Opinions - The Right Rhetoric - How to win a Drugs Debate

[FuBai]

This is just a thread about the practicalities of wining an argument about drugs, how to manipulate debate, whether it be formal or in-formal, so that you put forward your arguments as best they can be put, and to try and circumvent arguments laid against you. The problem that this forum tends to experience is that it becomes a venting place for anti-prohibitionist views which means that often there is little real debate or argument on some matters, so that many people here perhaps find it slightly more difficult to get across the central tenets of their arguments outside these forums. The other problem is that people use this forum to 'let off steam' - steam that, if pent up, might translate itself to actual political activism, but, as it is, is released steadily with little impact upon the political environment we face today. I intend to help people get their point across and I would also encourage people to come up with their own argument mechanisms to use in debate. I suppose another reason I am doing this is to force a little more pragmatism into how people argue, especially on this emotive issue. People tend to get lost in the righteousness of their cause which often means they move away from getting the conclusion they are hoping for, using ideological turn offs like calling people "Nazis" etcetera is counter productive. Ask yourself whether you are more motivated by getting drugs legalised or getting them legalised for the reasons you believe in. Most people, I hope, will agree with me that getting the result now is better than arguing over why we should be doing it.

The Starting Post

When I get into a conversation with people not quite so intimately involved with the Drugs Debate as I am I often receive incredulous remarks and disbelieving looks. This indicates one of the basic problems with debate in this area, there already is a great deal of indoctrination. People tend, by-en-large, to know very little specifically about drugs but allot about the government rhetoric that comes with them. Already the scales are set against you, you are not persuading an unbiased, uninitiated person to rationally accept an argument, you are persuading them to abandon a pre-existing view point, which is certainly tougher. If you are doing this in a formal debate then you will tend to get a more receptive audience (and almost certainly a more intelligent one), but do not underestimate the difficulty in persuading someone to abandon a key part of their world outlook. How you overcome this initial problem is by appealing to other, more important, parts of their world outlook. This means the rhetorical material you work from should always be seeking to do something more important to them than their opinion on drugs. This is why you shouldn't go straight into the 'freedom of choice' angle - people tend to agree with that when it's an abstract ideal, but applied in this circumstance is not such a vote winner.

A great way of doing this is to go right for rhetoric that talks about "protecting our children", "Protecting society", "getting to grips with crime" etcetera. Use material from the other side - remember voters are motivated by this sort of rhetoric, whether you like it or not. So start using phrases like "It's time the government took a strong moral stance", "It's time we took an honest look at law and order in...", "It's time we did something about crime...". These sort of phrases help tip the balance back the other way, because you are essentially taking what makes people believe in the prohibitionist arguments and using for your own purposes. This can help put you on the moral high ground, it makes you look concerned about what matters to the populace at large, rather than it just being a sectional interest.

It is on the idea of "sectional interest" that I move onto now: The first thing people tend to assume is that I am a drugs user. Apart from Alcohol, Tobacco and Caffeine my psychoactive exploits are non-existent, but the problem is that I am automatically assumed to be a "junky" because the issue of legalisation is thought to be of interest only to those who use. You've got to head that one off, it's something that can seriously weaken your argument in the eyes of some - lying is something I would advise against unless you are a very talented liar as remarks can come back to haunt you, especially in highly-charged public debate, but emphasise your reasons for wanting legalisation as being a desire to attack criminality, to protect society etcetera because that draws attention away from that issue and emphasises that you don't want to legalise just so you can use. The other thing you can do is use the fact that you have used drugs against them - if you stand up, well dressed and groomed, with a decent argument and a good Queen's English pronunciation and say that you, this respectable, confident and successful have used drugs and that this is where you are today then you can combat the idea that drug use inevitably leads to criminality.

Getting to Grips with the Issues and Turning Negatives:

You want to avoid, like the plague, discussions about how harmful a substances is. It shifts the grounds of the argument to the prohibitionists side because you are allowing them to say things like "all the medical evidence isn't in yet, until then it's a pretty bum risk" and you are also shifting the terms of the debate by acknowledging that the health damage a drug does is important in whether it should be legalised or not. The Legalisationalist should stay away from that and be focusing on the fact that it's not the states business to pry into our personal lives, to tell us how to live, which plants we can smoke etcetera. Get away from discussions about how harmful the drug is and push it into the regions of personal morality. I would still avoid talking too much about "The Right To Use" because what you really want is to come across as concerned about our community, desperate to change things for the better and forge a brighter, happier future for the children of this illustrious nation.

I'll assume you know and can counter alot of the problems people raise about prohibition, the arguments against drugs causing crime etcetera abound on these forums so I won't go into them here. However one of the most common negatives you will get is that people are concerned about increased drug use, ask questions like "If heroin was legalised tomorrow would you shoot up?" etcetera to show that the majority of people wouldn't start using just because something legal. The great thing to do is compare statistics on this one - only 8% of Dutch nationals aged 16-25 have used Marijuana compared to 45% of people aged 16-25 in Britain having used an illegal drug. Because it's a spoken argument people will often find it more difficult to catch you up on poor statistical comparisons like the one above (I compared just marijuana use in the Netherlands to all drug use in Britain), it's up to you to decide whether that's a risk worth taking in relation to your intended audience. Point out that the state doesn't endorse or condone tobacco use, but accepts it as a pragmatic reality - legalisation of drugs similarly requires no endorsement of drug use.

Mechanisms and Mechanics:

The really important thing to change about the issue of drug use is it's image. Always look good, be well dressed, clean shaven for preference - that's so important in dispelling the myth that all drug users are crazy, whacked out hippies who will do anything to get high. Appearances matter, whether you like it or not, and you really want to avoid instant characterisation as an "unsavoury element". As a political movement it is paramount we are well presented, that people are singing from, if not the same hymn sheet, then at least very similar ones to overcome our natural disadvantage and the government's characterisation of us. In a similar vein do not appear anti-establishment. Whatever your views on government and the establishment don't attack them when you are discussing drugs because it pushes you into that hippy image and once people have you down as a hippy you'll find it very hard to escape it.

Think about where your argument is going, look carefully at the risks of proceeding down a certain path of argument and always try and predict negatives - you don't even have to get the counter argument in first, you just say things like "I am sure that my colleague will try to tell you...but of course, to any thinking man, this is a fallacy." People will often just take your word on these pre-emptive strikes. If you are in a more private or informal debate or argument just say "I am sure that you are probably thinking...however...", of course you have to have a real reason then because they can talk straight back and they aren't limited by the rules of formal debate.

Remember that allot of the time you win your argument not for the sake of the points that you raise but because of how you deal with opponents arguments. You can win a debate just by making your opponents look bad. In my time as a prominent member of a debating team I started to drop more and more the intellectual arguments I had formulated and simply attack the opponents. In one debate at a school in Berlin I didn't even bother thinking up my own arguments I just trashed the opposition's and went on to win. It's all about manipulating your audience rather than necessarily getting the point across that you want to. Always be flexible in what you say, put in qualifying words like "most of the time" "allot" rather than "all" so that people can't contradict you. If someone does then you say "It's the exception that proves the rule, by far and away the majority of people..."

If it's an informal personal debate then you have much more scope for inter-personal manipulation. Don't ever get angry, over-heated or irrational in any debate, formal or informal, as you will lose credibility. Always be calm, use comments like "I understand why you would think that, but it is only true superficially, if you dig a little deeper" etcetera.

Thanks For Listening

If you have got this far I would like to thank you for taking the time to read it. As a debater and someone who works in sales I am worried more and more about the perception of the legalisation movement and why it's not been particularly successful, and I think one of the main reasons is the very poor image that it has. I really want to correct that and, if people read this piece and take something away from it, I will be really pleased to have helped some people get their views across and improved the image of the movement.

Thanks again,

FuBai.

Reputation Comments on this post:

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