Instructions: Listen to the video and answer the following questions. You will find the answers below.

1. According to the speaker, which drugs should be legalized? 

2. How does the speaker define freedom?

3. Mention one of the consequences of prohibiting drugs

4. According to the speaker, what would happen if we had a legal drug market?

5. Mention one policy that should be implemented alongside legalization

6. According to the speaker, how much would consumption increase with legalization?

Answers below

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1. All of the current illegal drugs.

2. In a free society, we should allow people to consume whatever they want, no matter how dangerous or bad it might be for them. Freedom is letting people do the things that might not be good for them, or that someone would think might not be good for them. 

3. The underground market for drugs is violent, it's corrupt, it has poor quality control, in the attempt to enforce it we have to infringe civil liberties by basically shredding the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.  We reduce the ability of people who are sick to use drugs like marijuana or opiates freely to reduce pain, to relieve nausea from chemotherapy, and a whole range of other symptoms.We interfere in other countries.  The violence that we observe in Mexico, the profitability underlying the Taliban in Afghanistan.  All those result form the fact that we've driven drug markets underground, and so terrorist groups make a profit by selling their protection services to the drug traffickers, the drug traffickers get the protection and the terrorists get profits.

4. If we had a fully legal market for all of these substances we would observe roughly the same set of things we observe now for alcohol, for caffeine, for tobacco, for other products which can be dangerous.  We would see a large fraction of people use them in moderation, use them reasonably responsible, with at most mild negatives for themselves or for others.  We would see a small fraction who would misuse them in bad ways but mainly they would adversely affect themselves, not the rest of society.

5. Virtually everyone thinks that we would have approximately the same auxiliary policies that we now have, say for alcohol.  We have a minimum purchase age. We would have restrictions on time and place of use, so of course there would be driving-under-the-influence laws.  It might be restrictions on using drugs while operating heavy machinery and things like that. But all of that would be very similar to what we currently do for alcohol and all of that would be in a framework where overall use, the overall production, transportation, distribution, and possession would be fully legal activities as occurs now for alcohol or tobacco. 

6. It's likely that consumption of the illegal drugs would increase if we legalized, but the evidence doesn't suggest a very big increase.  Indeed some aspects of the evidence don't suggest much increase at all. 

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