are no polls to reference. But polls , when they are
available, capture public opinion much better than a model does . In 2012, on Election
Eve, for example, the Princeton Election Consortium relied on polls alone to predict
every single Senate race correctly , while Silver, who used a polls-plus-fundamentals
approach, called two races incorrectly, missing Heidi Heitkamps victory, in North Dakota, and
Jon Testers, in Montana.
The Princeton Election Consortium generates a poll-based snapshot in which the win/lose
probabilities in all races are combined to generate a distribution of all possible outcomes. The
average of all outcomes, based on todays polls, is 50.5 Democratic and Independent seats (two
Independents, Bernie Sanders and Angus King, currently caucus with the Democrats).
Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity!
I did not always appreciate the importance of sticking closely to polling data. I first started
analyzing polls during the 2004 Presidential campaign, in which John Kerry and George W.
Bush traded the Electoral College lead three times between June and November. An October

calculation based purely on polls suggested that Bush would win. However, I added an extra
assumption: that undecided voters would break by two percentage points toward Kerry. On
Election Day, the president of my university e-mailed me asking for my final prediction. I told
her, with confidence, that it would be Kerry. It was a humbling mistake.
Because polls have better predictive value than fundamentals do , it would seem
prudent to ask what an unadulterated poll-based snapshot of the Senate race looks like. Today,
it looks like this:
[graph omitted]
Based on this calculation, if the elections were held today, Democrats and Independents would
control the chamber with an eighty-per-cent probability. (The green section accounts for Greg
Orman, the Independent candidate in Kansas, who would provide the fiftieth vote. Orman has
said that he would caucus with the majority, that he would caucus with the other Independents,
and that he wants to break the Senate gridlock. For this histogram, I have graphed him as
caucusing with the Democrats.)
But can a snapshot of todays polls really tell us that much about an election held eight weeks
from now? As it turns out, it might. A poll-based snapshot moves up and down, like the price of
a stock. That movement can show us the range of the most likely outcomes for Election Day . The
chart below displays those ups and downs. On the right is a zone of highest probability, drawn
out in much in the same style as a hurricane strike zone on a weather map. This area indicates
where the campaign is most likely to land.
[graph omitted]
At the point marked November, the smaller bracket indicates the two-sigma range, where I
estimate about eighty-five per cent of outcomes should fall. Near the center of this range is the
most probable outcomean equal split of seats, fifty Democratic and Independent, and fifty
Republican, a situation in which the Democrats would retain control. The entire range includes
the additional possibilities of a fifty-one-to-forty-nine split in either direction, as well as a fiftytwo-to-forty-eight split favoring the Democrats and Independents. By adding up the parts of the
strike zone that encompass fifty or more Democratic and Independent votes, it is possible to
estimate the probability of sustained Democratic control a fter the election: seventy
per cent .
A more accurate way to interpret the current state of the race is this: At the start of 2014,
conditions slightly favored the G.O.P., when measured by fundamentals. Based on opinion polls,
Democrats are currently outperforming those expectations. The shape of next years Senate is
based on whether that level of performance will continue.
Impeachment threats will motivate democratic turnout and if not nothing will
Benen, 7/25 (Steve, 7/25/2014, How to fix an enthusiasm gap,
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-fix-enthusiasm-gap, JMP)
The Pew Research Center published an interesting poll on the 2014 midterms, which offered a
little good news for both parties. But there was one major takeaway that will be of particular
significance between now and Election Day.
On the generic congressional ballot, Democrats enjoy a slight edge, 47% to 45%. But as we know,
thats not as important as turnout the parties were fairly close on the generic ballot in 2010,
too, right before Republicans gained 63 House seats and took the majority.
And thats where the results get interesting. Pew found greater Republican enthusiasm about the
elections, but the advantage over Democrats is much smaller than four years ago.
Whats more, theres still time for Democratic leaders to get their voters in the game a point
that does not appear to be lost on the partys major players.
I think Speaker Boehner, by going down the path of this lawsuit, has opened the door to
impeachment sometime in the future, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said at a
Washington breakfast [this morning] hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Pfeiffer said the lawsuit wont deter Obamas efforts to act via executive authority where
Congress wont. He predicted that the presidents upcoming executive actions on immigration
(which are expected to involve slowing deportations) will certainly up the likelihood that theyll
contemplate impeachment.
Much of this, to be sure, likely reflects Pfeiffers genuine assessment of the political landscape.
But at least some of this is also intended for a Democratic base the more the Republican
impeachment crusade is part of the national conversation, the more likely Democratic voters
will be inclined to get engaged in the 2014 midterms.
Indeed, thats not speculative; theres some quantifiable evidence to back this up.
While the uptick in impeachment is making many in the GOP uneasy, some Democrats see an
opportunity to motivate parts of their base coalition that are notoriously disengaged from
politics during non-presidential election years and dont show up at the polls.
Democrats say that the impeachment chatter, plus a recent lawsuit filed against Obama by
House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), have already proved a major fundraising boon
for the party.
Mother Jones David Corn said on the show last night, after House Speaker John Boehner (ROhio) first announced his anti-Obama lawsuit, it produced the biggest, most successful online
fund-raising day in the history of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. which
supports House Democratic candidates.
The more Republicans talk about impeachment, the more it helps Democrats. The more
Republicans talk up their anti-Obama lawsuit, the more it helps Democrats.
Indeed, as we talked about last week, whats the GOP message been of late? Opposition to
contraception, opposition to immigration, presidential impeachment, Dick Cheney maintaining
a near-constant media presence, and a vow to take families health care benefits away
This certainly doesnt guarantee that Dems will show up this fall, but its hard to imagine
what more motivation the partys base would need to get engaged in a midterm
cycle .
Dems already using minimum wage measures on state ballots to increase turnout
Holland, 14 --- senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com (1/4/2014, Joshua, Will Raising
the Minimum Wage Become a Wedge Issue in the 2014 Midterms?
http://billmoyers.com/2014/01/04/will-raising-the-minimum-wage-become-a-wedge-issue-inthe-2014-midterms/, JMP)
In 2004, the campaign to re-elect George W. Bush encouraged socially conservative activists to
put constitutional amendments barring same-sex marriage on state ballots across the country.
At the time, opposition to same-sex marriage was the majority position and the effort polled
well. The move was widely seen as an effort to use a wedge issue to peel off some Democratic
voters, fire up the Republican base and increase turnout among those likely to support the
president against challenger John Kerry. It succeeded in 11 states.
Writing in Fridays Washington Post, Harold Meyerson reports that Democrats are taking a page
out of the Bush playbook in the 2014 midterm elections. But they plan to use a very different
issue as their wedge increasing the minimum wage.
Meyerson:
American liberalism and the Democratic Party two partially overlapping but by no means
identical institutions have set themselves an unusually clear agenda for 2014: reducing
economic inequality and boosting workers incomes. These are causes they can fight for on
multiple fronts.
Raising the minimum wage should offer the course of least resistance. Although congressional
Republicans may persist in blocking an increase in the federal minimum wage, they do so at

their own peril. Raising the wage is one of the few issues in U.S. politics that commands acrossthe-board public support. A CBS News poll in November found that even 57 percent of
Republicans support such an increase.
Democrats have concluded that they can turn Republican legislators opposition to raising the
wage into an electoral issue by using state ballot measures. As states are free to set their own
minimum-wage standards though the rates take effect only when they exceed the federal
minimum Democrats are working to put wage-increase initiatives before voters in states that
will have contested House and Senate races in 2014, including Arkansas, Alaska, South Dakota
and New Mexico. Such ballot measures have proved an effective way to increase turnout of lowincome and minority voters, which can translate into more ballots cast for Democratic
candidates.
Immediately after the 2004 election, conventional wisdom held that the state marriage
amendments had succeeded in nudging Bush across the finish line. Later, as political scientists
dug deeper into the turnout results, that initial conclusion became the source of some
controversy.
But the debate was based on comparisons of voting patterns between 2000 and 2004. Midterm
elections represent a very different animal. Since 2008, weve seen a consistent pattern in which
the midterm and presidential election cycles feature divergent electorates. In low-turnout
midterms, the voting population has skewed older, whiter and more Republican. Key
Democratic constituencies, on the other hand, tend to be less attached to politics. Younger
voters, lower income voters, single people and people of color who are motivated to cast a ballot
during a presidential election have proven less likely to come out to vote in midterm elections.
No TPP or TPA even with a GOP congress
Feldman, 14 --- partner at BakerHostetler LLP, his international practice concentrates on
all forms of trade disputes (6/23/2014, Elliot J., The pivot to Asia and the inevitable failure of
the Trans-Pacific Partnership, www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=64175cf7-2586-4b5abb59-49fe3bf5e3f1)
The Status Of Negotiations
TPP negotiations are unlikely to produce an international agreement regardless whether Japan
or South Korea are parties. There are too many fundamental disagreements among the twelve
countries in the talks, and the American attempt to infuse the region with American values and
American legalities is transparent.
Despite the secrecy of negotiations, documents have leaked. Some have included full draft texts,
as for an environmental chapter. Mostly, they have exposed the lack of international progress.
Following the November 2013 Round of Negotiations in Salt Lake City, the internal commentary
of one participating government contained, in no particular order of importance, numerous
observations.
According to the leaked document, notwithstanding that the U.S. is exerting great pressure to
close as many issues as possible this week, The results are mediocre. The meeting, this
commentary reported, served to confirm the large differences that continue in most areas of the
[IP] chapter. For medicines, the United States resubmitted a text that had been strongly
rejected in the past. The United States, as in previous rounds, has shown no flexibility on its
proposal [for investment] . . . Only the U.S. and Japan support the proposal. The chapter on
State-Owned Enterprises is very far from closed. There was very little progress on Rules of
Origin, and the negotiations over textiles were in a major crisis. The Meeting on the
environment was interrupted because we could not get past the second issue [on] the definition
of environmental law. There was inadequate progress on financial services: The positions
are still paralysed. United States shows zero flexibility. The United States had been aiming to

close the entire deal by the end of 2013 and get it before Congress before the summer election
campaign.
Historically, the United States has had its way in international negotiations most when forging
bilateral agreements because it has always been the dominant player. Other countries typically
want to draw the United States into multilateral negotiations because they can band together to
dilute American power and influence. Here, the United States has been drawn into a
multilateral negotiation that it has tried to treat as a collection of bilaterals (an opportunity to
dismantle Canadas supply management; Japans agricultural protectionism; Vietnams textile
preferences; and so forth). Yet, even were the United States somehow successful internationally
in the negotiations, Congress probably for the wrong reasons would not close the deal.
The United States strategy for negotiation and ratification has been complicated and
backwards. The process, as it has evolved, has been to place the initial burden on Japan and to
present Congress with a deal it could not refuse. Congress, nonetheless, whatever it is
Republican or Democrat will refuse it, for at least three reasons. First, a Republican
Congress will not give President Obama a signature foreign policy success in trade. Republicans
consider international trade their domain (the history of trade commitments to the contrary
notwithstanding), and the current Republican Party is obstructionist regarding all Obama
initiatives. Second, the Presidents own Party does not support the Agreement, suspicious about
labor, the environment, banks, pharmaceutical companies. And third, most of Congress feels
betrayed by the alleged secrecy in making the deal.
Had Obama followed the historical process, in which TPA precedes TPP, he may have been more
successful, or he would have known sooner that the objective could not be reached. Now he is
presented with the risk of failure where American credibility throughout Asia is at stake. It
would have been better to know earlier, or to have lowered expectations. Those options are
gone.
Conclusion
The President needs to complete a very attractive TPP in order to persuade Congress to vote it
up or down, requiring prior TPA legislation. His international partners, however, are not
making their best and final offers without TPA coming first. Prime Minister Abe, for example,
does not want to take on his whole agricultural sector in order to make a deal that could fail in
the United States Congress. There seem to be almost daily reports that Japan will not give up its
protection of five sacred agricultural products, a position guaranteed to crater the deal. So,
TPP cant be completed successfully without TPA, and TPA cannot be passed without a
completed and attractive TPP.
At first, China seemed to interpret the TPP as a U.S.-led attempt at containment. Over time,
China seemed to recognize fatal problems with the negotiations and worried less. At one point,
a year ago, China called the U.S bluff that it might be included in the talks, whether because
China was genuinely interested, or because China wanted to expose the real purpose of the TPP.
Today, Chinas public discord with the United States is concentrated on the American
engagement as an ally of Japan in sovereignty disputes. Trade disputes principally American
complaints about state owned enterprises and Chinese state support for exported merchandise
continue unabated in the friendly confines of government investigating agencies and dispute
panels of the WTO, and seem reminiscent of the American confrontations with Japan during the
1980s, in the days of the GATT. Even as trade disagreements sometimes take on the appearance
of a trade war, security issues have replaced them in prominence and have induced President
Obama to insist again on the American acceptance of Chinas rise as a major power.
One last word for our European friends, who have been as seduced by TTIP as our Asian friends
have been drawn into one protracted negotiation round after another for TPP. The
Administration has made TPA dependent on TPP instead of the other way around.
Consequently, it perceives TPA as a one-off on behalf of TPP. Even were it possible to imagine

that this strategy could succeed once, it could not succeed twice. Therefore, at least for the life of
this presidency, TTIP is even deader than TPP.
GOP kills TPAcauses delays
Inside US Trade 9/19writes about trade?
(Kind Says TPA Unlikely In 2014 If GOP Takes Senate; Wyden Defers To Reid On Schedule, Inside US Trade Daily Report,
ProQuest, dml)
Two key congressional

Democrats on Tuesday (Sept. 17) separately highlighted two different hurdles to

advancing Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) legislation during the lame-duck session of Congress: the strong
likelihood that Republicans would not want to move on TPA if they take the Senate in the November
elections, and the uncertainty over whether Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) would allow such a
vote in the lame duck.
In an interview, House New Democrat Coalition Chairman Ron Kind (D-WI) stressed that a Republican takeover of
the Senate in the Nov. 4 midterm election would likely kill any chances for a TPA bill to move in the lame
duck. "I think if we get a flip of the Senate Nov. 4, the brakes get hit pretty fast around here and everything
slips into the new Congress then," he said.
Passage more likely under Democrats
Palmer 9/15Politico
(Doug, GOP Senate no slam dunk on trade for Obama, http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/2014-election-gop-senate-trade110937.html#ixzz3DwpBDy5O, dml)
But Hatch

and other Republicans, including outgoing House Ways and Means Committee Chairman
have warned Obama repeatedly in recent months that thats a risky strategy.
Adding to Republican frustration is their conviction that Congress could have passed a fasttrack bill early this year if Obama had given Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) a stronger push to bring it to
Dave Camp,

the floor.
Following months of negotiations, Hatch

and Camp reached agreement with former Senate Finance Committee Max

Baucus, a Montana Democrat, on a major update of fast track that had the tacit, if not explicit, backing of the White House.
But in another move that raised questions about the seriousness of Obamas efforts to win TPA, he plucked Baucus from
the Senate by nominating him to be ambassador to China. That put Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden
in charge of the Finance Committee. Since then, Wyden has held a number of trade hearings but
has yet to produce his own fast-track bill.
If Democrats retain the Senate majority, Wyden will still have the power of the pen next year
and should be in a stronger position to move with elections out of the way. But if
Republicans take control, Hatch will take over as Finance Committee chairman, and Wydens
influence over TPA will be greatly diminished .
TPAs not key to trade
Watson 13 Bill Watson is a trade policy analyst with Catos Herbert A Stiefel Center for
Trade Policy Studies. His research focuses on U.S. trade remedy policies, disguised
protectionism, and the institutional aspects of global trade liberalization. He manages Free
Trade, Free Markets: Rating The Congress, Catos online database that tracks votes by Congress
and its individual members on bills and amendments affecting the freedom of Americans to
trade and invest in the global economy. Watson received a B.A. in Political Science from Texas
Christian University, a J.D. from Tulane University Law School, and an LL.M. in international
and comparative law from the George Washington University Law School. Stay Off the Fast
Track: Why Trade Promotion Authority Is Wrong for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

http://www.cato.org/publications/free-trade-bulletin/stay-fast-track-why-trade-promotionauthority-wrong-trans-pacific)
The Obama administration has asked Congress to reinstate trade promotion authority in hopes
that it will enable passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement being
negotiated by 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Advocates of free trade generally support
trade promotion authority, because it eases the passage of trade agreements through Congress
by guaranteeing an up-or-down vote with no amendments. While trade promotion authority can
be useful, the current political climate in Washington reduces its benefits, and the late stage of
the TPP negotiations raises the risk that trade promotion authority will do more harm than
good. Free trade agreements are an important tool to improve U.S. trade policy, and "fast track"
trade promotion authority has been helpful in securing the completion and passage of those
agreements. But, contrary to the assertion of many trade advocates, trade promotion authority is
not a necessary prerequisite to passing trade agreements. Trade policy has become much more
partisan than it was when fast track was invented 40 years ago.1 With Republicans controlling
the House of Representatives and a Democrat in the White House, the TPP has excellent
prospects for passage even without trade promotion authority. While the benefits that stem
from granting fast track are currently weak, the costs are still very real. In exchange for
promising expedited procedures, Congress sets negotiating objectives in the trade promotion
authority statute that the president is expected to adopt if he wants an agreement to receive fast
track treatment. If the TPP negotiations are as far along as the administration claims, adding
new negotiating objectives will delay or possibly even prevent completion of the agreement. If
trade promotion authority is to be useful in facilitating the TPP negotiations, it must subtract
rather than add negotiating objectives. The TPP, as envisioned by U.S. negotiators, will push
forward a lot of unpopular, new U.S. demands as a condition for access to the U.S. market. None
of these "ambitious" goalslike stricter intellectual property enforcement, investment
protections, and regulatory good governancehelps American consumers or furthers the goal of
trade liberalization. They do, however, attract substantial political opposition at home and
abroad. Unless trade promotion authority is used to make the TPP a better agreement, there is
little point in pursuing it now. The battle over trade promotion authority will likely involve a
divisive debate about the value of trade in which support from individual members is bought
with guarantees of protection or favor for special interests. Such a debate will surely occur again
when Congress votes to pass a completed TPP agreement, so why have it twice? Unless trade
promotion authority can be used to simplify the trade debate and improve trade agreementsto
make them more about free tradethe American people will be better off without it. What Is
Trade Promotion Authority? There are a lot of myths about what fast track is and how it works.
A grant of trade promotion authority establishes an agreement between Congress and the
president over how trade agreements should be negotiated and ratified. Both the president and
Congress take on obligations. Congress agrees to hold an up-or-down vote on trade agreements
submitted by the president within established time limits. In exchange for this promise, the
president agrees to consult with congressional leaders throughout the negotiations and to adopt
a variety of negotiating objectives dictated by Congress.2 After negotiations are completed, the
"fast track" component of trade promotion authority kicks in. Under the 2002 Trade Promotion
Act, the president was required to notify Congress 90 days before signing any agreement. Then
the president would submit the agreement to each house of Congress in the form of a bill
implementing the treatys obligations. The House and Senate then had a total of 90 days to pass
the bill out of committee and hold a floor vote.3 During this time, no amendments could be
attached to the bill, and Senate filibuster rules didnt apply. Trade promotion authority can be
very helpful in securing ratification and implementation of trade agreements. By simplifying and
streamlining the approval process, and by giving congressional leaders influence over the
negotiations from the beginning, trade promotion authority greatly reduces the potential for

unhelpful disruption by Congress after an agreement is completed. The procedural restrictions

prevent the agreement from being picked apart by every member of Congress whose district is
home to an uncompetitive business. Indeed many proponents of trade promotion authority
claim that fast track is necessary to get trade agreements through Congress, and with good
reason. Trade historian Craig VanGrasstek notes that between 1789 and 1933, the president
submitted 27 tariff reduction treaties to the Senate for ratification, and only five of those were
approved.4 Most of those that did not pass died after the Senate simply refused to hold a vote on
them. Trade promotion authority removes that possibility. The benefits of trade promotion
authority, however, come with a substantial cost. Congress generally sees trade promotion
authority as a way not only to expedite the passage of trade agreements but also to influence
their content.5 Any agreement that receives fast track treatment is expected to conform to
demands imposed by Congress in the trade promotion authority statute. The 2002 Trade
Promotion Act, in particular, laid out extensive and detailed negotiating objectives. Topics
covered in the objectives included investment protection, intellectual property laws,
administrative law, labor law, and environmental protection.6 These objectives are mostly
export-oriented and reflect the interests of certain U.S. business interests in foreign markets.
Their inclusion may garner additional political support for the agreement, but they also attract
opposition. Most importantly, achieving these negotiating goals will not liberalize trade.
Nevertheless, these non-trade issues are often the most politically contentious aspect of trade
agreements. At the same time, they distract negotiators from the legitimate goal of lowering U.S.
trade barriers and fighting protectionism. Trade Promotion Authority Is Unnecessary The
conventional wisdom, among trade advocates and opponents alike, is that fast track is necessary
to get agreements through Congress. But the most recent experiences with trade promotion
authority following the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives in 2007 aptly
demonstrate how ineffective it can be. At the same time, trade policy has become increasingly
partisan in recent decades so that trade promotion authority is now neither necessary nor
sufficient to pass free trade agreements.

2AC AT: PRODUCTIVITY DA

Its NBD and prevents a shift to other worse drugs
Duke, 13 [Copyright (c) 2013 University of Oregon Oregon Law Review 2013 Oregon Law
Review 91 Or. L. Rev. 1301 LENGTH: 7972 words Article: The Future of Marijuana in the United
States NAME: STEVEN B. DUKE* BIO: * Professor of Law, Yale Law School, p. lexis]
decade after decade, researchers have
found no reliable evidence that marijuana is a serious threat to the physical or
psychological health of a normal, adult user. n30 Both alcohol and tobacco are far more
damaging to the human body, as is obesity. n31 Unlike alcohol consumption, marijuana use is not
chemically linked to violence and crime. n32 Millions of marijuana users have decided through experience what the studies suggest: although
powerful, marijuana is not a dangerous drug and most of its users lead healthy, productive lives .
Absent too is evidence of the so-called "gateway effect," the theory that marijuana causes the
user to move on to stronger drugs. n33 About two out of three marijuana users never even [*1308] try
harder drugs like cocaine or heroin, and for every frequent user of cocaine or heroin, there are
about eight frequent users of marijuana. n34 By satisfying a consciousness-altering appetite,
marijuana may in fact prevent many people from using harder drugs. If the
availability of marijuana has any effect on the consumption of hard drugs, it more likely acts as a
"moat" than as a "gateway" to hard drug use.
A. Marijuana Is Far Less Harmful than Many Legal, Regulated Drugs In study after study,

Increased usage empirically denied, but also causes a shift away from more
harmful drugs
Duke, 13 [Copyright (c) 2013 University of Oregon Oregon Law Review 2013 Oregon Law
Review 91 Or. L. Rev. 1301 LENGTH: 7972 words Article: The Future of Marijuana in the United
States NAME: STEVEN B. DUKE* BIO: * Professor of Law, Yale Law School, p. lexis]
A. If Marijuana Is Legalized, More People Will Use More of It This is surely true but not weighty.
Decriminalization at the state level during the 1970s did not lead to significant increases
in the usage of marijuana . n70 Nor did that occur in the Netherlands where marijuana was de
facto decriminalized decades ago. n71 Nor has it happened in Portugal, which in 2001
decriminalized possession and use of small quantities of all drugs. n72 Because no country has yet actually
legalized the distribution of marijuana, however, these examples of decriminalization are of limited value in predicting the increases
in consumption that are likely when both distribution and use of the drug are lawful. Marijuana distribution will be more efficient
and the drug far less costly when producing and distributing [*1315] it is no longer a black-market operation, as it is even in those
countries that have decriminalized or legalized the use and possession of marijuana. The failure of marijuana

prohibition, both in the United States and globally, n73 is due in part to the plant's ease of
cultivation. It can be grown virtually anywhere, indoors and out, requiring little horticultural expertise or
significant financial investment. In this respect it resembles alcohol, which was widely homemade during Prohibition and can
likewise be produced almost anywhere at little expense. Thus,

with both marijuana and alcohol, it is

impossible to eradicate the drug's source , and efforts to interdict the smuggling of the drug have only

marginal effects on price and consumption. Because marijuana is so easy to produce, the price of legalized marijuana to the
consumer could not be maintained at anywhere near its current level by imposing high taxes. High taxes would create another black
market and defeat many of the objectives of legalization. The price of legalized marijuana would have to be a fraction of its present
black market price. Also, when marijuana is regulated, as it would be under full legalization, the consumer will feel more
comfortable, morally and otherwise, in buying and consuming the drug. Thus, it is almost certain that legalizing both the use and the
distribution of marijuana would substantially increase consumption. Even if marijuana use were to triple under a

legalized regime, which no prohibitionist predicts, this would be a small price to pay for the benefits of
legalization. Not only would the drug be safer and less potent , n74 its increased use would
likely reduce the consumption of alcohol, a far more harmful drug . Even though the
physical and psychological effects of alcohol and marijuana are quite different , there is
substantial evidence that drinkers who take up marijuana drink less alcohol. n75 It also seems

likely that the consciousness-alteration obtained with cheaper and lawful marijuana would
reduce [*1316] the appetite for heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, and other illegal, dangerous drugs .
Increased consumption of legalized marijuana could prove to be a benefit of legalization, not a
cost. n76

2AC AT: K
Their argument elevates whiteness to an all-pervasive force that explains all
oppression that re-inscribes its inevitability---specific analysis of racism is
crucial
Margaret L. Andersen 3, Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies and Vice Provost for
Academic Affairs at the University of Delaware, 2003, Whitewashing Race: A Critical
Perspective on Whiteness, in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, ed Doane &
Bonilla-Silva, p. 28
Conceptually, one of the major problems in the whiteness literature is the reification of
whiteness as a concept , as an experience, and as an identity. This practice not only leads to conceptual
obfuscation but also impedes the possibility for empirical analysis . In this literature,
"whiteness" comes to mean just about everything associated with racial domination. As
such, whiteness becomes a slippery and elusive concept . Whiteness is presented as any or all of the following:
identity, self-understanding, social practices, group beliefs, ideology, and a system of domination. As one critic writes, " If historical
actors are said to have behaved the way they did mainly because they were white ,
then there's little room left for more nuanced analysis of their motives and
meanings " (Stowe 1996:77). And Alastair Bonnett points out that whiteness "emerges from this critique as
an omnipresent and all-powerful historical force . Whiteness is seen to be
responsible for the failure of socialism to develop in America, for racism , for the
impoverishment of humanity . With the 'blame' comes a new kind of centering: Whiteness, and White
people, are turned into the key agents of historical change, the shapers of
contemporary America" (1996b:153). Despite noting that there is differentiation among whites and warning
against using whiteness as a monolithic category , most of the literature still
proceeds to do so , revealing a reductionist tendency. Even claiming to show its multiple forms, most
writers essentialize and reify whiteness as something that directs most of Western
history (Gallagher 2000). Hence while trying to "deconstruct whiteness and see the
ubiquitousness of whiteness, the literature at the same time reasserts and
reinstates it ( Stowe 1996:77). For example, Michael Eric Dyson suggests that whiteness is identity,
ideology, and institution (Dyson, quoted in Chennault 1998:300). But if it is all these things, it
becomes an analytically useless concept . Christine Clark and James O'Donnell write: "to reference it reifies it, to
refrain from referencing it obscures the persistent, pervasive, and seemingly permanent reality of racism" (1999:2). Empirical
investigation requires being able to identify and measure a concept or at the very
least to have a clear definitionbut since whiteness has come to mean just about
everything, it ends up meaning hardly anything .

1AR

FEDERALISM
Plan overcomes alt causes
Rauch 13guest scholar in Governance Studies at Brookings
(Jonathan, Washington Versus Washington (and Colorado): Why the States Should Lead on Marijuana Policy,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2013/3/26%20marijuana%20legalization%20localism
%20rauch/Washington%20Versus%20Washington%20and%20Colorado_Rauch_v17.pdf, dml)
That said, the

payoffs for accommodation are substantial , and are not limited to drug
policy per se. Marijuana legalization is not the first state-federal conflict to have bubbled up, but
it certainly wont be the last. How the Obama Administration, the states, Congress, the courts,
and the public choose to cope with it will influence the handling of other conflicts

yet to emerge . The path around confrontation on marijuana is a trail which others
can follow in the future. The opportunity to
hard to recover .

blaze it , if foreclosed, may be

CP
taking marijuana off the CSA is keychanging enforcement is too weak

otherwise states and businesses dont have the confidence for a

regulated market
Firestone 14Correspondent for the New York Times (David, "Let States Decide on

Marijuana". 7/26/14. New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/opinion/sunday/hightime-let-states-decide-on-marijuana.html, TD)

Many states are unwilling to legalize marijuana as long as possessing or growing it remains a
federal crime. Colorado, for instance, allows its largest stores to cultivate up to 10,200 cannabis plants at a time. But the federal
penalty for growing more than 1,000 plants is a minimum of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10 million. That has created a
state of confusion in which law-abiding growers in Colorado can face federal penalties . Last August, the Justice

Department issued a memo saying it would not interfere with the legalization plans of Colorado and
Washington as long as they met several conditions: keeping marijuana out of the hands of minors or criminal gangs; prohibiting its
transport out of the state; and enforcing prohibitions against drugged driving, violence and other illegal drugs. The government has
also said banks can do business with marijuana sellers, easing a huge problem for a growing industry. But the Justice

Department guidance is loose ; aggressive federal prosecutors can ignore it if state

enforcement efforts are not sufficiently robust, the memo says. Thats a shaky foundation on which to build
confidence in a states legalization plan. More important, it applies only to this moment in this
presidential administration . President Obamas Justice Department could change its policy
at any time, and so of course could the next administration . How to End the Federal Ban Allowing
states to make their own decisions on marijuana just as they did with alcohol after the end of
Prohibition in 1933 requires unambiguous federal action. The most comprehensive plan to do so
is a bill introduced last year by Representative Jared Polis, Democrat of Colorado, known as the Ending Federal Marijuana
Prohibition Act. It would eliminate marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act , require a
federal permit for growing and distributing it, and have it regulated (just as alcohol is now) by the Food and Drug Administration
and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. An alternative bill, which would not be as effective, was introduced by
Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, as the Respect State Marijuana Laws Act. It would not remove
marijuana from Schedule I but would eliminate

enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act against

anyone acting in compliance with a state marijuana law.

Heres the killerCP doesnt solve federalism and causes more abuse
Kleiman 14professor of public policy at UCLA
(Mark, How Not to Make a Hash Out of Cannabis Legalization,
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march_april_may_2014/features/how_not_to_make_a_hash_out_of049291.php
?page=all#, dml)
But letting

legalization unfold state by state, with the federal government a mostly helpless
bystander, risks creating a monstrosity ; Dr. Frankenstein also had a laboratory. Right now, officials in
Washington and Colorado are busy issuing state licenses to cannabis growers and retailers to do things
that remain drug-dealing felonies under federal law. The Justice Department could have shut down
the process by going after all the license applicants. But doing so would have run the risk of having the two
states drop their own enforcement efforts and challenge the feds to do the job alone, something
the DEA simply doesnt have the bodies to handle: Washington and Colorado alone have about four times as
many state and local police as there are DEA agents worldwide. Faced with that risk, and with its statutory
obligation to cooperate with the states on drug enforcement, Justice chose accommodation.
In August, the deputy U.S. attorney general issued a formalthough nonbindingassurance that the
feds would take a mostly hands-off approach. The memo says that as long as state governments
pursue strong and effective regulation to prevent activities such as distribution to minors, dealing by gangs and

and as
long as marijuana growing and selling doesnt take place on public lands or federal property,
enforcement against state-licensed cannabis activity will rank low on the federal priority list. Justice has even
cartels, dealing other drugs, selling across state lines, possession of weapons and use of violence, and drugged driving,

announced that it is working with the Treasury Department to reinterpret the banking laws to allow state-licensed cannabis
businesses to have checking accounts and take credit cards, avoiding the robbery risks incident to all-cash businesses.

That leaves the brand-new cannabis businesses in Colorado and Washington in statutory limbo .
Theyre quasi - pseudo - hemi - demi -legal: permitted under state law, but forbidden under
a federal law that might not be enforceduntil, say, the inauguration of President Huckabee, at
which point growers and vendors, as well as their lawyers, accountants, and bankers, could go to
prison for the things theyre doing openly today.
But even if the federal-state legal issues get resolved, the state-level tax and regulation systems
likely to emerge will be far from ideal . While they will probably do a good job of eliminating the illicit
cannabis markets in those states, theyll be mediocre to lousy at preventing an upsurge of drug abuse
as cheap, quality-tested, easily available legal pot replaces the more expensive, unreliable, and harderto-find material the black market offers.
The systems being put into place in Washington and Colorado roughly resemble those imposed
on alcohol after Prohibition ended in 1933. A set of competitive commercial enterprises produce the pot, and a set of competitive
commercial enterprises sell it, under modest regulations: a limited number of licenses, no direct sales to minors, no marketing
obviously directed at minors, purity/potency testing and labeling, security rules. The post-Prohibition restrictions on

alcohol worked reasonably well for a while, but have been substantially undermined over the years
as the beer and liquor industries consolidated and used their economies of scale to lower
production costs and their lobbying muscle to loosen regulations and keep taxes low
(see Tim Heffernan, Last Call).

The same will likely happen with cannabis . As more and more states begin
to legalize marijuana over the next few years, the cannabis industry will begin to get richerand that
means it will start to wield considerably more political power , not only over the states but
over national policy, too.
Thats how we could get locked into a bad system in which the primary downside of legalizing
potincreased drug abuse, especially by minorswill be greater than it needs to be, and the benefits,
including tax revenues, smaller than they could be . Its easy to imagine the cannabis
equivalent of an Anheuser-Busch InBev peddling low-cost, high-octane cannabis in Super Bowl
commercials. We can do better than that, but only if Congress takes actionand soon .

MIDTERMS
lame duck kills the billfilibuster and amendments thump majoritythis quotes
hatch
Palmer 9/15Politico
(Doug, GOP Senate no slam dunk on trade for Obama, http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/2014-election-gop-senate-trade110937.html#ixzz3DwpBDy5O, dml)
I

doubt Congress would grant such an agreement the fast-track procedural benefits associate
with [trade promotion authority]. At that point, Congress may simply consider the agreement on its merits under
its regular rules and procedures, the Utah Republican said, meaning TPP would both be open to
potentially killer amendments and subject to filibuster .
No, Obama not pushingrequires increase which they havent read
Inside US Trade 9/19writes about trade?
(Kind Says TPA Unlikely In 2014 If GOP Takes Senate; Wyden Defers To Reid On Schedule, Inside US Trade Daily Report,
ProQuest, dml)

Camp repeated these points at the EGA event. He also urged the president to step up his advocacy for TPA in
the Senate, while calling on business groups to lobby members of Congress to support TPA, which is also known as "fast-track"
negotiating authority.
"Obviously if members

aren't hearing from you about the importance of TPA, it's not going to
happen. So we have a lot of work to do ahead us over the next few months," he said.
Hed get it passed
Inside US Trade 9/19writes about trade?
(Kind Says TPA Unlikely In 2014 If GOP Takes Senate; Wyden Defers To Reid On Schedule, Inside US Trade Daily Report,
ProQuest, dml)

Wyden said he continues to work with senators to develop a new version of TPA that he has previously dubbed
"smart track." He signaled that this effort is focused on making changes to a pending TPA bill introduced by
former Sen. Max Baucus and House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) on issues such as transparency,
enforcement and human rights, in order to garner the support of more Senate Democrats.
"We

continue to work with senators, as I've touched on in the past," he said. "We're trying to focus on areas
we think can help build a broad coalition, particularly transparency, enforcement, human rights, ... a variety of
issues."

Heavy pressure
Lawson 8/19Law 360
(Alex, EFF Calls On Wyden To Pull Back Trade Deal Curtain, http://www.law360.com/articles/568945/eff-calls-on-wyden-topull-back-trade-deal-curtain, dml)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday implored Sen. Ron Wyden, head of the powerful Senate
Finance Committee, to craft more transparent rules overseeing the negotiation and passage of free trade
agreements, warning against overly restrictive protections for copyrights.
EFF launched a petition that calls on Wyden, D-Ore., to introduce and pass legislation that would grant unprecedented
access to trade negotiating texts and meetings for lawmakers and other observers, along with negotiating objectives that would
balance the rights of both users and private industry.
As Senate Finance Committee Chair, Sen. Wyden is under pressure to fast-track trade agreements like

the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, the EFF petition said. But he has another option: to finally bring these deals out
into the open. We call on him now to continue to stand up to big private interests and help ensure that our digital rights are
protected.