Hi, I’m going to be debating someone on drug legalization soon and I’m pretty confident with the philosophical side of the debate and the plethora of information there is exposing the “War on Drugs”. However, the person I’m debating against brought up an argument that I’ve yet to counter. Their argument was that the legalization of drugs (particularly the more potent ones) would lead to more traffic accidents involving drugs. I know it’s a simple argument and I may be missing an obvious point in countering this, but I’ve yet to find a good response to this. The approach I decided to take, in a Libertarian fashion, was to introduce the concept of privatizing roads and highways and argue how various private road/highway owners would most likely prohibit the use of drugs on their highways in order to attract road users who wanted to be protected, but then I ran into the problem of monopolies with roads. What if one owns a road and imposes a monopoly-like toll or restriction on it because it is a vital and singular route that many people need to use?
I’ve argued this with a statist and tried to explain how a new competitor could then easily enter that market and build a new road or alternate route that offered lower rates and how all the road users would then flock to that route, forcing the original route owner to lower their own rates. However, my opponent labeled that as “too simplistic” and inconsiderate of many factors. I’m starting to believe them because WHAT IF there really is only one route? Is it that easy to just build a new route somewhere?
I’ve read sections of “On the Privatization of Roads and Highways”, but it didn’t really address this issue in great detail (although it did provide me with a bunch of other key points that I might use), and, of course, I’ve searched this site and the internet, but couldn’t really find that much.
