March/April Topic Analysis (Patrick Fox)

Patrick debated for 5 years in middle/high school (two in policy, three in LD) for Jack C Hays High School in Kyle, Texas. His junior year he cleared at TFA State and was fifth speaker, and his senior year he cleared at a variety of bid tournaments including Strake, Harvard, Grapevine, and UT. He is studying communications and debating policy at the University of Houston this fall.

Introduction

Hi! While March/April isn’t as common on the circuit, it’s a big factor in a lot of state tournaments (TFA State is coming up quick!). Seeing as how Premier has put out a brief for the topic, and a lot of debaters do debate it before the TOC, it’s worth taking a look at the meta and analyzing how “Resolved: The illegal use of drugs ought to be treated as a matter of public health, not criminal justice” breaks down as a topic. While startlingly similar to the 2010 November/December topic (although Bob assures me that “abuse” and “use” mean something different)[1], it’s nonetheless an excellent one, and between my own topic research and perusing the wiki from all of the NSDA district tournaments this past weekend in Texas, I’m personally pretty hyped for TFA State, and everyone else who debates this topic should be too!

Before reading on, while a lot of this article will be pulling from my own research, it’s worth downloading Premier’s excellent (and free!) brief for the MA topic. While obviously, no brief is comprehensive, it’s a great starting point for finding ideas to fuel your own research into the topic, and I’ll be referencing a few of the same articles and sources used in the brief.

Topicality

Before beginning substantive questions, it’s worth clearing up a few topicality questions – what does a “public health” or “criminal justice” approach look like in the context of drug policy?

The World Health Organization[2] defines public health as “the art and science of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts of society.” This seems to indicate that fair aff ground would include treating drug use as a medical issue, and treatment efforts such as free rehab, clinics, and healthcare protections/provisions. It’s worth noting that while an intuitive aff plan on this topic is decriminalization, after a spirited argument with my coach I personally believe these affs are questionably topical at best because while decriminalizing low-level drugs most definitely shifts away from criminal justice-based approaches, it’s not a shift towards health-based framings of the issue. In the weekend that the topic has been in use (in Texas, at least), I’ve seen both affs and 1NC strategies centered around providing rehabilitation within the prison system, and I’m inclined to believe that things like in-prison rehab, needle exchanges, and healthcare are more aff arguments given that they still treat drugs as a health issue.

US Legal[3] defines criminal justice as “the procedure by which criminal conduct is investigated, evidence gathered, arrests made, charges brought, defenses raised, trials conducted, sentences rendered and punishment carried out.” While I’m not personally very convinced by the argument that the neg must defend the converse of the topic, operating under the assumption that all criminal justice is neg ground, this would probably include things like penalties, drug courts, and prison time.

A note on specification – while there’s no bare plural agents or objects in the phrasing of this topic, it’s worth noting that it is written in passive voice, not active – the lack of an explicitly stated agent bringing about the state of affairs implied could be read from a grammatical standpoint as non-specific, as “with passive voice verbs often there is no agent, and this is one of the most important reasons for choosing it: the agent is unknown, or not relevant or something non-specific.”[4] Because there’s no agent (“The United States ought to”) in the topic, but there is an object (“The illegal use of drugs”) and an action (“ought to be treated as a matter of public health”), it implies a generic reading, with no specific actor in mind. This definitely calls into question the theoretical legitimacy of affirmatives like US drug reforms (or, as I suspect will be popular, the Philippines).

While it isn’t as clear-cut semantically as the classic bare plurals debate, there’s definitely at least a viable T debate against affs that specify a single country as the agent for implementation. However, it’s also possible to debate specific examples without a plan, as Bob explained in the excellent Planorama article he wrote earlier this season, found here.

Policy

Now I’m excited about this – while the lack of a specific agent could complicate things, policy affirmatives should nonetheless have a field day with this topic. The easy and most obvious (but by no means inferior) affs will be ones centering around inequality in care access, mass incarceration, and the war on drugs. Those are very solid, with tons of good literature and uniqueness, but there’s an absolute wealth of nuanced advantage areas for those willing to dive a bit deeper. Affs like needle exchanges can garner access to impacts about the current American opioid crisis, AIDS and other diseases transmitted through dirty needles and bodily fluids. Methadone clinics and rehab affs can also get access to super tight internal links about state and local community economies in relation to opioid abuse. I think my favorite aff on the topic will probably be ones about international law and co-op on drug policy, as there’s a lot of incredible evidence about things like health diplomacy that give the aff access to tons of big-stick impact scenarios.

Neg debates definitely will get some love from research too, as there are lots of good scenarios. Politics scenarios will be great for US-specific debates, with good links and uniqueness for DAs like base, 2020 elections, and court politics. The link scenarios for DAs like narco-terror and domestic crime are good, as there’s a very spirited debate in the literature about the deterrent effect of strong criminal penalties. For CPs, things like abolishing mandatory minimums, legalization (depending on how that T debate plays out), drug courts, or reducing sentencing disparities are examples of some counterplans that maintain a criminal justice approach but could still access some core topic advantage areas. And, for the more radical-minded of you out there, there’s always the more far-left CPs like abolish prisons or universal healthcare to answer farther-left cases.

Kritiks

As happy as I am about the policy ground on this topic, I’m even more hyped about the K debates. There is a plethora of critical literature surrounding drug policy and public health, and if you’re like me and haven’t read a DA more than three times all year you won’t be disappointed with what you come up with this topic. Abolitionist authors like Angela Davis[5] have written a ton about the prison-industrial-complex and its relationship to the War on Drugs, and there’s viability for both affirmatives that center demands for public health to combat the carceral state as well as negatives that criticize the idea of compromise and piecemeal reform. Authors like Agamben and Foucault have written absolutely scathing critiques of the idea of “public health” creating a biopolitical frame of care and life[6], and a few queer theory authors like Mel Chen[7] have applied that to the idea of different identities being policed by the idea of what makes a “healthy” subject. Biopower, in particular, will be good for links to specific 1ACs like needle exchanges and rehab. Afro-pessimists have written a lot of criticisms of the idea of “public health” being necessarily parasitic on black flesh[8], and in particular I think it’ll be very strategic against affirmatives that claim to end the War on Drugs due to the large body of work done by scholars like Jared Sexton on how to focus on those sort of issues necessarily misses the point.[9] I think the most interesting and impressive body of critical literature on the topic, however, has to be the almost creepily specific articles written by Peta Malins from the University of Melbourne in Australia about the relationship between Deleuze, health, and the aesthetics of drug use (seriously, check those out – this could be a great aff or neg strat done well).[10]

Those of you who follow college policy will undoubtedly be aware that the topic last year had a lot to do with healthcare (specifically health insurance), and while it’s definitely tempting to go hop onto the college wiki and steal K cards from those debates (as someone who’s coach debated that topic, I was 100% guilty as charged of this when it was first announced), I would encourage you to use that as a starting point but do more original research than anything else –you’ll miss out on a huge body of K literature very specific to drug policy as opposed to health insurance.

Philosophy

While I’m most definitely not the most qualified person to write about this, I have given this some thought and I think there’s a wealth of nuanced frameworks that could be applied to the topic. There is, as always, the ever-pervasive Kantianism debates, with affs being able to claim criminalization is a violation of one’s agency, and negs claiming drug usage is the same. Communitarianism frameworks could argue that rehabilitation and a care-based approach is key to maintaining healthy communal relationships. For neg ground, particularism frameworks could argue the health or justice approach is too absolutist to capture the nuances of the ethics of drug use.[11] One thing that I’m fond of is a specific subset of social contract theory called fair play, which concerns the obligations to follow the rule of law when existing in a society. It could be argued that drug users are free riders and as such deserve punishment even if they are also entitled to rehabilitation.[12] Obviously, this list isn’t comprehensive, and I’m in particular intrigued to see how these sorts of debates play out.

Overall, I’m pretty happy I get to have my last few debates on this topic – it’s by and large excellent, and people who get to debate it are in for a treat. That’s all for now! Feel free to comment your thoughts below!

Citations and Footnotes

[1] Hint, hint – https://methoide.fcm.arizona.edu/infocenter/index.cfm?stid=201

[2] World Health Organization. No date. “Public Health Services.” http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/Health-systems/public-health-services/public-health-services

[3] US Legal. No date. “Criminal Justice Law and Legal Definition.” https://definitions.uslegal.com/c/criminal-justice/

[4] Emma Darwin, London-based author, runs the “This Itch of Writing” blog. 09/02/2014. “What Is Passive Voice, And Why Are You Told To Avoid It?” https://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2014/09/what-is-passive-voice-and-why-might-it-be-a-bad-thing.html

[5] Angela Davis, professor at UC Santa Cruz, activist, and co-founder of Critical Resistance. 2003. “Are Prisons Obsolete?” https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Are_Prisons_Obsolete_Angela_Davis.pdf

[6] Geoffrey Whitehall, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and the Program Coordinator for the Social and Political Thought Masters at Acadia University. 2015. “Pre-emptive global biopolitics and the ProMED network.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21693293.2014.981374?journalCode=resi20

[7] Mel Chen, Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies; Director, Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. 2011. “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.” https://muse.jhu.edu/article/437417/pdf

[8] Egbert Alejandro Martina, Rotterdam-based scholar-activist and cultural critic, co-founder of Mediacate, a media literacy organization. March 2015. “Policy and Intimacy.” http://policy-people.com/egbert-alejandro-martina-policy-and-intimacy/

[9] Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American studies and film and media studies at UC Irvine. December 2013. “Radical Will.” https://www.humanities.uci.edu/SOH/calendar/news.php?recid=2434

[10] Peta Malins, University of Melbourne. There’s a ton of these articles, but the first one he wrote can be found here – http://www.janushead.org/7-1/malins.pdf (2004. “Machinic Assemblages: Deleuze, Guattari and an Ethico-Aesthetics of Drug Use.”)

[11] Jeff Packer, The John Howard Society of Durham Region. 2007. “A Moral Analysis of Canadian Drug Policy.” http://en.copian.ca/library/research/drugs/perspect/volume2/volume2.pdf#page=6.

[12] Stephen J. Morse, JD, PhD, University of Pennsylvania. 2017. “Addiction, Choice and Criminal Law.” https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2609&context=faculty_scholarship