Cal EM Neg v.

MSU ML – Harvard R8
1NC
 1

A. Interpretation –
Legalization means to apply regulation
Adrienne D. Davis, Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law, ’10 “REGULATING POLYGAMY:
INTIMACY, DEFAULT RULES, AND BARGAINING FOR EQUALITY” December, 2010 Columbia Law Review, 110 Colum. L. Rev. 1955
Several legal theorists recently re-clarified the crucial distinction between decriminalization and
legalization. Discussing sex work, they say, "Legalization involves complete decriminalization coupled
with positive legal provisions regulating one or more aspect of sex work businesses." Janet Halley et al.,
From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work, and Sex
Trafficking: Four Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism, 29 Harv. J.L. & Gender 335, 339 (2006).
Decriminalization may be partial, i.e., decriminalizing the activities of sex workers alone, or complete,
eliminating all criminal legislation.
B. Violation – the affirmative merely removes legal prohibitions, it doesn’t create
regulations

C. Voting issue –
First, ground – key to disad uniqueness – most topic areas are de facto decriminalized
now
Second, predictability – inclusion of regulation is key to the decriminalize CP because
otherwise there’s no distinction – that’s the core of the topic
 2
Legalizing marijuana is a tactic of neoliberal governmentality that places the onus on
individuals to govern themselves while the government sits back and makes sure that
they’re doing it right – this increases state control through regulatory mechanisms
while minimizing its perception
O’Brien 2013 - University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (February 25, Patrick, “Medical Marijuana and
Social Control: Escaping Criminalization and Embracing Medicalization” Deviant Behavior, 34: 423–443,
Taylor & Francis)
A latent outcome of this legal-medical system has been its adaptation to the new criminologies evidenced in late modern society (Garland 1996,
2001). The medicalization of cannabis has defined deviance down significantly (Moynihan 1993) and effectively reduced the demands placed on
the State’s criminal justice agencies. At the same time, the
State has increasingly embedded social controls into the
fabric of society, rather than inserting them from above in the form of sovereign command (Garland 2001). Medical
dispensary owners, cultivators, investors, and employees, along with local politicians and affiliated business
owners, have remained bound to State laws and policies, but have also been expected to proctor
themselves while government powers watch at a distance for a breakdown in control. The State has conceded
that it is unable to manage the illicit marijuana market alone and has redirected its control efforts away
from the sole authority of the police , the courts, and the prisons. The dispensary industry has provided the State
a situation in which it governs, but does not coercively control marijuana and its users. Instead, the State
manages the drug through the actors involved in the legal-medical industry, and has effectively mandated them as active partners in sustaining
and enforcing the formal and informal controls of the dispensary system. The State controls at an ostensibly distant fashion, but it has not
resigned its power. On the contrary, it has retained its traditional command over the police and the prisons while
expanding its efficiency and capacity to control marijuana and its users . This new reality in crime control has
stratified itself across all facets of society, including its structural, cultural, and interactional dimensions. At the structural level, the legal-
medical model has reduced the strain of a substantial segment of society by institutionalizing acceptable
and lawful means of accessing marijuana, effectively shifting this population into an ecological position
where they can be watched and controlled. The groups once involved in the illicit market have become
visible, and the laws that govern the use, distribution, and production of cannabis have actually become
enforceable by the State. Marijuana users have become patients, requiring a physician’s recommendation to con sume the drug lawfully.
The State has mandated what medical conditions warrant a registry card, monitoring people through licensing applications, doctors’ files,
government paperwork, and the medical marijuana registry. Dispensary owners have been required to grow 70%of their own product, to
provide live 24-hour surveillance camera feeds of their cultivation and distribution warehouses, and to subject themselves to periodic
inspection. Dispensary owners and employees have been fingerprinted and undergone extensive background checks, and marijuana businesses
only operate in State zoned locations. By amassing knowledge about the social organization of the marijuana
industry and its users, the government has engaged in monitoring, aggregating, and transmitting such
information to law enforcement and the public . At the cultural level, the legal-medical system has provided a
greater degree of social order, stability, and integration by relocating marijuana users into the fold of
conventional norms and values. Cultural cohesion and conformity have been fostered through legitimate
business opera tions that cater to conventional lifestyles and work hours, that quell concerns over safety
and lawfulness, and reduce the alienation of a subculture of users. The State has effectively aligned a
once criminal population of people with dominant ideals of normality (Goffman 1983) and dismantled a framework of
deviant organization (Best and Luckenbill 1982) with distinct ideol ogies and norms concerning marijuana sales and
use. The government has incorporated the norms and values of conventional society into the processes of distributing and using cannabis, and
now assists in controlling marijuana through the cultural transmission (Shaw and McKay 1972) of rituals and sanctions now aligned with the
normative social order. Both
of these macro- and meso-level shifts have augmented State control of marijuana and
its users at an interactional level. These structural and cultural changes have directly influenced micro-level
processes and mediated people’s differential associations and social learning processes (Akers 2000;
Sutherland 1949; Sutherland and Cressey 1955) as users have been increasingly socialized into a conventional drug
lifestyle. Marijuana users in the dispensary sys tem have decreased their contacts with deviant others and increased their contacts with
legitimate associations by purchasing lawfully from licensed distributors. Dispensary owners have come to interact with
banks, contractors, real estate firms, tax specialists, and lawyers because they exist in legitimate occupational
associations and lawful community relations. This legal-medical model has allowed the State to further monitor
interactional processes through receipts, taxes, and video surveillance. This continuous supervision has led to
growing discipline and normal ization. The State has prescribed conforming modes of conduct upon
marijuana users with new found power (Foucault 1975). Zoning laws have mandated where transactions occur, distribution
laws have defined how much can be purchased, and monitored business hours have controlled the time sales occur. The State has also
strengthened individual bonds to society (Hirschi 1969) as a medical license protects users’ conventional investments (i.e.,
education, career, and family) and caters to their time-consuming activities as they have decided the time, speed, and location of their
purchases. Finally, State medicalization of marijuana has prompted people to endorse society’s rules as progressively
more politically and morally correct, since users are typically critical of cannabis prohibition . This legal-
medical system has also accommodated the ideals of neoliberalism . Through the adaptive strategy of
responsibilization (Garland 2001), the penalization strategies (i.e., control mechanisms) regulating marijuana have
become increasingly privatized, operating through civil society. For example, although the State has demanded 24-
hour video surveillance over dispensary operations, it has also required these businesses to regulate their own
marijuana production and distribution, monitor their own employees and financial accounts, and direct their own branding and
promotional campaigns. Furthermore, by defining deviance down, marijuana has become legally sold through privately owned dispensaries.
In neoliberal fashion, marijuana has been deregulated for capital gain .
Biopower and neoliberalism combine to create a unique form of necropolitics that
drives endless extermination in the name of maintaining the strength of the market
Banerjee 2006 - University of South Australia (Subhabrata Bobby, “Live and Let Die: Colonial
Sovereignties and the Death Worlds of Necrocapitalism,” Borderlands, Volume 5 No. 1,
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol5no1_2006/banerjee_live.htm)
10. Agamben shows how sovereign power operates in the production of bare life in a variety of contexts:
concentration camps, 'human guinea pigs' used by Nazi doctors, current debates on euthanasia, debates on human rights
and refugee rights. A sovereign decision to apply a state of exception invokes a power to decide the
value of life, which would allow a life to be killed without the charge of homicide. The killings of mentally and physically handicapped
people during the Nazi regime was justified as ending a 'life devoid of value', a life 'unworthy to be lived'. Sovereignty thus becomes a decision
on the value of life, 'a power to decide the point at which life ceases to be politically relevant' (Agamben, 1998: 142). Life
is no more
sovereign as enshrined in the declaration of 'human' rights but becomes instead a political decision, an
exercise of biopower (Foucault, 1980). In the context of the 'war on terror' operating in a neoliberal economy, the
exercise of biopower results in the creation of a type of sovereignty that has profound implications for
those whose livelihoods depend on the war on terror as well as those whose lives become constituted as 'bare life' in the economy of the war
on terror. 11. However, it is not enough to situate sovereignty and biopower in the context of a neoliberal economy especially in the case of the
war on terror. In
a neoliberal economy, the colony represents a greater potential for profit especially as it is
this space that, as Mbembe (2003: 14) suggests, represents a permanent state of exception where sovereignty is
the exercise of power outside the law , where 'peace was more likely to take on the face of a war
without end' and where violence could operate in the name of civilization. But these forms of necropolitical
power, as Mbembe reads it in the context of the occupation of Palestine, literally create 'death worlds, new and unique
forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon
them the status of theliving dead ' (Mbembe, 2003: 40). The state of endless war is precisely the space where
profits accrue whether it is through the extraction of resources or the use of privatized militias or
through contracts for reconstruction. Sovereignty over death worlds results in the application of
necropower either literally as the right to kill or the right to 'civilize', a supposedly 'benevolent' form of
power that requires the destruction of a culture in order to 'save the people from themselves' (Mbembe,
2003:22). This attempt to save the people from themselves has, of course, been the rhetoric used by the
U.S. government in the war on terror and the war in Iraq . 12. Situating necropolitics in the context of economy, Montag
(2005: 11) argues that if necropolitics is interested in the production of death or subjugating life to the power of death then it is possible to
speak of a necroeconomics - a space of 'letting die or exposing to death'. Montag explores the relation of the market to life and death in his
reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments. In Montag's reading of Smith, it is 'the dread of death, the great
poison to the happiness...which while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society' (cited in Montag, 2005: 12). If
social life was driven solely by unrestrained self-interest then the fear of punishment or death through juridical systems kept the pursuit of
excessive self-interest in check, otherwise people would simply rob, injure and kill for material wealth. Thus, for Smith the universality of life is
contingent on the particularity of death, the production of life on the production of death where the intersection of the political and the
economic makes it necessary to exercise the right to kill. The market then, as a 'concrete form of the universal' becomes the 'very form of
universality as life' and requires at certain moments to 'let die'. Or as Montag theorizes it, Death establishes the conditions of life; death
as
by an invisible hand restores the market to what it must be to support life . The allowing of death of the
particular is necessary to the production of life of the universal. The market reduces and rations life ; it not
only allows death, it demands death be allowed by the sovereign power , as well as by those who suffer it. In other words,
it demands and required the latter allow themselves to die . Thus alongside the figure of homo sacer, the one
who may be killed with impunity, is another figure, one whose death is no doubt less spectacular than the first and is the object of no
memorial or commemoration: he who with impunity may be allowed to die, slowly or quickly, in the name of the
rationality and equilibrium of the market (Montag, 2005: 15). Montag, therefore, theorizes a necroeconomics
where the state becomes the legitimate purveyor of violence : in this scenario, the state can compel by force
by 'those who refuse to allow themselves to die' (Montag, 2005: 15). However, Montag's concept of necroeconomics
appears to universalize conditions of poverty through the logic of the market. My concern however, is the creation of death worlds in colonial
contexts through the collusion between states and corporations. 13. If states and corporations work in tandem with each
other in colonial contexts, creating states of exception and exercising necropowe r to profit from the death worlds
that they establish, then necroeconomics fails to consider the specificities of colonial capitalist practices. In this sense, I would argue that
necrocapitalism emerges from the intersection of necropolitics and necroeconomics, as practices of accumulation in
colonial contexts by specific economic actors - multinational corporations for example - that involve
dispossession, death, torture, suicide, slavery, destruction of livelihoods and the general management of
violence. It is a new form of imperialism, an imperialism that has learned to 'manage things better' .
Colonial sovereignty can be established even in metropolitan sites where necrocapitalism may operate in states of exception: refugee detention
centres in Australia are examples of these states of exception (Perera, 2002). However, in the colonies (either 'post' or 'neo'), entire regions in
the Middle East or Africa may be designated as states of exception.

The alternative is a critical refusal of the affirmative – criticism of power is necessary

to destabilizing the status quo
DONEGAN 2006 – PHD STUDENT DEPT ANTHROPOLIGY SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL STUDIES
GOVERNMENTAL REGIONALISM, MILLENNIUM, VOL 35 NO 23
The typical reproach to Foucault’s conception of power as immanent to all types of relationships is that
such a conception prevents us from ever being able to step outside a conflict, whether it be epistemic or
political, in order to resolve it. Of course it is the case that ‘to make truth-claims is to try to strengthen some epistemic alignments, and to
challenge, undermine, or evade others’.148 To criticise power is to attempt to resist or evade it; it is also to take a
stance, a position. Foucault’s critics ask: how is it possible to take a stance without some outside, neutral position from which to make a
decision about which side to adopt, about which side is ‘right’? According to Foucault, neither side is right. But [m]y point is not that
everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then
we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic
activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main
danger.149 Is there any reason why a neoliberal, neo-medieval world order of multiple levels of governance need be ‘worse’ than the
present world order? This is the wrong question. The question to ask is: how are things developing, how are social
relations changing, and who will be hit  hardest, and who will benefit most? These are the questions we need to be
asking, as analysts. A governmentality perspective can contribute to our ability to respond to this task. Mitchell Dean has emphasised that the
study of governmentality as an empirical phenomenon ‘does not amount to a study of politics or power relations in general; it is a study only of
the attempts to (more or less) rationally affect the conduct of others and ourselves’.150 In this sense, the picture of power relations
that governmentality scholarship can offer is therefore partial and incomplete. But to
the extent that the particular power
relations it portrays are both hard to see and increasingly significant, the governmentality
framework offers something useful to the analyst of power in the contemporary global social order. It may seem
that post-structuralist theorists are constantly engaged  in a game of ‘catch-up’,151 unpacking and teasing out
how those with power do what they do, always after the event. But the conclusion to be drawn should not focus on the
fact that the deconstructive practice is always post- and thus ‘too late’, in vain, without hope; rather it should focus
on the fact that in order for those in power to do what  they do the use of such material and discursive
practices is necessary – which suggests, as Foucault points out, that their hold on power is far more fragile, that the
relationships of power they impose are far closer to relationships of confrontation, than they would like
us to believe. Thus the deconstructive practice is not essentially negative, pessimistic, and nihilistic. In seeking not
simply to understand what or why any particular action was undertaken in the past, but also to use that understanding when engaging
with political practice in the present, it is  hopeful, optimistic, and pro-active.  
 3
The best models show the GOP will win
FiveThirtyEight – 10/23 (“FiveThirtyEight’s Senate Forecast”; OCT 23, 2014;
http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/senate-forecast/)
FiveThirtyEight’s election forecasting model combines hundreds of opinion polls with historical and
demographic information to calculate odds for each Senate race . We estimate the probability that each party will win control of
the Senate by running those odds through thousands of simulations . The forecast is updated regularly. What It Means

Republicans have a 66.0% chance of winning a majority . Democrats have a 34.0% chance of keeping the majority. There is an 18.6%
chance Republicans will control 52 seats and Democrats will control 48 seats.

The GOP has an edge because of turnout—the plan is the key issue in flipping that
Linskey, 14—Annie, citing; George Washington U polling, Lake Research Partners polling firm and the
Tarrance Group, a public affairs firm
“Poll: Marijuana Legalization Measures Will Drive Voters,” Bloomberg, Mar 25,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/poll-marijuana-legalization-measures-will-drive-
voters.html --BR
A majority of Americans favor legalizing marijuana and would be motivated to vote if a measure to do so is on
the ballot, according to a George Washington University Battleground poll released today. The survey of 1,000
likely voters found 73 percent support allowing marijuana for legal medical purposes, 53 percent favor decriminalization
and 68 percent are “more likely” to go to their polling place to weigh in on a ballot. “Marijuana
legalization and marijuana decriminalization is at a tipping point” said Celinda Lake, president of Lake
Research Partners and one of the two pollsters who conducted the survey. Support crosses party lines, though younger and single
voters -- who tend to vote for Democrats -- are more motivated by those issues, she said. Ballot measures on
legalizing pot are set for Alaska’s August primary and probably this November in Oregon, according to Allen St. Pierre, the executive director
Norml, a Washington-based nonprofit pushing for more access to the drug. Florida will see a decriminalization effort, he said. The marijuana
question was part of a wide-ranging poll that tested President Barack Obama’s approval rating, potential 2016 presidential candidates and
American’s views on the billionaire Koch brothers. The survey, conducted March 16-20, was released today at a breakfast sponsored by The
Christian Science Monitor. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Republican Edge While the poll showed Americans
are evenly split between supporting Democrats and Republicans on a generic ballot, Republicans hold an advantage because
they are more motivated to vote: 64 percent said they are “extremely likely” to go to the polls compared with 57 percent of
Democrats. The president’s job-approval rating is 44 percent in the survey -- up 3 points from when the question was last asked in mid-January.
Obama’s disapproval is 53 percent, down a point from when the question was last asked. “This data gives an edge to
Republicans,” said Ed Goeas, chief executive officer of the Tarrance Group, a public affairs firm based in
Alexandria, Virginia, who also worked on the survey. “Obama’s name will not be on the ballot but Obama’s polices will
be,” he said. And “you don’t have the operation of the presidential race there turning out votes on that side.”
GOP senate is key to Asia Pivot
Keck 14—Managing Editor @ The Diplomat, former Deputy Editor of e-IR @ Center for a New
American Security
Zachary Keck, “The Midterm Elections and the Asia Pivot: The Republican Party taking the Senate in the
2014 elections could be a boon for the Asia Pivot.” The Diplomat, April 22, 2014,
http://thediplomat.com/2014/04/the-midterm-elections-and-the-asia-pivot/ --BR
There is a growing sense in the United States that when voters go to the polls this November, the
Republican Party will win enough Senate seats to control both houses of Congress. This would potentially
introduce more gridlock into an already dysfunctional American political system . But it needn’t be all
doom and gloom for U.S. foreign policy, including in the Asia-Pacific . In fact, the Republicans wrestling
control of the Senate from the Democrats this November could be a boon for the U.S. Asia pivot. This is
true for at least three reasons. First, with little prospect of getting any of his domestic agenda through
Congress, President Barack Obama will naturally focus his attention on foreign affairs. Presidents in
general have a tendency to focus more attention on foreign policy during their second term, and this effect is
magnified if the other party controls the legislature . And for good reason: U.S. presidents have far more
latitude to take unilateral action in the realm of foreign affairs than in domestic policy. Additionally, the 2016
presidential election will consume much of the country’s media’s attention on domestic matters. It’s only when acting on the world
stage that the president will still be able to stand taller in the media’s eyes than the candidates running
to for legislative office. Second, should the Democrats get pummeled in the midterm elections this year,
President Obama is likely to make some personnel changes in the White House and cabinet. For instance,
after the Republican Party incurred losses in the 2006 midterms, then-President George W. Bush quickly moved
to replace Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with the less partisan (at least in that era) Robert Gates.
Obama followed suit by making key personnel changes after the Democrats “shellacking” in the 2010
midterm elections. Should the Democrats face a similar fate in the 2014 midterm elections, Obama is
also likely to make notable personnel changes. Other aides, particular former Clinton aides, are likely to leave the
administration early in order to start vying for spots on Hillary Clinton’s presumed presidential campaign. Many of these changes are likely to be
with domestic advisors given that domestic issues are certain to decide this year’s elections. Even so, many nominally domestic positions—such
as Treasury and Commerce Secretary—have important implications for U.S. policy in Asia. Moreover, some of the post-election
changes are likely be foreign policy and defense positions, which bodes well for Asia given the appalling
lack of Asia expertise among Obama’s current senior advisors. But the most important way a Republican
victory in November will help the Asia Pivot is that the GOP in Congress are actually more favorable to
the pivot than are members of Obama’s own party . For example, Congressional opposition to granting President Trade
Promotional Authority — which is key to getting the Trans-Pacific Partnership ratified — is largely from Democratic legislators. Similarly , it is
the Democrats who are largely in favor of the defense budget cuts that threaten to undermine
America’s military posture in Asia. If Republicans do prevail in November, President Obama will naturally
want to find ways to bridge the very wide partisan gap between them. Asia offers the perfect issue area
to begin reaching across the aisle. The Republicans would have every incentive to reciprocate the
President’s outreach. After all, by giving them control of the entire Legislative Branch, American voters will be expecting
some results from the GOP before they would be ostensibly be ready to elect them to the White House
in 2016. A Republican failure to achieve anything between 2014 and 2016 would risk putting the GOP in the same dilemma they faced in the
1996 and 2012 presidential elections. Working with the president to pass the TPP and strengthen America’s
military’s posture in Asia would be ideal ways for the GOP to deliver results without violating their
principles. Thus, while the president will work tirelessly between now and November to help the Democrats retain the Senate, he should
also prepare for failure by having a major outreach initiative to Congressional Republicans ready on day one. This initiative should be Asia-
centric.

Pivot is to key to prevent Asia wars

Lohman 13 – MA in Foreign Affairs @ UVA (Walter, “Honoring America’s Superpower
Responsibilities,” http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/2013/06/honoring-americas-superpower-
responsibilities)
When you withdraw from the world, either by imposing trade barriers or drawing down military commitments, you lose your
ability to influence events. Those considering an Asia with less American presence have to ask
themselves whether freedom would do as well without us. In fact, proponents of American withdrawal have to ask
themselves a more important question: Whether they have responsibility for anyone’s well-being but their own! Times are, indeed,
changing in Asia. Power is shifting. I have traveled to Asia quite a bit—easily 50 times over the course of my career. I’ve seen
the change first-hand. One thing that is not changing is that the U.S. is the one “indispensable” ingredient
for continued peace, prosperity, and freedom around the world. Everyone I talk to in Asia tells me that. They must be
talking to President Obama, too, because he’s also used the word “indispensable” to describe America’s role in the world. Of course, these
countries want access to our markets and our capital. But on
the diplomatic side, it is also the case that the U.S. is
the closest thing in Asia to an honest broker. And because if anything, nationalist tensions in Asia are
only growing, this is not going to change anytime soon. Sure, there are South Koreans who would rather not have
American troops in their country. But they are not the majority. And they like us a whole heck of a lot more than they like the prospect of
another invasion. They like us a lot better than they like the Japanese. Imagine how the Koreans feel about the prospect of Japan acquiring
nuclear weapons to defend itself. That’s what they would have to do without the benefit of the American nuclear deterrent.

Asian wars cause extinction – multiple reasons they uniquely escalate

Mead, 10 – Senior Fellow @ the Council on Foreign Relations
Walter Russell, American Interest, Nov 9, “Obama in Asia”, http://blogs.the-american-
interest.com/wrm/2010/11/09/obama-in-asia/
The decision to go to Asia is one that all thinking Americans can and should support regardless of either party or ideological affiliation. 
East and South Asia are the places where the 21st century, for better or for worse, will most likely be
shaped; economic growth, environmental progress, the destiny of democracy and success against
terror are all at stake here.  American objectives in this region are clear.  While convincing China that its best interests are not
served by a rash, Kaiser Wilhelm-like dash for supremacy in the region, the US does not want either to isolate or contain China.  We want a
strong, rich, open and free China in an Asia that is also strong, rich, open and free.  Our
destiny is inextricably linked with
Asia’s; Asian success will make America stronger, richer and more secure.   Asia’s failures will
reverberate over here, threatening our prosperity, our security and perhaps even our survival. The
world’s two most mutually hostile nuclear states, India and Pakistan, are in Asia.  The two states
most likely to threaten others with nukes, North Korea and aspiring rogue nuclear power Iran, are
there.  The two superpowers with a billion plus people are in Asia as well.  This is where the world’s
fastest growing economies are.  It is where the worst environmental problems exist.   It is the home
of the world’s largest democracy, the world’s most populous Islamic country (Indonesia — which is also among the most
democratic and pluralistic of Islamic countries), and the world’s most rapidly rising non-democratic power as well.  Asia holds more oil
resources than any other continent; the world’s most important and most threatened trade routes lie off its shores.  East Asia, South Asia,
Central Asia (where American and NATO forces are fighting the Taliban) and West Asia (home among others to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey
and Iraq) are the theaters in the world today that most directly engage America’s vital interests and where our armed forces are most
directly involved.  The world’s most explosive territorial disputes are in Asia as well, with islands (and the
surrounding mineral and fishery resources) bitterly disputed between countries like Russia, the two Koreas, Japan, China (both from Beijing
and Taipei), and Vietnam.  From the streets of Jerusalem to the beaches of Taiwan the
world’s most intractable political
problems are found on the Asian landmass and its surrounding seas. Whether you view the world in
terms of geopolitical security, environmental sustainability, economic growth or the march of
democracy, Asia is at the center of your concerns .  That is the overwhelming reality of world politics today, and that
reality is what President Obama’s trip is intended to address.
 4

Almost universal technical adherence now to drug control treaties, the plan allows a
pick-and-choose approach that undermines the overall system
Hasse 13 – consultant for international drug policy consortium
(Heather, The 2016 Drugs UNGASS: What does it mean for drug reform?,
http://drogasenmovimiento.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/13-10-14-the-2016-drugs-
ungass-e28093what-does-it-mean-for-drug-reform_.pdf)
But why? With all of the progress made in reform around the world lately, many - especially in the US - are
asking if the UN is even
relevant to domestic drug reform at this point. With the recent marijuana laws passed in Colorado and
Washington and the proposed legislation in Uruguay - not to mention decriminalization measures enacted in Portugal and a growing
number of other countries - reform seems inevitable. At some point, the argument goes, the UN system will
simply be overtaken by "real world" reform on the ground. Why even bother with advocacy at the UN?¶ This
is not an easy question to answer; however, I truly believe that to be effective, reform efforts must be made at every level - locally, nationally,
and globally.¶ It may be true that reform efforts in the US and around the world have made significant progress in the last 10 years. But there
is still a long way to go - marijuana is still not completely legal anywhere in the world (despite state laws to the
contrary, marijuana still remains illegal under federal law throughout the US ), and many human rights abuses continue
to be carried out against drug users throughout the world in the name of drug control. Meanwhile, the international drug control
treaties - the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and its progeny - remain in place and, in fact, enjoy nearly universal
adherence by 184 member states.¶ That so many countries comply – at least technically, if not in “spirit” – with the
international drug treaty system, shows just how highly the international community regards the system .
As well it should – the UN system is invaluable and even vital in many areas, including climate change, HIV/AIDS
reduction, and, most recently, the Syrian chemical weapons crisis (and don’t forget that the international drug treaty system also
governs the flow of licit medication). While it is not unheard of for a country to disregard a treaty, a system in which countries pick
and choose which treaty provisions suit them and ignore the rest is, shall we say, less than ideal.
Legalization violates the single convention on narcotic drugs, abrogating technical
compliance
Donohue et al 10 – law prof @ stanford
(John, with Benjamin Ewing and David Peloquin, Yale Law, Rethinking America’s Illegal
Drug Policy)
International Law. Another complication for legalization is international law . While many researchers attempt to make
international comparisons in studying drugs, one area of drug control policy that receives scant attention is the United Nations Single
Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 which binds all UN member nations to maintain prohibition of drugs, including
cannabis specifically (Levine and Reinarman 2006, 61). While the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs requires that
countries maintain prohibition of manufacture, sales, and import, it does not require a punitive regime of the
type currently found in the United States. Article 36 of the Single Convention, “Penal Provision,” specifically allows for treatment
programs to either enhance or serve as a substitute for punishment.81 The Economist reports that countries like the Netherlands are able to
allow for some innovation in controlling marijuana use through the convention’s commentary, which states that its goal is “improvement of the
efficacy of national criminal justice systems in the field of drug trafficking” (“A Toker’s Guide” 2009). Thus,
reforms working within
the framework of the existing treaty are possible, though full- scale legalization would require either a
country’s withdrawal from the treaty or revision thereof.¶ Perhaps partly due to the Single Convention on Narcotic
Drugs, even countries with more liberal narcotics policies than the United States lack full- fledged drug
legalization and at most allow for depenalization of marijuana and/ or widespread needle exchange programs. As discussed above, in the
Netherlands, a country long known for its tolerance of marijuana smoking, the importation and commercial production of
cannabis remains illegal (Levine and Reinarman 2006, 64). When considering its own drug reform, Portugal declined to adopt
outright legalization likely in part because of its treaty obligations under the 1961 Single Convention (Cato Institute 2009).

Spills over to destabilize the whole treaty system

Rolles 9 – senior policy analyst for the Transform Drug Policy Foundation
(Stephen, “After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation”)
Parties could simply ignore all or part of the treaties. If multiple states engaged in such a strategy, the treaties would eventually
‘wither on the vine’, falling into disuse without any specific termination or reform. An individual country disregarding the
treaties, or applying them only partially, could in this way institute any policies deemed to be necessary at the national level, including
arguably the most likely example: the actual legalisation of cannabis and the introduction of a licensing system for domestic
producers (as the Netherlands and Switzerland have been debating at the parliamentary level for some years, and which is now on the political
agenda in a number of US states).¶ Such
a move however, like all the other possible reforms discussed here, raises serious issues
that go beyond the realm of drug control—particularly if taken unilaterally. The possibility of nations
unilaterally ignoring drug control treaty commitments could threaten, or be perceived to threaten, the stability of
the entire treaty system. The cost of such a threat and the benefits derived from the wider UN treaty system would make states wary
of opting out, even on a limited reform such as cannabis production.

Effective international law facilitates global coordination over public goods---solves

multiple existential threats
Gregory Shaffer 12, Melvin C. Steen Professor of Law, and Affiliated Professor in the Department of
Political Science, University of Minnesota, “International Law and Global Public Goods in a Legal Pluralist
World,” Eur J Int Law (2012) 23 (3): 669-693, http://ejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/3/669.full
Power fragments and states holding nuclear weapons destabilize, risking
We face imminent financial collapse with scant collective will to address it.

nuclear proliferation and terrorist use. Climate change intensifies while states
eventual dither that are the main contributors and politicians

Fisheries deplete, deserts expand, and aquifers diminish

with veto power trivialize repeated scientific findings as ‘the greatest hoax ever perpetrated’.1 . International law scholarship, in

¶ Increased
the meantime, takes a turn towards celebrating pluralism without sufficiently accounting for institutional variation to address different contexts. Those writing on global public goods challenges, at the same time, tend to come from disciplines other than law.2

transnational interdependence recasts domestic issues into global ones . To give one mundane example, until 1997, corporate insolvency law in Indonesia was
considered a purely local matter. But with the onset of the Asian financial crisis, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Asian Development Bank rethought domestic corporate insolvency law as a global issue in light of the risks of financial contagion, threatening a global public

good, financial stability.3 Other examples include domestic banking regulation, tax avoidance (given the impact on state sovereign debt crises), pest control, public health, and civil conflict . In response,
states create new international institutions and existing international institutions expand their mandates. The UN Security Council has expanded its mandate for overseeing international peace and security to authorize ‘humanitarian intervention’, and the World Health Organization has
done so to address public health in response to the SARS epidemic and similar threats.4 States and state institutions sometimes create international club-like institutions with limited membership, such as the Financial Action Task Force and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision,
with the express aim of affecting behaviour in non-members, such as over money laundering and bank capital requirements.5 ¶ So what is international law’s role in the production of global public goods? Where are greater international legal constraints and international institutions
needed, and where should international law retain slack? International law both is required to produce global public goods and can potentially impede dynamic processes that are needed to address global public goods challenges. This article provides a framework for addressing these
issues in light of variation in the properties of global public goods (section 3), their distributive implications (section 4), and alternative institutional choices for confronting them, as reflected in different theoretical visions for global governance advanced within international law
scholarship (section 5). But first we address the rise of the legal pluralist vision (section 1) and the tensions between it and the concept of global public goods (section 2). ¶ 1 The Rise of the Legal Pluralist Vision¶ Legal pluralism seems a bit of a fad in international law scholarship today,
just as dialectical federalism may be a bit of a fad in the United States, and constitutional pluralism in the European Union.6 Legal pluralism is a construct, a way of understanding and envisaging the world, both positively (the way the world is) and normatively (the way it should be). The
challenge with the legal pluralist construct is how it takes account of the global public goods challenges confronting us. ¶ What has led to the rise of this academic construct, its proliferation, its catching on, its enticement of our imaginations? In part, the concept resonates with our
experience of multiple overlapping orders in tension with each other, with no clear centre. In part, the concept provides a normative vision of restructuring plural orders into pluralist ones – that is, re-envisaging them from fragmented, closed, sovereign legal orders into an open,
interacting, interlinked, interdependent, multi-level structure of legal ordering. In part, it particularly resonates with those writing in Europe, reflecting the European experience with supranational law. The European experience, encompassing both economic regulation and human rights
protection, is viewed as an experimental model and ‘laboratory’ for the ordering of a global legal pluralism, one which provides order without centralized hierarchy, hegemony, or the abandonment of public law principles to transnational market forces.7 ¶ Yet the turn to a pluralist vision
also has something to do with our disenchantments, our disenchantment with international law, the limits of the European experiment where a constitutional order exists but has been formally rejected by its citizens, and the failure of progressive politics in the US at the national level,
spurring a strategic retreat out of political necessity to bottom up progressive initiatives from small municipal activist havens like Berkeley, California, and Madison, Wisconsin. There are good reasons for such disenchantment within the US, with the populist lure of the Tea Party’s
destructive rhetoric of any sense of collective purpose, its members cheering at Republican debates at the prospect of Americans dying because they do not have health insurance. There are good reasons for this disenchantment in Europe with little sense of solidarity in facing a crisis
threatening the Euro, the Union itself, and the world, with the biggest sovereign defaults in history, ones that would dwarf earlier defaults in South America and Asia. It is a crisis which – to play with Hobbes’ famous phrase – could be nasty and brutish, but not short. And there are good
reasons for such disenchantment globally, with the cynicism of the Bush administration’s despising of international law in invading Iraq, its trivializing of torture, and its ordering the freeze of individual assets through Security Council resolutions with no concern for due process.
International law failed to constrain power when power chose to belittle and ignore it, and it served to legitimize power when power deigned to deploy it. ¶ The concept of pluralism certainly captures much going on in the world better than its occasional foil, the concept of
constitutionalism.8 There is rarely any central hierarchy in international law. And even where there is a glimpse of a shadow of hierarchy, such as decisions by the UN Security Council or of the WTO Appellate Body, there always follows the challenge of implementation. International law
depends on national systems and private actors to implement its dictates, and it has little authority to ensure that they do so. ¶ We have a fragmented plurality of legal orders spatially in at least three senses.9 First, as international functional organizations proliferate, we have a plurality
at the international level – constituting a horizontal plurality. Different semi-autonomous international institutions address common issue areas in different ways. At times actors may strategically create overlap among international institutions to reorient international legal norms when
they are unable to trigger such change within an existing institution. The tensions between the rules of the WTO and the Convention on Biodiversity and its Biosafety Protocol are a salient example.10 Institutions with overlapping mandates may also compete for leadership on a legal
issue, as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Asian Development Bank did during the Asian financial crisis.11¶ Secondly, we have a plurality of legal orders between levels of governance – constituting a vertical plurality. Since considerable power remains at the nation state
level, whether for producing detailed law, implementing it, or enforcing it, international law must interact with national law to be effective. In practice, domestic law and institutions will always remain critical parts of a recursive process of resistance, adoption, and adaptation of
international legal norms, which in turn can reshape those international norms.¶ Thirdly, in an economically interdependent world, private actors develop non-public legal orders at the state and international levels. They are sometimes encouraged by public actors that may later codify
these private legal norms, or enforce them judicially, or collaborate through forming ‘public–private partnerships’. We thus also have a plurality of public and private legal orders.12 ¶ The concept of legal pluralism does not signify disorder – per the international relations trope of
anarchy. Legal pluralism, with its account of interacting legal orders, takes the idea of international law seriously. Otherwise, there is nothing with which national legal systems can interact, except with each other or with private legal ordering. The normative vision of legal pluralism rather
aims to foster transnational and global legal order out of the plural; it aims to structure out of the many one, but with the one constituted by the interactions of the many.13 ¶ 2 Legal Pluralism and the Challenge of Global Public Goods¶ Despite the appeal of the legal pluralist vision, one
realizes in reading thought-provoking authors on legal pluralism, such as Mireille Delmas-Marty and Nico Krisch, that though they compellingly support their arguments with examples and case studies, their case studies do not focus on the challenges of global public goods. They do not,
one might conjecture, because there is a tension between the operation of legal pluralism and the production of global public goods where processes of pluralist interaction will provide too little too late. ¶ What do we mean by a global public good? In economic theory, a public good, in
contrast to a private good, is one that is non-excludable (no one can be excluded from the good’s consumption) and non-rivalrous (the good’s consumption does not reduce its availability to others).14 Clean air, for example, is a public good because it is not depleted by our breathing it,
and it cannot be appropriated by a few. The term ‘good’ refers to a product, and not a normative attribute. A public good thus can be positive (such as knowledge), or negative, a good that we wish to curtail so that our aim is to produce its absence (such as terrorism). ¶ Those promoting
international cooperation often broaden the definition of a public good classically used in economic theory, which was statist in its initial focus, to encompass a larger number of issues for global action. On the one hand, the two-fold ‘publicness’ of a good in practice often lies along a
continuum, so that goods may combine public and private attributes, complicating the assessment of how to generate them.15 On the other hand, one reason policy-makers arguably have developed a broader definition of global public goods is to enhance the scope for global
governance projects and thus legitimize their pursuit.16 The concept of global public goods, for example, was originated under a project sponsored by the UN Development Programme which seeks funding for projects. Inge Kaul and her collaborators, leading that project, use a relaxed
definition of public good as ‘goods with benefits that extend to all countries, people, and generations’,17 while noting that the concept of public good is a social construction.18 Such expanded definitions, however, risk making the concept of global public goods so malleable that it
becomes abused, leading to scepticism and cynicism regarding its relevance.19 As we will see in section 3, we rather need to differentiate among different types of public goods in order meaningfully to address the role of international law and organizations in their production. ¶ The
major challenge for the production of many (but not all) global public goods, as well as those public goods that are transnational (but not global) in scope,20 and thus the challenge of celebrating legal pluralism, is collective action and free riding. Nation states and other actors will not
invest in global public goods if their independent action will have no impact, or if they can free ride on the investment of others. To produce global public goods often requires a sense of collective purpose based on mutual interests and understandings. To arrive at that collective purpose,
we need (for economists) an alignment of incentives, and (for sociologists) socialization processes that lead to a common identity (such as national citizens). We are then more likely to cooperate and create institutions that invest in producing public goods. The creation of nation states
with general taxing powers and a monopoly of the legitimate use of force facilitated the production of national public goods. The development of the theory of public goods correspondingly has been statist on account of the existence of centralized decision-making in nation states which
produce them.21¶ The most salient challenge internationally is that we lack legitimate, centralized institutions with general taxing and regulatory powers. We thus have traditionally depended on cooperation between nation states involving decentralized forms of implementation and
enforcement to advance collective goals. International law facilitates this cooperation through creating international institutions and common norms and rules, thereby reducing transaction, monitoring, and enforcement costs and building shared understandings.22 States created the UN
and its Security Council to help to ensure the global public good of international peace and security. They created the World Health Organization to protect public health from the spread of infectious diseases, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to address climate
stabilization, the World Trade Organization to address trade liberalization and help to manage inter-state trade conflicts so that they do not escalate into 1930s beggar-thy-neighbour policies, the Financial Action Task Force to address money laundering of illicit funds, and the International
Monetary Fund to stabilize currency and sovereign debt crises. The concerns addressed by these institutions can be viewed in global public goods terms. Yet none of these institutions has a general taxing power to address them. All of them depend on negotiations between states over
the amount of ‘contributions’.¶ 3 The Need to Differentiate between Global Public Goods¶ In order to assess the place and role of international law and institutions to promote and govern the production of global public goods, we need to differentiate among the range of public goods
challenges faced, as opposed to speaking of global public goods and international law in the abstract. Global public goods come in different varieties, calling for different institutional responses, sometimes involving greater centralization through international law and institutions, and
sometimes not. There is no one size fits all, no one optimal institutional structure. For the production of many global public goods, legal pluralism, in which different legal orders interact with each other, works fine. There may be little need for international law, at least in its hard
(mandatory) law variety, much less centralized international institutions. ¶ Since global public goods do not come in one variety, international law plays a variable role in their production. As Scott Barrett conceptualizes in his book Why Cooperate?: The Incentive to Supply Global Public
Goods,23 some global public goods raise collective action problems and others do not. Barrett, following other economists, classifies global public goods into three varieties: single best efforts goods, weakest links goods, and aggregate efforts goods.24 An example of a single best efforts
public good, on the cover of his book, is the crashing of a giant asteroid into the earth. All countries are affected by this prospect. Scientists do not know when one will hit and what size it will be, but they find that small ones hit the earth about once a month, and estimate that potentially
catastrophic ones that could devastate an area the size of Manhattan every 250 years, and one that could cause the extinction of most life forms every 65 million years.25 For this global public good, the US has the incentive to finance research and implement technology to detect and
deter such happenings. No international treaty is required for it to do so. Other countries may free ride on the US’s research, or may engage in complementary research, but that will not deter the US from investing. ¶ Similarly, countries, companies, and even individual researchers have
incentives to invest in basic science on their own which can benefit the world. Joseph Salk’s development of the polio vaccine in the US was a gift to the world, as he did not patent the polio vaccine.26 Such a good can be produced by private initiatives (such as those of pharmaceutical
companies and of the Gates Foundation), purely national ones (such as those of the National Institutes of Health), or international collaborative ones (such as the UNICEF/UNDP/World Bank/WHO Special Programme in Tropical Diseases).27 ¶ Is there no required role for international law
in these cases? Even in the asteroid case, Barrett notes the potential negative externalities of other countries relying on the US. The US may have the incentive to invest in producing the global public good, but in a way that could create a new risk. If an asteroid bears toward the earth,
and if the existing technology is such that the asteroid could only be slightly deflected so that it would crash into a different part of the earth, who should make the decision regarding its deflection? Even if it were to be deflected into the ocean, the location of its impact would raise

differential risks for countries of a tsunami.28 ¶ Similarly, geoengineering increasingly looks like an important policy option for climate
stabilization , given the world’s inability to reduce carbon emissions. It thus can be viewed as a global public good, at least to avoid abrupt and catastrophic climate change.29 Since engineering the climate may be relatively cheap, it could be a single best efforts global

Yet
public good. geoengineering may benefit some countries and harm others. Climate engineering
like climate change itself,

constitutes a huge experiment that poses unforeseeable, differential risks for countries in light of uncertainties. A wealthy country may decide to invest in

If different countries engage in climate engineering, their plural

geoengineering to assist its own climate situation, but in the process have negative externalities on others.

efforts will interact, potentially undercutting each other. Coordination over climate change thus raises
governance challenges there is a role for international law and
. Who should decide whether and how the climate should be engineered? Once again,

international institutions in coordinating decisions ¶ Eliminating even though only one or a few wealthy countries invest in geoengineering on their own.

infectious diseases and curtailing w m d are weakest link public goods the proliferation of eapons of ass estruction . A wealthy country can invest in preventing an
infectious disease within its borders through financing the vaccination of its population each year. The US does so, for example, with polio vaccines. Yet it would be much more cost effective to eradicate polio, as the world did for smallpox in the 1970s. The benefit-cost ratio for smallpox
eradication is thought to be 159:1, if all costs are included, and 483:1, if only international funds for financing eradication efforts in developing countries are considered.30 That is a remarkable rate of return. Investing in polio eradication could provide another global public good. Yet, in

order to eradicate polio, poor and failed states, such as Somalia, are the weakest links.¶ The World Health Organization, an international institution created under
the auspices of the UN leads the eradication efforts
and inheriting the mandate of an earlier institution created pursuant to the League of Nations, . The WHO includes distinct voting rules for its
regulations on infectious diseases, which facilitate collective action for collective purposes. The general rule of international law of treaties is an ‘opt in’ rule. A state is not bound unless it consents. Under Articles 21 and 22 of the WHO constitution, however, a majority decision is binding
on matters involving ‘procedures designed to prevent the international spread of disease’, unless a state opts out. The WHO created new International Health Regulations in 2005 pursuant to these provisions, which require states to build institutional capacity toward containing
communicable diseases, collaborate with each other, and maintain clear points of contact.31 In parallel, the regulations expand the legal authority of the WHO’s Director-General to intervene in response to communicable disease outbreaks, including through a system for convening
experts and declaring a public health emergency of international concern. As has been shown experimentally and statistically, opt-out rules generate much broader participation than do opt-in rules.32 No WHO member, in fact, opted out of the 2005 International Health Regulations.33 ¶

Keeping weapons of mass destruction out of terrorist hands is another weakest link global public good . We
do not know where or when such weapons will be used, but the fallout of their use will have global repercussions, whether for life and health, civil rights, or the global economy. Countries thus have the incentive to keep these weapons out of terrorist hands, but the result will depend on
the weakest links. The weakest links today are Pakistan, Russia, and North Korea. New weakest links may emerge, as more states invest in nuclear technology to gain advantage or parity with their rivals. States in 1968 signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was
extended indefinitely in 1995,34 and the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material in 1987, amended in 2005.35 In addition, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1540 in 2004 which enjoins all states to take measures to prevent nuclear weapons materials from
being obtained by non-state actors having ‘terrorist purposes’.36 The non-proliferation regime, however, has been under some risk of unravelling, as the Bush administration created a special regime for India and reconsidered the US’s first strike options and weapons development
plans.37¶ The severest global public goods challenge today is what Barrett calls an aggregate efforts public good – that is, where the global public good can only be produced through the aggregate efforts of multiple countries. The world appears to have been startlingly successful in
addressing the depletion of the ozone layer, starting with a framework convention, then turning to hard law obligations that were progressively enhanced, and then using soft law mechanisms to facilitate compliance, even when formally hard law sanctions were available.38 The Montreal
Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer created a variety of sticks and carrots to realign incent ives, including potential trade sanctions and a Multilateral Fund for Implementation for developing countries. In contrast, the world has been completely unsuccessful in
addressing climate change mitigation, which is a much more complex and difficult issue that is more susceptible to free riding, undermining collective action. Human-induced climate change is happening and it is not clear what, if anything, effectively will be done to reduce emissions. ¶
These different public goods entail different problem types. That of weakest link public goods involves a holdout problem, whether the holdout is an unwilling one, such as North Korea over nuclear weapons, or an unable one, such as Somalia regarding polio eradication. That of aggregate
efforts public goods involves a free rider/collective action problem, resulting in underinvestment in providing a solution. And that of best shot public goods involves a positive externalities problem because the investor does not fully capture the benefits. It is easier to fund best shot public
goods, even if the result is overinvestment from the perspective of global efficiency. A technological alternative to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) for refrigerants, propellants, and solvents (a best shot problem) appears to have resolved ozone layer depletion by facilitating the phase-out of
CFCs (an aggregate efforts problem). Similarly, climate engineering (a best shot problem) has become a default solution for addressing climate change because of the difficulty of agreeing to emissions reductions (an aggregate efforts problem). ¶ There is a varying role for international
law and international institutions in producing these different global public goods. For best shot global public goods, an international institution is not needed to develop them. Private foundations could provide some of these goods, such as through prizes for the development of new
drugs to combat tropical diseases. Yet where decisions over implementation can have negative externalities, international legal obligations and institutions that constrain unilateral action can better ensure fairness and manage conflicts, and possibly produce public goods more efficiently,
as in the case of asteroid deflection and climate engineering. For aggregate efforts public goods, in comparison, there is a greater need for centralized institutions to produce them, leading to a relinquishment of some national sovereignty. The opening quotation from Nordhaus reflects
his frustration with the global collective failure to address climate change. In contrast, with weakest link public goods, the challenge sometimes lies in building state sovereignty. The challenge for disease eradication, for example, is with ‘failed states’ that lack functional governing
institutions. In other weakest-link situations involving states unwilling to cooperate, such as that of nuclear proliferation, there is greater need for an international institution such as the UN Security Council, combined with financial transfers to secure nuclear materials. Otherwise,
pressure for unilateral action will increase.¶ In sum, international law and organizations play varying roles in the production and governance of global public goods. Table 1 summarizes the relationship of different types of global public goods with international law and organizations in a
legal pluralist world.¶ 4 The Challenge of Distributive Conflict and the Production of Global Public Goods ¶ International law, like all law, has distributive consequences, posing particular challenges for governing the production of global public goods. These distributive issues cannot be
elided, although they often are in legal scholarship. At least three distributive issues arise in decisions over the provision of global public goods: the specific terms of cooperation for producing a global public good; choices among producing different global public goods in a world of limited
resources; and the potential of actual conflict in the pursuit of different public goods which can act at cross-purposes to each other. ¶ It is striking that many of the international legal scholars who incorporate ra tional international relations theory to explain international cooperation
have drawn on the familiar Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) situation from game theory.40 The Prisoner’s Dilemma game, however, elides distributive issues. In the classic PD model, states are assumed to have a defined set of preferences and a common interest in reaching a cooperative
outcome, and the primary impediment to be overcome is the fear that other states will cheat on their agreements. In PD models, mechanisms for the monitoring of state behaviour and the sanctioning of states that violate the terms of the agreement can be created to address these
concerns. International law thus comes to the rescue to facilitate mutually beneficial outcomes. Since concerns over cheating, shirking, and slacking inhibit the production of global public goods through international cooperation, the PD model may seem appropriate. ¶ However, the
Prisoner’s Dilemma game ignores another important obstacle to successful cooperation, namely conflicts among states with different interests over the distribution of the costs and benefits of cooperation.41 When states cooperate in international politics, they do not simply choose
between ‘cooperation’ and ‘defection’, the binary choices available in PD games. They rather choose among specific terms of cooperation, which raise distributive issues.42 Different states and constituencies within them can have competing preferences for different international rules
and standards. States, and especially powerful states, thus jockey to employ different forms of international law in a world of fragmented institutions in an effort to influence the development, meaning, and impact of international law.43 ¶ Secondly, different states and private actors
benefit from the production of some global public goods more than others. Since resources are limited, they face opportunity costs when they make choices regarding the production of public goods. They must determine not only which public goods to fund, but also how much to fund
each of them.44 Distributive concerns arise in choice and budgeting decisions, given states’ and private actors’ conflicting views. ¶ Thirdly, the pursuit of different public goods can conflict in a more direct sense. One public good may interfere with the pursuit of another. For example,
choices over the generation of at least four public goods arise in the debate over the interaction of public health, pharmaceutical patent protection, human rights, and trade policy: knowledge-generation, liberalized trade, public health, and the right to life and human dignity.45
Knowledge has public-good attributes since once knowledge enters the public domain it is no longer excludable and our consumption does not diminish its availability.46 The central issue is how to generate knowledge that facilitates new inventions and understandings most effectively
and equitably. International trade law similarly has public good attributes, since all countries benefit not only from the wider variety of products made available at lower prices that trade liberalization facilitates, but also because they benefit from rules constraining mutually harmful
beggar-thy-neighbour policies.47 Public health constitutes a third implicated public good since we all benefit from the global eradication of diseases and we do not diminish that good when we benefit from it.48 The right to life and human dignity can be viewed as yet another affected
public good to the extent that it affects our moral sensibilities.49 ¶ The production of these public goods, however, can conflict, complicating global decision-making over the terms of international law. The recognition and enforcement of patent rights under the WTO Agreement on
Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs Agreement) and other conventions can generate incentives for the production of knowledge and new drugs for the protection of human life. But the protection of pharmaceutical patent rights also can diminish the benefits of
liberalized trade by reducing the consumption possibilities of citizens, interfere with the provision of public health policies in containing diseases, and raise human rights concerns, as the AIDS epidemic illustrates. Moreover, mandatory vaccination policies to protect public health raise
human rights concerns, especially from a libertarian perspective, and in particular given uncertainty regarding the consequences of vaccinations. ¶ In sum, choices over global governance policies involve different values, priorities, and perspectives, considerable uncertainty, and rival
public goods. As a result, although the definition of a single global public good is one that is non-rivalrous, global public goods are collectively rivalrous because choices must be made among them, including in funding their production. Decisions over producing global public goods thus
raise the question of alternative institutional choices in light of trade-offs.¶ 5 Alternative Institutional Choices for the Production of Global Public Goods: Global Constitutional, Administrative Law, and Legal Pluralist Approaches ¶ For the efficient production of pure private goods we rely
on (imperfect) preference revelation through the market. For the efficient production of pure public goods we rely on (imperfect) preference revelation through democratic voting. The conventional (although not sole) solution is thus to rely on the state for the production of public
goods.50 State decisions, in turn, are constrained by constitutionally provided checks and balances involving different state institutions, including democratically elected legislatures and courts which exercise judicial review of legislative and executive decisions. For the production of
global public goods, the institutional analogues are international organizations. Since centralizing decision-making within them raises serious legitimacy concerns, institutional choice poses the ultimate question for the production of global public goods. ¶ Although economists and law and
economic scholars tend to address the production of global public goods in terms of substantive effectiveness, and thus start with an assumption of what is to be measured, we first need agreement over the goal. Priorities and goals are determined through institutional processes. Where
choices among institutions affect opportunities to participate, institutional analysis is needed to focus on the relative biases of participation in alternative decision-making processes that may define priorities and goals. ¶ Problems of biased participation beset all institutional alternatives
on account of informational and resource asymmetries and divergent incentives to participate because of varying per capita stakes in outcomes. A major challenge in relying on national institutions is that they make decisions which affect outsiders who are not represented before them.
In the case of many global public goods, moreover, reliance on national decision-making raises collective action problems and free rider concerns which undercut each nation’s ability to attain its goals. International institutions can help to overcome collective action problems, as well as to
reduce bias in participation in national decision-making. However, the major challenge with international institutions is their remoteness from affected constituencies and local contexts, raising legitimacy concerns when decision-making has distributive implications. ¶ A key issue from a
public policy perspective is thus the assessment of the relative merits of institutional processes, and different combinations of them, in terms of the relatively unbiased participation of affected parties compared with other (non-idealized) institutional alternatives.51 That is, who decides
regarding the production of global public goods? Or, put differently, which institutional process, among alternative political, market, and judicial processes at the national, local, regional, and international levels, should be granted how much authority to decide on the appropriate
balancing of different goals in light of their distributive implications? These institutional choices affect how different interests, directly and indirectly, are taken into account. Such an approach is decidedly pragmatist. It recognizes that there is no single best approach to producing global
public goods, but rather alternative approaches that involve trade-offs which vary in light of particular global public goods problems, and from which we can learn through practice. ¶ In current international law scholarship, three analytic frameworks compete for addressing the
challenges of global governance, and thus implicitly of the production of global public goods: constitutionalism, global administrative law, and legal pluralism. These frameworks are sometimes put forward as alternatives that better address global governance challenges; yet, for our
purposes, they are better viewed as complements that apply differentially to the types of global public goods we have discussed. These frameworks each have attributes and deficiencies that make them more suitable frameworks for some issues compared to others. ¶ A The Global
Constitutional Approach¶ Global constitutionalism is one of legal pluralism’s chief rivals as a contemporary vision for organizing, constraining, and legitimizing international law.52 The constitutional vision of international law comes in different varieties, but, relative to the pluralist vision,
one of its major attributes is its framing international law and international institutions in constitutional terms that involves centralized international institutions,53 often involving some form of majoritarian or supra-majoritarian decision-making. The global constitutional vision is suitable,
in particular, for addressing the production of aggregate efforts global public goods. Centralized institutions operating under international law help to align national incentives and to overcome free rider problems facing the production of aggregate efforts global public goods. ¶ For

if climate change stabilization is to occur, centralized rules and institutions to oversee their
example,

application will be required, as in the case of the protection of the ozone layeroccurred successfully . Under the Montreal Protocol on Substances that
Deplete the Ozone Layer, amendments to emissions limits can be made by a two-thirds vote of the parties representing at least half of the total consumption of the parties of controlled ozone-depleting substances, if there is no consensus.54 Analogous voting arrangements will need to

For global public goods challenges that pose imminent

be developed for the international regulation of climate change mitigation that take account of those most implicated. ¶

threats, existing institutions UNwill need to be reformed , and in particular the UN Security Council, and updated. The issue of UN reform was considered in the 1990s and 2000s, but remains

Issues such as asteroid collisions and climate change

needed to reflect today’s global context.55 pose could even be considered within a reformed Security Council where they

international security risks Centralized institutions have become important for coordinating the
. and regulations

monitoring of dangerous diseases and declaring international public health emergencies , as we saw under the WHO’s 2005

¶
International Health Regulation. Centralized institutions
Finally, as we have seen, even the production of best shot global public goods raises distributive concerns that centralized governance can help to address. , operating under a constitutional

can help to keep national decision-makers accountable

frame of checks and balances, in decision-making over . We have seen these issues raised

geo-engineering and asteroid deflection for national defence. ¶ As globalization and technological advance increase the need for centralized international decision-making, a
constitutional frame will become of growing importance for critically scrutinizing and checking these institutions’ exercise of power. Nonetheless, although the global constitutional vision has certain attributes regarding the governance of centralized institutions needed to provide global
public goods, these institutions face major legitimacy challenges. The production by national institutions of public goods is beset by trade-offs, ranging from bureaucratic inefficiencies to political corruption. A vastly greater challenge at the global level is the lack of democratic processes
that reveal preferences, reflecting the lack of a global demos.56 To the extent that we rely on states to represent citizens’ interests, moreover, many states are not democratic.57 States vary considerably in terms of population, so that decision-making arguably should take into account
differences in the size of states (as opposed to generally relying on consensus voting at the international level). Since international institutions are so distant from citizens that it is difficult to conceive of democratic global institutions, we will need to re-conceive or otherwise adapt our
concept of democratic checks and balances to the international level,58 and rely on other forms of accountability mechanisms. Curiously, the existing literature on global constitutionalism has been largely silent on the issue of global public goods.59 ¶ B The Global Legal Pluralist
Approach¶ Although the concept of global public goods poses challenges for the legal pluralist vision and its focus on decentralized processes, this approach remains extremely relevant. Among legal pluralism’s virtues is that pluralism accounts better for divergences in community
values, priorities, and perspectives in light of the distributive consequences at stake in the production of global public goods. Enumerating and deliberating over these distributive issues highlights the need for pluralism to contest centralized policies. ¶ The legal pluralist vision calls to the
forefront the importance of ongoing interaction with state institutions in order for global-public-goods governance to be accountable and effective. From an accountability perspective, the pluralist approach provides a needed check on centralized decision-making at the global level, such
as for the production of aggregate efforts public goods. From the perspective of effectiveness, international law is more likely to be implemented if it engages and takes account of state perceptions and concerns through pluralist interaction. ¶ Legal pluralists focus on the potential
pathologies of centralized institutions and the role of pluralism in checking these pathologies. Krisch shows how, in our current socio-political context, the interaction of pluralist legal orders can produce superior ordering to a constitutionalism that is based on hierarchic, centralized
decision-making, since mutual accommodation that can result from pluralist interaction will be grounded in greater legitimacy.60 Krisch illustrates, for example, how the UN Security Council reassessed and revised its procedures regarding the freezing of individuals’ assets in the ‘war on
terror’ in light of due process concerns, only after states and other actors challenged and resisted implementation of its resolutions.61 ¶ Delmas-Marty demonstrates how pluralism can also lead to a unification of legal norms based on a ‘hybrid’ melding of different ‘ensembles’ of law,
rather than on hegemony.62 Such a pluralist hybrid is more legitimate, in that it takes into account, and borrows from, different national legal systems. Because it is more legitimate, it is more likely to be implemented in practice by states. ¶ Ultimately, international law depends on
national implementation. Concerns over implementation are particularly salient regarding weakest link public goods. If an infectious disease is to be eradicated, for example, then capacity must be built in a weakest link state. Otherwise, centralized decision-making will be ineffective.
Weakest link global public goods highlight the need for pluralist interaction with states having meaningful capacity to engage with policies, such as disease eradication. Take, for example, the distribution of antiretroviral drugs to combat the AIDS crisis. Their effective use for constraining
the epidemic’s ravages are enhanced where developing countries have the capacity to provide meaningful input to tailor policies and to carry out such tailored programmes effectively. ¶ C The Global Administrative Law Approach ¶ The global administrative law approach helps to address
the deficiencies of the global constitutional vision through providing other accountability mechanisms, derived from national administrative law, which can be used to check centralized international decision-making.63 As national governments grew during the twentieth century in
response to the growing complexity of national public goods challenges, legislatures delegated increasing powers to agencies. States correspondingly developed administrative law accountability mechanisms to apply to agencies, given that legislatures were unable to oversee them
sufficiently. International institutions can be viewed analogously to national government agencies, in that both involve a delegation of power to an unelected body. ¶ The accountability mechanisms highlighted by the global administrative law pro ject are pragmatically useful for
governing the production of global public goods. They include transparency and access to information; engagement with civil society and with national parliaments; monitoring, inspection, reporting, and notice and comment procedures; reason-giving requirements; substantive
standards, such as proportionality, that must be met; and judicial review.64 These accountability mechanisms can be developed through international treaties, such as under the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in
Environmental Matters,65 and through national and international judicial decisions. Decision-making within international institutions must be overseen, in particular, through private groups placing pressure on public representatives. Making international decision-making more
transparent facilitates such processes.¶ To give one example of the usefulness of the global administrative law framework in the context of global public health, the WHO is increasingly engaging in public–private partnerships for innovative drug development because of the challenges of
obtaining sufficient public financing.66 These partnerships raise conflicts-of-interest concerns that a global administrative law model can help to address through transparency and other administrative law mechanisms. ¶ The global administrative law model also offers the advantage of
being applicable to national decision-making over the production of global public goods, thus providing checks on decentralization under a legal pluralist model. As we have seen, the deployment of best shot global public goods, such as technologies for asteroid deflection and climate
engineering, may not require an international institution. Yet, the externalities involved in their deployment by states calls for accountability checks. Such national decision-making can be subject to due process requirements and to monitoring and review before international
administrative bodies and courts. The WTO Shrimp–Turtle case provides an excellent example. The US exercised unilateral action to help preserve an endangered species on the high seas (a global public good). Its efforts, however, had significant implications for developing countries and
their traders. The WTO Appellate Body successfully pressed the US to change its administrative law procedures better to assure due process review of the situations and concerns of these countries and their traders.67 ¶ Nonetheless, despite its many attributes, the global administrative
law approach is rather technocratic and thus lacks ambition regarding larger scale questions of governance requiring political decision-making for the production of global public goods. ¶ Each of these three leading analytic frameworks for assessing law’s role in global governance focuses
in a different way on the issues of accountability and legitimacy. Their relative attributes can be assessed in relation to different global public goods. For the production of aggregate efforts public goods where more centralization is needed, the legal pluralist vision is particularly
insufficient. The global constitutionalist perspective, which legal pluralists have criticized, offers a complementary frame for building and critically scrutinizing centralized international institutions to which important secondary rule-making powers are delegated in light of imminent global
public goods challenges, such as over international security and climate change. The global administrative law project has been particularly important in providing practical tools drawn from domestic administrative law for enhancing the accountability of decision-making in the production
of global public goods, whether at the international or at the national level. The case of best shot public goods, for example, illustrates concerns regarding decision-making at the national level. Finally, the challenges of weakest link public goods highlight the need for ongoing interaction
between centralized entities and nation states if international law and policy are to be implemented effectively. Each approach, in short, has attributes and deficiencies, involving trade-offs and potential complementarities. They should be viewed in comparative institutional analytic terms
in relation to different global public goods challenges. Table 2 summarizes our discussion.68¶ Although these analytic approaches are sometimes advanced as alternatives, they play important complementary roles for enhancing the legitimacy of the international institutions that we
need to produce different types of global public goods. ¶ 6 International Law as Facilitator of, and Potential Constraint on, the Production of Global Public Goods ¶ Law (in general) and international law (in particular) can be viewed as a public good in providing for order and stability.69

international law
Law (in general) and can be viewed as an intermediate public good that facilitates the
(in particular) also

production of final substantive public goods – such as the avoidance of ozone depletion, the provision
of a stable climate through mitigation and geoengineering, financial stability, and peace between
nations. International law and institutions overcome collective action and free rider problems. They
70 help to

facilitate interaction that can produce shared understandings and common purposes. And they help to

manage the frictions between pluralist legal orders that govern different public goods . In this way, international law helps to provide for

public order.¶ However, international law, in its prescriptive and proscriptive forms, can also constrain the production of global public goods. It may do so by creating positive or negative obligations that interfere with their production. Some contend, for example, that the positive
obligations under the WTO TRIPs Agreement and other international intellectual property conventions reduce the supply of knowledge and constrain the protection of public health.71 Others contend that the negative obligations provided in other WTO agreements could constrain
needed national action on climate change, such as through carbon taxes, an emissions-trading system, or a product ‘life cycle’ labelling regime.72 To the extent that decisions under the Convention on Biodiversity limit research on geoengineering, they too are suspect.73 ¶ Unilateral
action is problematic because it can be self-serving and fail to take account of the values and perspectives of affected others. Yet unilateral action may also be an important part of a broader transnational process leading to the production of a global public good over time. In a world of
interacting legal orders, certain actors will have to act, sometimes unilaterally, to catalyse international and global action. These actors most likely will exercise some form of power, such as market power wielded by the US and EU. To advance climate change policies globally, the US or EU
may need to take unilateral action by creating its own internal system and then imposing some form of a border tax adjustment or penalty applied to applicable imports and cross-border services from countries that do not have a remediation system of comparable effectiveness.74 In a
world without centralization and hierarchy, there will often be a need for unilateral action to spur the production of global public goods by inciting reactions and interactions which lead to the emergence of international law and international institutions to govern conflicts and maintain
order. In practice, unilateralism may help to produce a global public good where common action fails, especially in light of opt-in rules under international treaties. Although international law can help to produce global public goods, it also can get in the way of their production. ¶ The
possibility of unilateral action is not available to all, and the results often reflect biases. For example, John Yoo has written of global security as a public good which is not provided by global institutions in order to justify US intervention in Iraq and other unilateral policies.75 The example
of Iraq makes clear the need for some form of international constraint on unilateral action so that a nation must justify its acts and take into account their impact on others. The WTO provides such a possibility in the area of regulation. It creates constraints and has a mandatory dispute
settlement system to hear legal complaints, backed by sanctions. Its dispute settlement system can press a country to negotiate in good faith with third countries and create internal administrative law mechanisms in which non-citizens’ interests are heard. These constraints are less
binding in other areas, such as international security, as represented by the US invasion of Iraq, NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, and US missile and drone attacks in the territories of other states. ¶ In sum, international law represents an important ‘constraint on the unilateral definition of
a global public good’.76 The stringency of this constraint, however, should vary in light of the objective at stake, the effectiveness of a multilateral alternative, and the possibility that the national measure can take better account of its implications on outsiders in an unbiased manner.

Globalization pressures
There are thus compelling reasons to refocus attention from public international law to processes of transnational legal ordering in which international law is one element in a broader interactive process. ¶ 7 Conclusion¶

transform issues that formerly were national in scope into global ones. With globalization, national
decision-making increasingly has externalities on outsiders, and it is increasingly insufficient to attain
national goals. International law and institutions thus rise in importance . Choices over the terms of international law, however, have distributive consequences,
and the choice among global public goods and their funding involves rivalry. As a result, the key normative question becomes a comparative institutional one: that is, under what conditions are more or less centralization and hierarchy preferable? While the choice among alternatives may
be complicated at the national level, the choice becomes much more so at the international level where problems of numbers and complexity multiply. ¶ The global public goods framework helps us to see both the attributes and limits of a legal pluralist approach toward international law
and institutions. Legal pluralism’s starting assumption is about the need for communities to have a voice in shaping their own destinies. It thus distrusts order imposed by hierarchical, centralized institutional authority. The starting assumption for the production of many global public
goods, in contrast, is the need for collective action to cooperate for common benefits. These starting points create a tension. There are risks of too much comfort with the legal pluralist framework as an organizing concept for the production of global public goods. But there are parallel
risks with legitimizing centralized international decision-making without global democratic checks. Comparative institutional analysis is thus required which is tailored to the particular challenges raised by the production of different global public goods.

International law will play a critical role by facilitating the creation, maintenance, oversight, and
constraint of centralized international institutions, and the monitoring and review of national
institutions, in relation to decision-making implicating the production of global public goods in different contexts. Given the
varying contexts of different global public goods, there is no single best, universalist approach. Rather, a pragmatic approach is required in relation to different types of public goods and real world institutional limits. These strategies must include greater international centralization (for
which constitutional principles are needed), multi-level institutional interaction (highlighting the key role of pluralism), and hybrids that include public–private partnerships (for which administrative law principles are required).
 5
The Drug Enforcement Agency should reschedule marihuana into Schedule V of the
Controlled Substances Act and should eliminate hemp of less than 0.3% THC from the
Controlled Substances Act. The United States federal government should repeal
federal regulations preventing states from issuing immigration visas as per the 1AC
Fuller and Rust evidence.

The counterplan solves the case but avoids the disads – rescheduling is a game
changer at all levels of government
Sullum 14, Senior editor at Reason magazine (Jacob, 2/10, Why Reschedule Marijuana?,
reason.com/archives/2014/02/10/why-reschedule-marijuana)
In light of President Obama's recent observation that marijuana is safer than alcohol, CNN's Jake Tapper wondered if he was open to
reconsidering marijuana's status as a Schedule I drug. When Tapper asked him that in an interview that aired last week, Obama derailed the
conversation by denying that the executive branch has the power to reclassify marijuana. That clearly is not true, since the
CSA gives the
attorney general the authority to move drugs between schedules. The attorney general has delegated
that authority to the DEA (a division of the Justice Department), which is why that agency has been the recipient of petitions urging it
to put marijuana in a less restrictive category. Because Obama incorrectly insisted that rescheduling marijuana would require an act of
Congress, he never addressed the merits of doing it administratively. From the perspective of people who believe marijuana should be legalized
for medical or general use, the advantages of such a move are not as substantial as you might think. But neither are they, as UCLA drug policy
expert Mark Kleiman claims, "identically zero." Moving
marijuana to a less restrictive legal category would have some
significant practical effects, perhaps the most important of which would be to advance a more honest
discussion of marijuana's hazards and benefits. As Kleiman points out, removing marijuana from Schedule I
would not automatically make it legal for medical use, since any cannabis product still would have to be approved by the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA). "For a doctor to prescribe it," notes Aaron Houston, a Marijuana Majority board member and WeedMaps lobbyist,
"there would have to be an FDA-approved formulation of it." Since marijuana itself cannot be patented, a pharmaceutical company would not
have much incentive to go through the arduous, time-consuming, and expensive process required to gain FDA approval. Furthermore, drug
regulators tend to look askance at herbal medicine, preferring isolated chemicals. "They're never going to approve a whole-plant organic
product," says Dan Riffle, director of federal policies at the Marijuana Policy Project. Rick Doblin, executive director of the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies, which for years has been trying to jump through the hoops required to get marijuana approved as a
medicine, disagrees. "FDA, like most regulatory agencies, wants to expand the areas it regulates ," he says. "FDA
does want to regulate botanical drugs and would be willing to approve whole-plant organic products if
Phase 3 studies demonstrate safety and efficacy." In any case, rescheduling marijuana might make it easier to conduct
research on the plant's medical utility, which could lead to cannabis-derived medications that would
pass muster with the FDA. "The biggest obstacle, at least historically, to doing research on marijuana to prove its
medical benefit is that it's in Schedule I," Riffle says. "So you had that Catch-22, where marijuana is a Schedule I
drug because there's no evidence, and there's no evidence because marijuana is a Schedule I drug."
Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon, co-author of Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine and a leading expert on cannabis, agrees that
marijuana's Schedule I status has impeded research . "Since 1970," he says, "it has been the major reason why
the kinds of large double-blind studies which have been the basis for FDA approval of medicines since the
mid-1960s have been impossible to pursue in this country ." Dale Gieringer, who runs the California chapter of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, notes that "there are very burdensome registration requirements and
regulations regarding Schedule I substances." Although "most of them also apply to Schedule II," he says, they do not
apply to substances in Schedules III through V, which are deemed to have progressively lower potential
for abuse. There are other research obstacles , unique to marijuana. In 1999, responding to the legalization of medical
marijuana in California, the Clinton administration imposed an additional layer of review on research involving
cannabis, requiring approval by the Public Health Service as well as the FDA, the DEA, and the relevant
institutional review board. And even after they get all the other necessary approvals, researchers have
to obtain marijuana from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which has a monopoly on the legal
supply—something that is not true of other Schedule I drugs. NIDA, an agency whose mission focuses on marijuana's hazards, has not been
keen to assist research aimed at measuring its benefits. Although neither of these requirements is a necessary consequence of
marijuana's Schedule I status, they would be harder to defend if marijuana were reclassified, which would mean
acknowledging that it has medical value and can be used safely. Rescheduling marijuana would not affect the legal
status of state-licensed cannabusinesses in states such as Colorado and Washington, which would still be criminal enterprises in the eyes of the
federal government. But Gieringer notes that rescheduling
could remove one of the major financial challenges
facing state-legal marijuana suppliers: Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code prohibits the
deduction of business expenses related to "trafficking in controlled substances," but only for drugs on
Schedule I or II. If marijuana were moved to, say, Schedule III, that prohibition would no longer apply.
Schedule III, which is supposed to be for medically useful drugs that can be taken safely and have a lower abuse potential than drugs on
Schedules I and II, arguably is appropriate for marijuana because that is where the DEA put Marinol (a.k.a. dronabinol), a synthetic version of
THC, marijuana's main active ingredient. The DEA also has said naturally occurring THC used in generic versions of Marinol belongs on Schedule
III. But depending on how you define abuse potential, marijuana could go on a lower schedule. "When you look at the Schedule IV drugs," says
SUNY at Albany psychologist Mitch Earleywine, author of Understanding Marijuana, "you've got the opiate Tramadol, the stimulant Modafinil,
lethal sedatives like phenobarbital and chloral hydrate, and the 'date rape' drug rohypnol. Surely cannabis is safer than these." Grinspoon
believes "none of the schedules is truly appropriate for marijuana." But if it he had to pick, he says, "based on a realistic appraisal of the drug, I
would put it in Schedule V." That category, which includes codeine and opium preparations, is for prescription drugs with the lowest abuse
potential. Rick Doblin notes that the DEA could move cannabis to a lower schedule only if it changed its definition of "currently accepted
medical use," which demands the sort of large-scale, multi-site, double-blind studies that the FDA requires to approve a new drug. "Assuming
that marijuana has been approved as a prescription medicine by the FDA," Doblin says, "Schedule II seems too high, since Marinol is in Schedule
III. Due to its actual abuse potential, marijuana for medical use should be in Schedule V." Alex Kreit, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of
Law in San Diego who studies drug policy, notes that the
CSA leaves undefined phrases on which scheduling hinges.
The DEA therefore "has enjoyed incredibly broad discretion to interpret and define 'potential for abuse' and
other scheduling criteria," Kreit writes on the Marijuana Law, Policy & Reform blog. Just as it could adopt a less demanding definition of
"accepted medical use," the DEA could take a narrower view of "abuse," which it equates with any nonmedical use. By that standard,
marijuana, by far the most popular illegal drug, does indeed have a high potential for abuse. But that judgment seems peculiar if abuse is
defined as problematic use, in which case potential for abuse might be measured by the percentage of users who become addicted or suffer
serious harm. In truth, as Lester Grinspoon observes, marijuana does not fit any of the schedules very well. It is not the sort of medicine the
FDA is used to approving. But it clearly can be used safely, as Obama conceded when he noted that it is less dangerous than alcohol. Back in
1988, when he urged the DEA to reschedule marijuana, Administrative Law Judge Francis Young called it "one of the safest therapeutically
active substances known to man." And while marijuana surely can be abused (what can't?), its potential for abuse seems lower than that of
many pharmaceuticals, not to mention alcohol and tobacco, which the CSA specifically excludes from its schedules. In light of these
inconsistencies, could the DEA take marijuana off of the CSA's schedules altogether? Probably not. "I think it is very unlikely that the attorney
general could remove marijuana from the schedules entirely," Kreit says. Although the
CSA gives the attorney general the power to "remove
a drug or other substance entirely from the schedules," it also says
that "if control is required by United States obligations
under international treaties, conventions, or protocols in effect on October 27, 1970, the Attorney General shall issue an
order controlling such drug under the schedule he deems most appropriate." Since the 1961 Single Convention on
Narcotic Drugs requires its signatories (which include the United States) to criminalize production, possession, and distribution of cannabis for
nonmedical purposes, this reference to treaty
obligations seems to bar the DEA from descheduling, as opposed to
rescheduling, marijuana. Cannabis "requires a lot of control" under the Single Convention, notes Eric Sterling, president of the
Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, who helped write federal drug legislation in the 1980s as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.
"Cannabis is supposed to be controlled like opium and opiates." Then again, Kreit notes, other CSA provisions "seem to contemplate situations
where the U.S. does not accept international scheduling determinations." Riffle, who is also a lawyer, sums it up this way: "I could make some
arguments in a court that [the reference to drug treaties] doesn't bind the executive, but I'd probably lose." The consequences of
administratively descheduling marijuana are difficult to tease out, given that some provisions of federal law refer to marijuana specifically,
while others talk about "controlled substances" or drugs on certain schedules. Aaron Houston notes one salutary result of descheduling
marijuana: Its consumers would no longer be barred from owning firearms under the Gun Control Act of 1968, which purports to carve out an
exception to the Second Amendment for "unlawful user[s] of…any controlled substance." Even if the CSA permitted the Obama administration
to deschedule marijuana, such a step would be politically inconceivable. But even
moving marijuana down one level, from
Schedule I to Schedule II, could have an important impact on the drug policy debate. For one thing, it would
free the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), which is required by law to oppose the
legalization of any Schedule I substance, to talk about the hazards of marijuana a little more honestly.
Such freedom is desperately needed, to judge by the effort required to extract the concession that marijuana is safer than alcohol
from ONDCP Deputy Director Michael Botticelli at a congressional hearing this week. "You have Obama saying that marijuana is less harmful
than alcohol, that it's important for Colorado and Washington to move forward," says Riffle, "but nonetheless you have the ONDCP saying, 'We
remain steadfastly opposed to legalization.' If
it weren't a Schedule I drug, they wouldn't have to say that. The ONDCP would
be free to take a new position on legalization or put out more honest statements about the harms
associated with marijuana." Rescheduling marijuana also might affect the level of cannabis candor at the
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is barred from using any of its funds to promote
the legalization of Schedule I substances. Riffle thinks lifting that restriction might even make NIDA,
which is part of HHS, more willing to let researchers use its marijuana . Beyond such statutory implications,
acknowledging that marijuana is more beneficial and less hazardous than the government has been
saying all these years is apt to influence the conversation about how to handle this much-maligned
plant. When the president conceded , in an interview with The New Yorker, that alcohol is more dangerous than
marijuana, it set off weeks of high-profile discussion about whether pot prohibition is sensible or fair. If
he followed up on that observation by asking whether marijuana meets the criteria for Schedule I, it
would call further attention to the arbitrary distinctions drawn by our drug laws. The resulting
discussion could help pave the way for more ambitious moves, such as legislation lifting the federal
ban on marijuana in the 20 states that have legalized it for medical or recreational use. Bill Piper, director of national affairs at the Drug
Policy Alliance, says rescheduling is not his top priority, but it would be "a significant victory for commonsense drug
policy," because it "would acknowledge the weight of scientific evidence and popular support for medical
marijuana, and it could boost state legislative efforts." Sterling thinks that acknowledgment could help people
who get into legal trouble for growing medical marijuana. "Moving marijuana to any other schedule would
be a recognition by the government that it has medical value ," he says, which "makes a difference in terms
of what can be said to a jury." Gieringer agrees. "Rescheduling would send a powerful message around the
U.S. that marijuana does have medical uses," he says, "even in states like Alabama that don't allow it . This would help put to
rest the common argument of cops and DAs that marijuana isn't medicine." Regardless of the practical consequences, there is something to be
said for telling the truth. "When Obama took office," Riffle notes, "he said that decisions in his administration would be guided by science, not
by politics and ideology. It's very clear that marijuana's continued classification as a Schedule I drug violates that mandate." Since
Congress banned marijuana in 1937, says Houston, "we have seen extremely cynical efforts to overblow the
danger of marijuana and to demonize it. A move to reschedule or unschedule would be the first time since 1937 that
our government started to roll back some of that reefer madness."
 Industry

Legalization causes cartels to compete over new revenue streams – increases violence
Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow with the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in the
Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She is an expert on international and internal conflicts and
nontraditional security threats, including insurgency, organized crime, urban violence and illicit
economies, “Law Enforcement Actions in Urban Spaces Governed by Violent Non-State Entities: Lessons
from Latin America,” September ‘11
Often, criminal groups function as security providers (suboptimal as they are), regulating and punishing theft,
robberies, extortions, rapes and murders and dispensing their rules and punishments for transgressions.
The removal of the criminal gangs often results in a rise of street crime that can become a critical nuisance to
the community and discredit the presence of the State and its law enforcement. That has in fact been the case in
both Medellín in the post-Don Berna order as well as in the pacified favelas of Rio.14 Especially in areas where
police have been trained as light counterinsurgency forces (in Latin America, unlike South Asia, this is more often a
problem in rural areas rather than in urban spaces) they may be undertrained, under-resourced, and not focused on
addressing street crime. Even community-policing forces may have little capacity to undertake criminal
investigations that lead to meaningful prosecution , yet police units specialized in criminal investigations may continue to be
too far away and have limited access to a pacified urban space to conduct investigations that reduce street crime. Providing training to
community police forces for tackling at least some street crime and streamlining and facilitating the presence of specialized criminal
investigation units, such as homicide squads and prosecutors, are of critical importance for improving public safety for the community and for
anchoring State presence in the pacified areas. Under some circumstances, law enforcement actions against the governing
criminal entity may give rise to intense turf warfare among other criminal groups over the spoils of the
criminal market. After Don Berna was extradited to the United States, for example, many criminal gangs in and
around Medellín, including two large ones led by Sebastian and Valenciano, began fighting each other over smuggling
routes, local drug distribution, prostitution enterprises, and protection rackets. The turf war triggered
extensive violence, including homicide rates in over 100per 100,000 in the late 2000s and on par with those before the
FARC was defeated in the city, and Don Berna established his “narco-peace”.15 Similarly in Mexico, law enforcement
actions against established DTOs triggered intense violence among splinter groups and new gangs, such as
in the Mexican state of Michoacán where interdiction operations against La Familia Michoacana have given rise to Los Templarios. That
criminal gang has since been battling with Los Zetas, another of Mexican DTOs originating as splinter
group, over control of criminal markets in the state . Such turf wars can compromise the physical and
economic security of local communities far more than even the previous criminal order. In some circumstances,
an urban area to which State presence has been extended may even suffer a peace deficit. Along with or
instead of the hoped-for peace dividend of legal businesses moving into the urban space and providing legal jobs and income, the new
areas may be attractive as a source of new land to be taken over by nefarious land developers . Such
demands for land in the newly “pacified” urban areas may generate new forced land displacement, instead of
benevolent gentrification. In rural spaces, the cause of such new illegal displacement may be the presence of
profitable resources, such as gold, coal, and others, or the agricultural potential of the land, such as for African oil palm
plantations. In urban spaces, housing development and real estate speculation may well drive such illegal
displacement. Competition over State resources inserted to “pacified” areas, such as for socio-economic
development, may generate new temptations of illegal behavior. Militias or new criminal groups seeking
to set up new protection rackets and usurp the inserted State resources may well emerge . Many urban spaces
in Colombia suffer from such old-new criminality today, as they have historically. Local community forces, even while effective at
keeping the old criminals out, may not have the capacity to prevent such nefarious activities cloaked as legal
development. At the same time, criminal units specializing in white-collar organized crime and asset
expropriation are often located in the city center of a State capital far away from the “pacified” slums and may
be paying little attention to such phenomena in the newly-liberated spaces. Moreover, since such land takeover and asset
expropriation may well be linked to legal and politically-powerful developers , municipal authorities may
lack the motivation to pay close attention to such criminal developments in the “pacified” urban areas. Yet
without diligent and concerted law enforcement actions against such new crime , the benefits of the
complex and costly State interventions in the marginalized urban areas may be altogether lost. Instead of
addressing the causes of illegal economies and violent organized crime by strengthening effective and accountable
State presence, the State intervention may ultimately only alter the manifestation of illegality and displace
existing problems to other areas. Not only criminality and criminal gangs, but also the marginalized residents of the urban
shantytowns themselves may merely be forced out to other slums.

Can’t steal, build, or buy a bomb- experts agree

Peter Bergen- fellow @ the New America Foundation and NYU’s Center on Law and Security- Sept
2010, Reevaluating Al-Qa`ida’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Capabilities, Combating Terrorism Center
@ West Point, CTC Sentinel, Vol 3 Issue 9, http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Digital-
Library/Publications/Detail/?ots591=0c54e3b3-1e9c-be1e-2c24-a6a8c7060233&lng=en&id=122242
Bin Ladin’s and al-Zawahiri’s portrayal of al-Qa`ida’s nuclear and chemical weapons capabilities in their post-9/11 statements to Hamid Mir was
not based in any reality, and it was instead meant to serve as psychological warfare against the West. There
is no evidence that
al-Qa`ida’s quest for nuclear weapons ever went beyond the talking stage. Moreover, al-Zawahiri’s
comment about “missing” Russian nuclear suitcase bombs floating around for sale on the black
market is a Hollywood construct that is greeted with great skepticism by nuclear proliferation
experts. This article reviews al-Qa`ida’s WMD efforts, and then explains why it is unlikely the group will ever acquire a
nuclear weapon. Al-Qa`ida’s WMD Efforts In 2002, former UN weapons inspector David Albright examined
all the available evidence about al-Qa`ida’s nuclear weapons research program and concluded
that it was virtually impossible for al-Qa`ida to have acquired any type of nuclear weapon.8 U.S.
government analysts reached the same conclusion in 2002.9 There is evidence, however, that al-Qa`ida experimented
with crude chemical weapons, explored the use of biological weapons such as botulinum, salmonella and anthrax, and also made multiple
attempts to acquire radioactive materials suitable for a dirty bomb.10 After the group moved from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, al-Qa`ida
members escalated their chemical and biological weapons program, innocuously code-naming it the “Yogurt Project,” but only earmarking a
meager $2,000-4,000 for its budget.11 An al-Qa`ida videotape from this period, for example, shows a small white dog tied up inside a glass cage
as a milky gas slowly filters in. An Arabic-speaking man with an Egyptian accent says: “Start counting the time.” Nervous, the dog barks and then
moans. After struggling and flailing for a few minutes, it succumbs to the poisonous gas and stops moving. This experiment almost certainly
occurred at the Darunta training camp near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, conducted by the Egyptian Abu Khabab.12 Not
only has
al-Qa`ida’s research into WMD been strictly an amateur affair, but plots to use these types of
weapons have been ineffective. One example is the 2003 “ricin” case in the United Kingdom. It was widely advertised as a
serious WMD plot, yet the subsequent investigation showed otherwise. The case appeared in the months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq,
when media in the United States and the United Kingdom were awash in stories about a group of men arrested in London who possessed highly
toxic ricin to be used in future terrorist attacks. Two years later, however, at the trial of the men accused of the ricin plot, a government
scientist testified that the men never had ricin in their possession, a charge that had been first triggered by a false positive on a test. The men
were cleared of the poison conspiracy except for an Algerian named Kamal Bourgass, who was convicted of conspiring to commit a public
nuisance by using poisons or explosives.13 It is still not clear whether al-Qa`ida had any connection to the plot.14 In fact, the
only post-
9/11 cases where al-Qa`ida or any of its affiliates actually used a type of WMD was in Iraq,
where al-Qa`ida’s Iraqi affiliate, al-Qa`ida in Iraq (AQI), laced more than a dozen of its bombs with the chemical chlorine in
2007. Those attacks sickened hundreds of Iraqis, but the victims who died in these assaults did so largely from the blast of the bombs, not
because of inhaling chlorine. AQI stopped using chlorine in its bombs in Iraq in mid-2007, partly because
the insurgents never understood how to make the chlorine attacks especially deadly and also because
the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. military hunted down the bomb makers responsible for the campaign, while simultaneously clamping
down on the availability of chlorine.15 Indeed, a survey of the 172 individuals indicted or convicted in Islamist terrorism cases in the United
States since 9/11 compiled by the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and the New America Foundation found that none of the cases
involved the use of WMD of any kind. In the one case where a radiological plot was initially alleged—that of the Hispanic-American al-Qa`ida
recruit Jose Padilla—that allegation was dropped when the case went to trial.16 Unlikely Al-Qa`ida Will Acquire a Nuclear Weapon Despite the
difficulties associated with terrorist groups acquiring or deploying WMD and al-Qa`ida’s poor record in the matter, there was a great deal of
hysterical discussion about this issue after 9/11. Clouding the discussion was the semantic problem of the ominous term “weapons of mass
destruction,” which is really a misnomer as it suggests that chemical, biological, and nuclear devices are all equally lethal. In fact, there is only
one realistic weapon of mass destruction that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people in a single attack: a nuclear bomb.17 The
congressionally authorized Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism issued a report in 2008
that typified the muddled thinking about WMD when it concluded: “It is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in
a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.”18 The report’s conclusion that WMD terrorism was likely to happen somewhere
in the world in the next five years was simultaneously true but also somewhat trivial because terrorist groups and cults have already engaged in
crude chemical and biological weapons attacks.19 Yet the prospects of al-Qa`ida or indeed any other group having access to a true WMD—a
If any organization should have developed a serious WMD
nuclear device—is near zero for the foreseeable future.
capability it was the bizarre Japanese terrorist cult Aum Shinrikyo, which not only recruited 300
scientists—including chemists and molecular biologists—but also had hundreds of millions of
dollars at its disposal.20 Aum embarked on a large-scale WMD research program in the early 1990s because members of the cult
believed that Armageddon was fast-approaching and that they would need powerful weapons to survive. Aum acolytes experimented with
anthrax and botulinum toxin and even hoped to mine uranium in Australia. Aum researchers also hacked into classified networks to find
information about nuclear facilities in Russia, South Korea and Taiwan.21 Sensing an opportunity following the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Aum recruited thousands of followers in Russia and sent multiple delegations to meet with leading Russian politicians and scientists in the early
1990s. The cult even tried to recruit staff from inside the Kurchatov Institute, a leading nuclear research center in Moscow. One of Aum’s
leaders, Hayakawa Kiyohide, made eight trips to Russia in 1994, and in his diary he made a notation that Aum was willing to pay up to $15
million for a nuclear device.22 Despite its open checkbook, Aum was never able to acquire nuclear material or technology from Russia even in
the chaotic circumstances following the implosion of the communist regime.23 In the end, Aum
abandoned its investigations
of nuclear and biological weapons after finding them too difficult to acquire and settled instead on a
chemical weapons operation, which climaxed in the group releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995. It is hard to imagine an environment
better suited to killing large numbers of people than the Tokyo subway, yet only a dozen died in the attack.24 Although Aum’s WMD
program was much further advanced than anything al-Qa`ida developed , even they could not acquire a true
WMD. It is also worth recalling that Iran, which has had an aggressive and well-funded nuclear
program for almost two decades, is still some way from developing a functioning nuclear bomb.
Terrorist groups simply do not have the resources of states. Even with access to nuclear technology, it is next
to impossible for terrorist groups to acquire sufficient amounts of highly enriched uranium (HEU) to
make a nuclear bomb. The total of all the known thefts of HEU around the world tracked by the
International Atomic Energy Agency between 1993 and 2006 was just less than eight kilograms, well
short of the 25 kilograms needed for the simplest bomb;25 moreover, none of the HEU thieves
during this period were linked to al-Qa`ida. Therefore, even building, let alone detonating, the simple, gun-type nuclear
device of the kind that was dropped on Hiroshima during World War II would be extraordinarily difficult for a terrorist group because of the
problem of accumulating sufficient quantities of HEU. Building a radiological device, or “dirty bomb,” is far more plausible for a terrorist group
because acquiring radioactive materials suitable for such a weapon is not as difficult, while the construction of such a device is orders of
magnitude less complex than building a nuclear bomb. Detonating a radiological device, however, would likely result in a relatively small
number of casualties and should not be considered a true WMD. There is also the concern that a state may covertly provide a nuclear device to
a terrorist group. This was one of the underlying rationales to topple Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq in 2003. Yet
governments
are not willing to give their “crown jewels” to organizations that they do not control, and giving
a terrorist group a nuclear weapon would expose the state sponsor to large-scale retaliation.26
The United States destroyed Saddam’s regime on the mere suspicion that he might have an active nuclear weapons program and that he might
give some kind of WMD capacity to terrorists. Also, nuclear
states are well-aware that their nuclear devices leave
distinctive signatures after they are detonated, which means that even in the unlikely event that a government gave a
nuclear weapon to terrorists, their role in the plot would likely be discovered.27 Just as states will not give nuclear weapons to terrorists, they
are unlikely to sell them either. This leaves the option of stealing one, but nuclear-armed states, including Pakistan, are
quite careful about the security measures they place around the most strategic components of
their arsenals. After 9/11, the United States gave Pakistan approximately $100 million in aid to help secure its nuclear weapons.28 The
U.S. Department of Defense has assessed that “Islamabad’s nuclear weapons are probably stored in component form,”29
meaning that the weapons are stored unassembled with the fissile core separated from the non-nuclear
explosive.30 Such disassembling is just one layer of protection against potential theft by jihadists.31 A further layer of protection is
Permissive Action Links (PAL), essentially electronic locks and keys designed to prevent unauthorized access to nuclear weapons; Pakistan
asserts that it has the “functional equivalent” of these.32 As a result of these measures, Michael Maples, the head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence
Agency at the time, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2009 that “Pakistan has taken important steps to safeguard its nuclear
weapons.”33

Weapons aren’t on hair-trigger- multiple checks on use

Slocombe, Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, ‘9 (Walter, June 21-23, “De-Alerting:
Diagnoses, Prescriptions, and Side-Effects” Re-framing De-Alert: Decreasing the Operational Readiness
of Nuclear Weapons Systems in the U.S.-Russia Context,
http://www.ewi.info/system/files/Slocombe.pdf)
Whatever other problems the current nuclear posture of the US nuclear force may present, it cannot reasonably be said
to be on a “hair trigger.” Since the 1960s the US has taken a series of measures to insure that US
nuclear weapons cannot be detonated without the receipt of both external information and
properly authenticated authorization to use that information. These devices – generically Permissive
Action Links or “PALs” – are in effect combination locks that keep the weapons locked and
incapable of detonation unless and until the weapons’ firing mechanisms have been unlocked
following receipt of a series of numbers communicated to the operators from higher authority.
Equally important in the context of a military organization, launch of nuclear weapons (including insertion of the
combinations) is permitted only where properly authorized by an authenticated order. This
combination of reliance on discipline and procedure and on receipt of an unlocking code not
held by the military personnel in charge of the launch operation is designed to insure that the
system is “fail safe,” i.e., that whatever mistakes occur, the result will not be a nuclear explosion .
 Waste
Squo solves
Tlustos et al 6 - Czech University of Agriculture in Prague [P., J. Száková, J. Hrubý, I. Hartman,
J. Najmanová, J. Nedělník, D. Pavlíková1, M. Batysta, “Removal of As, Cd, Pb, and Zn from contaminated
soil by high biomass producing plants” PLANT SOIL ENVIRON., 52, 2006 (9): 413–423,
http://www.agriculturejournals.cz/publicFiles/50753.pdf]
Phytoremediation, the use of plants to remedy contaminated soils, is an emerging technology requiring
a greater understanding of the underlying mechanisms for its optimization (McGrath and Zhao 2003).
Number of plant species was already tested because of their ability to accumulate potentially toxic
elements to high extent in the above ground biomass. Recently, two strategies have been tested within
the phytoremediation technologies. The application of hyper accumulating plants (such as Thlaspi
caerulescens or Alyssum bertolonii) producing a relatively low amount of aboveground biomass but
accumulating high amounts of one or more elements in this biomass represents the first approach. The
alternative approach comprises an application of high biomass producing plants characterized by lower
ability to accumulate risk elements where total uptake of elements is comparable to hyper accumulating
plants due to high yield of aboveground biomass. In this context, zinc accumulating Brassica spp. seems
to be more effective for removing this element from the polluted soil compared to zinc hyper
accumulator Thlaspi caerulescens producing one order lower amount of shoot biomass (Ebbs et al.
1997). The plant species tolerant to high element contents in soil followed by an intensive uptake of
these elements belong in most cases into families Caryophyllaceae, Brassicaceae, Cyperaceae, Poaceae,
Fabaceae, and Chenopodiaceae (Kabata-Pendias and Pendias 2001). Also EPA recommendations (EPA
2000) include metal accumulator plants such as maize (Zea mays), sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), and
lucerne (Medicago sativa) among plants able to remove a greater mass of metals but more research is
necessary to verify it. The present results suggest that fast-growing trees and especially willows have a
very promising potential for phytoremediation use because of their large biomass and good ability to
accumulate risk elements, especially cadmium and zinc (Pulford and Watson 2002). Among herbaceous
species, tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) accumulating predominantly Cd and Cu, and maize (Zea mays L.)
are discussed as effective plants because of high production of aboveground biomass with a relatively
high content of elements. Comparing to N. tabacum, Z. mays is able to remove more Zn (Wenger et al.
2002). For phytoextraction purpose, however, the effectiveness of maize still seems to be insufficient
(Keller et al. 2003, Schmidt 2003). Cadmium and lead are retained predominantly in roots of maize
demonstrating limited mobil¬ity of elements within plant (Bricker et al. 2001). Relatively high contents
of Pb in aboveground biomass showed Indian mustard [Brassica juncea (L.) Czern.], rye grass (Lolium
perene L.), sunflower (Helianthus anuus L.) or smallwing sedge (Carex microptera Mack.) (Klassen et al.
2000). Moreover, sunflower demonstrated a good ability for phytoextraction of copper. Relatively high
contents of As and Zn were determined in biomass of amaranth (Amaranthus hybridus L.) accumulating
the elements in order leaves > stems > roots; this plant however seems to be insufficient and
questionable for practical use for phytoreme¬diation as well (Jonnalagadda and Nenzou 1997).
 States

No impact to science diplomacy

Dickson 9 [David, Direction Science & Development Network. June 2, 2009, “Science diplomacy: the case for caution”,
http://scidevnet.wordpress.com/category/new- frontiers-in-science-diplomacy-2009, SM]

One of the frustrations of meetings at which scientists gather to discuss policy-related issues is the speed with
which the requirements for evidence-based discussion they would expect in a professional context
can go out of the window. Such has been the issue over the past two days in the meeting jointly organised in London by the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Royal Society on the topic “New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy“. There
has been much lively discussion on the value of international collaboration in achieving scientific goals,
on the need for researchers to work together on the scientific aspects of global challenges such as
climate change and food security, and on the importance of science capacity building in developing countries in order to make this
possible. But there remained little evidence at the end of the meeting on how useful it was to lump all
these activities together under the umbrella term of “science diplomacy ”. More significantly, although
numerous claims were made during the conference about the broader social and political value of
scientific collaboration – for example, in establishing a framework for collaboration in other areas, and in
particular reducing tensions between rival countries – little was produced to demonstrate whether this
hypothesis is true. If it is not, then some of the arguments made on behalf of “science diplomacy” , and
in particular its value as a mechanism for exercising “soft power” in foreign policy, do not stand up to
close scrutiny. Indeed, a case can be made that where scientific projects have successfully involved
substantial international collaboration, such success is often heavily dependent on a prior political
commitment to cooperation, rather than a mechanism for securing cooperation where the political
will is lacking. Three messages appeared to emerge from the two days of discussion. Firstly, where the political will to
collaborate does exist, a joint scientific project can be a useful expression of that will. Furthermore, it can be an
enlightening experience for all those directly involved. But it is seldom a magic wand that can secure broader
cooperation where none existed before. Secondly, “science diplomacy” will only become recognised as a useful activity if it is
closely defined to cover specific situations (such as the negotiation of major international scientific projects or collaborative research
enterprises). As an umbrella term embracing the many ways in which science interacts with foreign policy, it loses much of its impact, and thus
its value. Finally, when
it comes to promoting the use of science in developing countries , a terminology based
historically on maximising self-interest – the
ultimate goal of the diplomat – and on practices through which the
rich have almost invariably ended up exploiting the poor, is likely to be counterproductive . In other words,
the discussion seemed to confirm that “science diplomacy” has a legitimate place in the formulation and
implementation of policies for science (just as there is a time and place for exercising “soft power” in international relations).
But the dangers of going beyond this – including the danger of distorting the integrity of science itself,
and even alienating potential partners in collaborative projects , particularly in the developing world – were also
clearly exposed.

Won’t cause extinction

Shapiro et al 2009 -- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Chair (Irwin, “Near-Earth Object
Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies.” National Academies of Sciences, report,
http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/pages/images/stories/Prepublication_NEOInterimReport_for_0812.
pdf) CMR
The uncertainties in the damaging effects of asteroids increase as the size of the asteroid increases. A 1-
kilometer-diameter asteroid is generally accepted as the lower boundary for an impactor with global consequences—asteroids below
this size probably will not have globally catastrophic effects, although most estimates place the boundary for catastrophic effects starting at
around 1.5 to 2 kilometers. Such an asteroid would be expected to produce a continent-sized fireball and form a crater
approximately fifteen times the diameter of the asteroid , similar in size to many craters known from the geologic record; it
could instead produce a devastating tsunami if it hit in an ocean. On average, such craters form at about 1-million-year intervals, but there is
no known association between impact craters of this size and biologic extinctions . However, modern human
civilization, with its strong dependence on agricultural crops and intricate distribution networks, is presumably much more fragile than the
mere survival of humans or other animals as a species. We would thus want to avoid any impact that caused
a large fraction of
surviving humans to die of starvation, even though humans as a species would endure.
2NC
 Rescheduling CP
The counterplan doesn’t link – international law allows rescheduling
Nelson 14, Reporter at U.S. News & World Report (Steven, 1/31, Obama Confused About Power to
Reschedule Pot, Advocates Say, www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/01/31/obama-confused-about-
power-to-reschedule-pot-advocates-say)
The 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which created five tiers of restricted drugs, says the attorney general may "remove any drug or other
substance from the schedules if he finds that the drug or other substance does not meet the requirements for inclusion in any schedule." If
a
substance is banned by international treaties – as marijuana is – the law grants the attorney general the
power to place it "under the schedule he deems most appropriate." Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., tells U.S. News it's
"very clear" that the law "actually permits reclassification administratively ." I don't dispute that Congress could and
should make the change, but it's also something the administration could do in a matter of days and I hope they will consider it," says
Blumenauer, who is currently circulating a letter among colleagues asking Obama to do so. Eight members of Congress have signed the letter so
far.

The counterplan solves the cannabis industry

MBD 13, Marijuana Business Daily (6/23, FDA Considers Rescheduling Marijuana Off Schedule 1 List,
mmjbusinessdaily.com/fda-considering-looser-restrictions-for-marijuana/)
The study could lead to marijuana being removed from the Schedule 1 category of the Controlled
Substances Act. A reclassification would have a sweeping impact on the U.S. cannabis industry. It could
eliminate the industry’s problems with banks and allow more states to legalize the plant. It could also
open the door for major corporations to enter the industry.

The aff causes legalization too fast – collapses marijuana industries – the counterplans
gradual approach solves best
Copeland 13, Civil Rights Analyst (Tripp, 1/10, Is Marijuana Legalization the Next Bubble Industry?,
mic.com/articles/22612/is-marijuana-legalization-the-next-bubble-industry)
According to Minsky, there are five elements to any bubble scenario . First, in the displacement stage, a new entity piques
investor interest. Second, the boom stage ensues as prices and participants begin to rise. The third characteristic is euphoria where investors
create justifications for increasingly higher market prices. Forth, the participants see a profit taking opportunity and money begins to leave the
market. And last, the panic sets in when prices fall dramatically and investors sell out to protect against
financial ruin. I believe the emerging pot industry is protected against this phenomenon — for now. The
most important factor protecting the marijuana industry from economic bubble status is a conflict of
laws. Conflict between federal prohibition and state legalization measures will allow the industry to
grow at a reasonable pace, as large scale financial and insurance institutions will hesitate to support
investors in a federally prohibited industry . Although the marijuana industry is not lacking financial resources due to private and
venture capital money, creating a economic bust similar to the dotcom or housing market will require a much
larger influx of financial resources and participants. Without legalization on a federal level, that influx is
unlikely. Legal conflicts impose a scaling problem on the industry, limiting its growth. However, in the
long run, those limitations may be exactly what create a lasting dynamic . Additionally, the incremental
implementation via a state-by-state federalism approach will allow the industry to learn from mistakes and
determine best practices. Moreover, state governments will be able to study different implementation methods, as they already differ
on how to regulate a nascent marijuana industry. Federalism also has the benefit of limiting federal policy intervention. Although the federal
government has not yet determined how to proceed, it seems likely they will leave this issue to the states. And by limiting the invasion of
federal policy through true federalism, there is less of a chance for broad, top-down policies to facilitate a bubble environment.
Rescheduling has important material and symbolic effects that create Federal support
for marijuana
Gettman 12, Director of Communications at NORML - PHD Public Policy at George Mason
(Rescheduling Marijuana, www.hightimes.com/read/rescheduling-marijuana)
Rescheduling marijuana is a complex subject with a long history and profound relevance to the medical use of marijuana in the United States.
Despite the technical complexity of this issue, its relevance is fairly straightforward. Rescheduling
has both practical and
instructive significance with respect to federal policy and law regarding marijuana . First, scheduling
under the CSA determines specific regulatory requirements regarding the manufacture and distribution
of listed substances for both research and commercial purposes. Rescheduling marijuana would move it
from the most restrictive schedule under law to a less restrictive schedule, which would expedite
additional research and make it easier for states that have authorized medical marijuana use to comply
with federal law. Second, rescheduling would acknowledge the scientific accomplishments that have
taken place since marijuana was originally scheduled in 1970 and make marijuana’s legal status under federal law consistent
with contemporary scientific knowledge about the drug. This would require the federal government to acknowledge
that marijuana is not similar, scientifically, to drugs like heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine in terms of safety,
abuse potential, and dependence liability. Most important, rescheduling requires the federal government to
recognize that marijuana has an accepted medical use in the United States.

Rescheduling removes barriers to effective marijuana research

Guardian 14 (4/20, It's Time To Legalize Marijuana On The Federal Level Read more:
http://www.businessinsider.com/its-time-to-legalize-marijuana-on-the-federal-level-2014-
4#ixzz3Gv1z9edN, www.businessinsider.com/its-time-to-legalize-marijuana-on-the-federal-level-2014-4)
We could start by rescheduling marijuana (cannabis) at the federal level. This would at least make the dialogue around
the substance more in keeping with science – particularly when it comes to the abuse potential of cannabis,
which is simply not equivalent to heroin. Rescheduling it will not make cannabis a medicine dispensed at pharmacies – and various
marijuana-based concoctions would still require FDA approval – but it would acknowledge the plant’s therapeutic uses. And
barriers to research would be removed because Schedule I substances are the most difficult to access
for study.
The counterplan is key to marijuana research
Sullum 14, Senior editor at Reason magazine (Jacob, 2/10, Why Reschedule Marijuana?,
reason.com/archives/2014/02/10/why-reschedule-marijuana)
In any case, rescheduling marijuana might make it easier to conduct research on the plant ’s medical
utility, which could lead to cannabis-derived medications that would pass muster with the FDA. “The
biggest obstacle, at least historically, to doing research on marijuana to prove its medical benefit is that
it’s in Schedule I,” Riffle says. “So you had that Catch-22, where marijuana is a Schedule I drug because
there’s no evidence, and there’s no evidence because marijuana is a Schedule I drug.” Harvard
psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon, co-author of Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine and a leading expert on
cannabis, agrees that marijuana’s Schedule I status has impeded research . “Since 1970,” he says, “it has
been the major reason why the kinds of large double-blind studie s which have been the basis for FDA
approval of medicines since the mid-1960s have been impossible to pursue in this country.” Dale
Gieringer, who runs the California chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws, notes that “there are very burdensome registration requirements and regulations regarding
Schedule I substances.” Although “most of them also apply to Schedule II,” he says, they do not apply to
substances in Schedules III through V, which are deemed to have progressively lower potential for
abuse. There are other research obstacles, unique to marijuana . In 1999, responding to the legalization of medical
marijuana in California, the Clinton administration imposed an additional layer of review on research involving cannabis, requiring
approval by the Public Health Service as well as the FDA, the DEA, and the relevant institutional review
board. And even after they get all the other necessary approvals, researchers have to obtain marijuana from the National
Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which has a monopoly on the legal supply—something that is not true of other Schedule I drugs. NIDA, an
agency whose mission focuses on marijuana's hazards, has not been keen to assist research aimed at measuring its benefits.
Although neither of these requirements is a necessary consequence of marijuana's Schedule I status, they would be harder to
defend if marijuana were reclassified, which would mean acknowledging that it has medical value and
can be used safely. Rescheduling marijuana would not affect the legal status of state-licensed cannabusinesses in states such as
Colorado and Washington, which would still be criminal enterprises in the eyes of the federal government. But Gieringer notes that
rescheduling could remove one of the major financial challenges facing state-legal marijuana suppliers: Section 280E of the Internal Revenue
Code prohibits the deduction of business expenses related to "trafficking in controlled substances," but only for drugs on Schedule I or II. If
marijuana were moved to, say, Schedule III, that prohibition would no longer apply. Schedule III, which is supposed to be for medically useful
drugs that can be taken safely and have a lower abuse potential than drugs on Schedules I and II, arguably is appropriate for marijuana because
that is where the DEA put Marinol (a.k.a. dronabinol), a synthetic version of THC, marijuana's main active ingredient. The DEA also has said
naturally occurring THC used in generic versions of Marinol belongs on Schedule III. But depending on how you define abuse potential,
marijuana could go on a lower schedule. "When you look at the Schedule IV drugs," says SUNY at Albany psychologist Mitch Earleywine, author
of Understanding Marijuana, "you've got the opiate Tramadol, the stimulant Modafinil, lethal sedatives like phenobarbital and chloral hydrate,
and the 'date rape' drug rohypnol. Surely cannabis is safer than these." Grinspoon believes "none of the schedules is truly appropriate for
marijuana." But if it he had to pick, he says, "based on a realistic appraisal of the drug, I would put it in Schedule V." That category, which
includes codeine and opium preparations, is for prescription drugs with the lowest abuse potential. Rick Doblin notes that the DEA could move
cannabis to a lower schedule only if it changed its definition of "currently accepted medical use," which demands the sort of large-scale, multi-
site, double-blind studies that the FDA requires to approve a new drug. "Assuming that marijuana has been approved as a prescription
medicine by the FDA," Doblin says, "Schedule II seems too high, since Marinol is in Schedule III. Due to its actual abuse potential, marijuana for
medical use should be in Schedule V." Alex Kreit, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego who studies drug policy, notes that
the CSA leaves undefined phrases on which scheduling hinges. The DEA therefore "has enjoyed incredibly broad discretion to interpret and
define 'potential for abuse' and other scheduling criteria," Kreit writes on the Marijuana Law, Policy & Reform blog. Just as it could adopt a less
demanding definition of "accepted medical use," the DEA could take a narrower view of "abuse," which it equates with any nonmedical use. By
that standard, marijuana, by far the most popular illegal drug, does indeed have a high potential for abuse. But that judgment seems peculiar if
abuse is defined as problematic use, in which case potential for abuse might be measured by the percentage of users who become addicted or
suffer serious harm. In truth, as Lester Grinspoon observes, marijuana does not fit any of the schedules very well. It is not the sort of medicine
the FDA is used to approving. But it clearly can be used safely, as Obama conceded when he noted that it is less dangerous than alcohol. Back in
1988, when he urged the DEA to reschedule marijuana, Administrative Law Judge Francis Young called it "one of the safest therapeutically
active substances known to man." And while marijuana surely can be abused (what can't?), its potential for abuse seems lower than that of
many pharmaceuticals, not to mention alcohol and tobacco, which the CSA specifically excludes from its schedules. In light of these
inconsistencies, could the DEA take marijuana off of the CSA's schedules altogether? Probably not. "I think it is very unlikely that the attorney
general could remove marijuana from the schedules entirely," Kreit says. Although the CSA gives the attorney general the power to "remove a
drug or other substance entirely from the schedules," it also says that "if control is required by United States obligations under international
treaties, conventions, or protocols in effect on October 27, 1970, the Attorney General shall issue an order controlling such drug under the
schedule he deems most appropriate." Since the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs requires its signatories (which include the United
States) to criminalize production, possession, and distribution of cannabis for nonmedical purposes, this reference to treaty obligations seems
to bar the DEA from descheduling, as opposed to rescheduling, marijuana. Cannabis "requires a lot of control" under the Single Convention,
notes Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, who helped write federal drug legislation in the 1980s as counsel to the
House Judiciary Committee. "Cannabis is supposed to be controlled like opium and opiates." Then again, Kreit notes, other CSA provisions
"seem to contemplate situations where the U.S. does not accept international scheduling determinations." Riffle, who is also a lawyer, sums it
up this way: "I could make some arguments in a court that [the reference to drug treaties] doesn't bind the executive, but I'd probably lose."
The consequences of administratively descheduling marijuana are difficult to tease out, given that some provisions of federal law refer to
marijuana specifically, while others talk about "controlled substances" or drugs on certain schedules. Aaron Houston notes one salutary result
of descheduling marijuana: Its consumers would no longer be barred from owning firearms under the Gun Control Act of 1968, which purports
to carve out an exception to the Second Amendment for "unlawful user[s] of…any controlled substance." Even if the CSA permitted the Obama
administration to deschedule marijuana, such a step would be politically inconceivable. But even moving marijuana down one level, from
Schedule I to Schedule II, could have an important impact on the drug policy debate. For one thing, it would free the Office of National Drug
Control Policy (ONDCP), which is required by law to oppose the legalization of any Schedule I substance, to talk about the hazards of marijuana
a little more honestly. Such freedom is desperately needed, to judge by the effort required to extract the concession that marijuana is safer
than alcohol from ONDCP Deputy Director Michael Botticelli at a congressional hearing this week. "You have Obama saying that marijuana is
less harmful than alcohol, that it's important for Colorado and Washington to move forward," says Riffle, "but nonetheless you have the ONDCP
saying, 'We remain steadfastly opposed to legalization.' If it weren't a Schedule I drug, they wouldn't have to say that. The ONDCP would be
free to take a new position on legalization or put out more honest statements about the harms associated with marijuana." Rescheduling
marijuana also might affect the level of cannabis candor at the Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS), which is barred from using any of its funds to promote the legalization of Schedule I
substances. Riffle thinks lifting that restriction might even make NIDA , which is part of HHS, more willing
to let researchers use its marijuana.
 Case
Obama won’t retaliate
Crowley ‘10 (Michael, Senior Editor the New Republic, “Obama and Nuclear Deterrence”,
http://www.tnr.com/node/72263)
Others argue that the United States should promise that it would never use nuclear weapons first, but only in response to a nuclear attack. As
the story notes, some experts don't place much weight on how our publicly-stated doctrine emerges because
they don't expect foreign nations to take it literally. And the reality is that any decisions about using nukes will certainly
be case-by-case. But I'd still like to see some wider discussion of the underlying questions, which are among the most consequential
that policymakers can consider. The questions are particularly vexing when it comes to terrorist groups
and rogue states. Would we, for instance, actually nuke Pyongyang if it sold a weapon to terrorists
who used it in America? That implied threat seems to exist, but I actually doubt that a President Obama--or any
president, for that matter--would go throug
1NR
 Treaties DA
The DA outweighs and turns the case – international law affects all conflicts
longitudinal empirical analysis confirms our impact
Simmons 10 – Professor of International Affairs @ Harvard
(Beth, “Treaty Compliance and Violation,” Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci., vol. 13)
The concept of audience costs has also been useful for understanding how formal agree- ments can influence the duration of
peace. After years of war and mistrust, agreements to make peace are difficult to make credible. Treaties here again
play an important role by raising ex post international audience costs as well as by signaling intentions
ex ante. They can also reduce uncertainty about actions and in- tentions, thus helping to reduce belligerents’
incentives to rekindle their conflict. Fortna (2003) suggests there is some empirical basis for viewing peace
agreements in this way. She finds that stronger peace agreements—by which she means ones that raise the costs of
reneging by creating clear demilitarized zones, joint monitoring commissions, and third-party guarantees— lead to more a durable
peace. Similarly, Mattes (2008) examines the role of “conciliatory” agreements in the resolution of territorial disputes and finds that those
that re- duce uncertainty and raise costs ex post are likely to reduce the risk that disputing parties ¶ will resort to militarized conflicts. But these
cases raise the problem of the endogeneity of treaties. It is highly likely that governments design strong and/or conciliatory agreements when
they are especially motivated to settle the dispute. If so, is it the agreement or the underly- ing motivation to settle that drives the findings? ¶
Agreements that constrain military opera- tions in the heat of battle present the most significant challenges for international treaties. When
independent state survival may be at stake, we have the most stringent test possi- ble for the power of treaty agreements to con- strain state
behavior. The laws of war fighting are a good example. They embody norms to protect civilians and cultural property, to re- quire decent
treatment of prisoners, to medi- cally treat wounded enemies, and so forth. Not only are there strong temptations to defect if banned practices
might mean a military advan- tage; there is also the problem that atrocities can be committed by individual soldiers despite the policy of their
government.¶ The protection of civilians may be the most difficult problem of all. Valentino et al. (2006) test the proposition that international
treaties on the laws of war during the twentieth cen- tury (1900–2003) have had a significant impact on the rates at which the militaries of war-
ring states intentionally kill civilians. For each of 148 international conflicts of the past cen- tury, Valentino et al. coded whether the par- ties
had ratified the 1899 Hague Convention, the 1907 Hague Convention, the 1949 Geneva Convention, and the Geneva Convention Protocols of
1977. They found that the inten- tional killing of civilians was correlated with the strategy chosen to prosecute the war but was not influenced
at all by ratification of the relevant treaty for the time period under question. They conclude that “international law provides little protection
for civilian populations in times of war. Whatever pressures toward restraint these treaties may exert on their signatories appear to be
overwhelmed by the strategic incentives that combatants face to prevail and limit the costs of war to their own citizens” (Valentino et al. 2006,
p. 373). However, much more could be done to understand the indirect influence of these treaties on war fighting, including their possible
influence on the choice of a strategy itself. If ratifiers are much less willing to lay siege to an enemy, causing the starvation of its population,
there is some risk that the effect of the legal norm is being masked by the choice of strategy. ¶ An even more ambitious
effort to un-
derstand the dynamics of the laws of war is Morrow’s (2007) study of eight differ- ent subissue areas, including
aerial bombard- ment, armistice/ceasefire, chemical and biolog- ical weapons, treatment of civilians, protection of cultural property, conduct
on the high seas, treatment of prisoners of war, and treatment of the wounded. Using different data and meth- ods, Morrow does to some
extent corroborate the findings of Valentino et al. in that he finds the treatment of civilian populations to be es- pecially problematic in
wartime. This is not the end of the story, however. Morrow draws on signaling theory to argue, “ Treaties
are a public signal that a
state accepts a standard by rati- fying it, and so will live up to the standard of that treaty if it goes to war .
. . . Ratification by both sides is necessary for them to understand that they intend to honor that standard to
the best of their ability” (Morrow 2007, p. 561). Morrow is not explicit about why such a signal would be credible to an adversary,
although he does suggest that in a democratic setting, au- dience costs help to hold governments to their international commitments. The
model he pro- poses allows for an indirect role for treaty rati- fication: Treaties
clarify what is and what is not acceptable behavior,
which allows adversaries in war more precisely to respond to violations in kind. This reciprocity, in turn, is
associated with higher levels of compliance with the laws of war. Morrow’s key finding is that a state is more likely to violate the laws of war
recipro- cally when it is clear the adversary has done so, when both have ratified the relevant treaty, or when both of these conditions hold (a
triple in- teraction term). Merely to have ratified a treaty does not produce better compliance, but by fa- cilitating reciprocity, he argues, the
treaty has¶ made important if indirect contributions to the somewhat more humane conduct of war.¶ Arguments
for treaty compliance based on legal principles are by nature rare in the security area. As we have seen, theories of compliance or violation of
international agreements in the se- curity area tend to be based on arguments about reciprocity, the ability to send credible signals, or the ex
post costs associated with reneging. It is therefore quite refreshing to consider the results of a study by Kelley (2007) on states’ (un)willingness
to renege on their formal le- gal commitments to the International Crim- inal Court (ICC). Kelley asks, why do states live up to their
legal obligations to cooperate with the ICC, especially in the face of pressures any realist might assume would cause them to violate?
Between 2002 and 2006, the United States applied tangible forms of pressure—from diplomatic up to and including the threat of withdrawing
military aid—to countries that re- fused to sign a mutual nonsurrender agreement with the United States. These agreements cre- ated bilateral
obligations not to surrender one another’s nationals to the ICC. The problem, however, is that such agreements conflict with the legal
obligation of any ratifier of the ICC statutes to cooperate with that institution. It is a difficult dilemma: Should a state party fulfill its ICC
obligations and risk U.S. sanctions, or should it stand up to the United States and stand by the ICC?¶ Kelley argues that despite the threats of
the United States, some states resisted for very principled reasons. Some states had a strong affinity for the purposes of the ICC. She presents
evidence from a cross-sectional pro- bit that democracies, the “like-minded coun- tries” (the hard-core ICC supporters during the negotiations),
and states with sterling human rights records tended to ratify the ICC statutes. But even more revealing, states with a strong commitment to
the rule of law refused to go back on their ICC commitments. The interac- tion of a strong commitment to the rule of law and a previous
ratification was a strong predic- tor (again, in a cross-sectional probit model) that a state would refuse to ratify a mutual nonsurrender
agreement with the United States. Four case studies—Botswana, Costa Rica, Estonia, and Australia—provide the con- text for these findings.
Although Botswana re- neged, the other three rebuffed the United States, stuck with the ICC, and cited the im- portance of consistency with
their prior legal obligations as the primary reason. Kelley (2007, p. 15) concludes that “ international
agreements can be effective
across a broad spectrum of issue areas, not just in cases with clearly identified material payoffs of
iterated cooperation.” She argues that a strong commitment to the rule of law highly conditions any general claims about the overall
“compliance pull” of treaties gener- ally. Consistent with normative theories of be- havior, the “tug” is strongest for polities that place the
highest value on the rule of law.

Dampens all conflict – controls their impacts

Weeramantry 5, Judge, International Law and Peace: A Peace Lesson,
http://lcnp.org/global/Law_and_Peace.pdf
International law is an essential tool for the abolition of war . War has been a part of the human
condition for thousands of years, but its abolition is now a necessity. With w eapons of m ass
d estruction becoming ever more readily available to state and non-state actors , the threat to a
peaceful world being dragged into catastrophic conflict is so great that civilization itself is in peril .
Misunderstanding and cross cultural ignorance are among the root causes of war . While global forces
demolish geographical barriers and move the world toward a unified economy, clashes among
cultures can have damaging impact on peace. International law draws upon the principles of peace
expressed by great peacemakers and embodied in ancient writings, religions, and disciplines, and places
them in the social and political context of today to dissipate the clouds of prejudice, ignorance and
vested interests that stand in the way of world peace and harmony .
state legalization doesn’t affect the link – its just an enforcement question
Blumenauer 13
(“MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION: ARE THERE ALTERNATIVES TO STATE-FEDERAL CONFLICT?” 4/15,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/events/2013/4/15-
marijuana/20130415_marijuana_federalism_transcript.pdf)
CONGRESSMAN BLUMENAUER: Well, the one thing I’d mention is that the prosecutorial discretion, which is very broad under U.S. law, when
we entered the treaties it was subject to the understanding by everybody who understands how U.S. law works
that not all crimes defined in the Federal Code are prosecuted every time they occur. I expect that’s true in the other
countries of the world, too. So I think it becomes more a diplomatic problem than a treaty violation problem. If our
treaty partners think that we’re violating the treaty, that’s a problem that our government needs to address with them. In terms of
whether we’re technically violating the treaty, I think it would probably be fairly easy for the government to construct an
argument that says we’re not, even if we have an accommodating policy towards state legalization. Also,
treaties don’t bind the states by and large.
States not bound by treaties
Humphreys 13 – prof @ stanford
(Keith, “Can the United Nations Block U.S. Marijuana Legalization?” 11/15,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith-humphreys/can-the-united-nations-bl_b_3977683.html)
1. Is the U.S. currently in violation of the UN treaties it signed agreeing to make marijuana illegal ? No. The U.S. federal
government is a signatory to the treaty, but the States of Washington and Colorado are not. Countries with
federated systems of government like the U.S. and Germany can only make international commitments regarding their national-level policies.
Constitutionally, U.S. states are simply not required to make marijuana illegal as it is in federal law. Hence, the U.S. made no such
commitment on behalf of the 50 states in signing the UN drug control treaties.¶ Some UN officials believe that the
spirit of the international treaties requires the U.S. federal government to attempt to override state-level marijuana legalization. But in
terms of the letter of the treaties, Attorney General Holder's refusal to challenge Washington and Colorado's marijuana
policies is within bounds.

the distinction of technical compliance that our disad makes complicates all their
thumpers – room to maneuver within international law means that violating the spirit
of i-law doesn’t trigger our impact
Koplow 13 – prof @ gtown law
David, “Indisputable Violations: What Happens When the United States Unambiguously Breaches a
Treaty?,” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 37(1): http://www.fletcherforum.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/02/Koplow_37-1.pdf
Debates about putative treaty violations are also often inconclusive because international law , like domestic U.S. law,
is frequently contestable. For example, the rules for demarcating a disputed land or maritime boundary or the interpretation of a
World Trade Organization obligation about improper barriers to international trade can be obscure, ambiguous, and debatable.
Often, the United States (or any other country) adopts a certain interpretation of the treaty . If the issue becomes a
cause célèbre, the United States might “win” or “lose” the debate over its interpretation. But if the matter is
truly one on which countries could reasonably disagree, there may not be much embarrassment for a
country that has in good faith advanced what subsequently turns out to be only a minority position.
This argument proves the brink to the DA – treaty compliance is relatively high now,
despite violations of the spirit of i-law – violations by the US of the letter of the law
without a shred of legal cover undermine diplomatic credibility that sustains the
whole treaty system
Koplow 13 – prof @ gtown law
David, “Indisputable Violations: What Happens When the United States Unambiguously Breaches a
Treaty?,” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 37(1): http://www.fletcherforum.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/02/Koplow_37-1.pdf
So what? Why does it matter that the United States violates treatie s, and occasionally does so without a shred
of legal cover? Perhaps that is the realpolitik privilege of the global hegemon: to be able to sustain hypocrisy, asserting that its unique
international responsibilities and its “exceptional” position in the world enable the United States explicitly to welch on its debts, fudge on its
obligations, and adopt a “do as we say, not as we do” approach with other countries. ¶ However, there
is a cost when the world’s
strongest state behaves this way. One potential danger is that other countries may mimic this disregard for
legal commitments and justify their own cavalier attitudes toward international law by citing U.S.
precedents. Reciprocity and mutuality are fundamental tenets of international practice; it is foolhardy
to suppose that other parties will indefinitely continue with treaty compliance if they feel that the
United States is taking advantage of them by unilateral avoidance of shared legal obligations.¶ So far,
there has not been significant erosion of the treaties discussed in the three examples. !e United States and Russia will fall
years short of compliance with the CWC destruction obligations, but other parties, with the notable exception of Iran, have reacted with
aplomb, comfortable with the two giants’ unequivocal commitment to eventual compliance. Likewise, the VCCR is not unraveling, even if other
states lament the asymmetry in consular access to detained foreigners. And while many states pay their UN dues late and build up substantial
arrearages, that recalcitrance seems to stem more from penury than from a deliberate choice to follow the U.S. lead. ¶ But that persistent
flouting undermines the treaties—and by extension, it jeopardizes the entire fabric of international
law. Chronic noncompliance—especially ostentatious, unexcused, unjustified noncompliance — also
sullies the nation’s reputation and degrades U.S. diplomats’ ability to drive other states to better
conform with their obligations under the full array of treaties and other international law commitments from
trade to human rights to the Law of the Sea. The United States depends upon the international legal
structure more than anyone else: Americans have the biggest interest in promoting a stable, robust, reliable system for international
exchange. It is shortsighted and self-defeating to publicly and unblushingly undercut the system that offers the
United States so many benefits. It is especially damaging when, following an indisputable violation, the United
States acknowledges its default, participates in an international dispute resolution procedure, and apologizes—but then
continues to violate the treaty. The CWC implementation bodies, the International Court of Justice, and even the UN General
Assembly and Security Council are unable to effectively do much to sanction or penalize the mighty United States, but it is still terrible for
U.S. interests to disregard those mechanisms.
There’s room to maneuver within the treaty, but the plan is a definitive, blatant
violation
Bewley-Taylor 14 – prof @ Swansea U
(Dave, founding Director of the Global Drug Policy Observatory, March 2014, “The Rise and Decline of
Cannabis Prohibition: the History of cannabis in the UN drug control system and options for reform,”
http://www.tni.org/sites/www.tni.org/files/download/rise_and_decline_web.pdf)
As we have seen, decriminalization, including schemes in which possession, purchase and cultivation for personal use are no longer
punishable offences, is now functioning comfortably within the confines of the UN drug control conventions. Parties
are also allowed to provide social support rather than punishment for those caught up in minor drug offences due to socio-economic necessity
and the lack of alternative livelihood options. Indeed, the 1988 Convention introduced the provision to allow health or social services “as
alternatives to conviction or punishment” for offences of a minor nature, not only in cases in which the offender is dependent on drugs, but for
anyone involved in minor drug offences. This compensates for the stricter provisions in the treaty calling for harsher
penalties for more serious offences. It introduces proportionality principles in sentencing for low-level drug offences such as small-scale
cultivation, street dealing or courier smuggling. Here lies a potential legal basis for development-based policy approaches regarding subsistence
farmers of cannabis (and of coca or opium poppy): non-enforcement of legal eradication requirements in the absence of alternative-livelihoods
options, in order to create an enabling legal environment for sustainable development assistance. It could also be applied to micro-traders, a
group for which this policy option is rarely considered. Althoughthe conventions leave considerable room for
manoeuvre and permit softening of criminal sanction requirements, the limits of latitude are also clearly established
and finite. Authorities cannot create a legally regulated market including the cultivation, supply, production,
manufacture or sale of controlled drugs for non-medical and non-scientific use, which is to say, recreational purposes. Proscriptions
laid out in the conventions clearly prevent authorities from creating a legally regulated market for cannabis beyond the realm of medical and
scientific purposes.¶ Although the explicit reference to the complete “prohibition of cannabis” in the original draft version was deleted, the
Single Convention did broaden the scope of the regime to include the cultivation of plants. Article 22 of the Single Convention specified the
“special provision applicable to cultivation” using a similar phrasing as used for Schedule IV substances: ¶ “Whenever the prevailing conditions in
the country or a territory of a Party render the prohibition of the cultivation of the opium poppy, the coca bush or the cannabis plant the most
suitable measure, in its opinion, for protecting the public health and welfare and preventing the diversion of drugs into the illicit traffic, the
Party concerned shall prohibit cultivation.”56¶ This refers to prohibiting cultivation for medical and scientific purposes, because the
requirement to prohibit cultivation for other purposes is the basic premise of the treaty. The only exception is that it does “not apply to the
cultivation of the cannabis plant exclusively for industrial purposes (fibre and seed) or horticultural purposes” (article 28, para. 2). ¶ For parties
deciding not to prohibit cannabis cultivation, article 28 establishes clear conditions under which licit production for medical or scientific
purposes would be permitted.57 As touched on above in the discussion of the INCB’s stance on medical marijuana, these requirements,
identical to those in article 23 for the control of the opium poppy, include the obligation to create national agencies with a monopoly to license
and control distribution. Such agencies designate the areas in which the cultivation can take place, allow only licensed cultivators to engage in
such cultivation, and ensure that the total crop be delivered to the agency. The agency maintains exclusive rights regarding importing,
exporting, wholesale trading and maintaining stocks.¶ These
treaty articles about the optional character of prohibition, leaving
open options for licit cannabis cultivation, are often misinterpreted by cannabis-reform advocates,
arguing that they also allow for licit cultivation for non-medical purposes if the strict requirements for governmental
control are met. They argue that if a party does not “render the prohibition of the cultivation [...] the most suitable measure [...] for protecting
the public health and welfare,” that party is not required to prohibit it and thus can allow cannabis cultivation under state control. However,
the object and purpose of the conventions limits the non-prohibition option exclusively to medical and scientific purposes. And in the case of
cannabis, as per its inclusion in Schedule IV, the
Single Convention clearly recommends that it should be limited to
small amounts for research only. Legal regulation of the cannabis market for recreational purposes,
therefore, cannot be justified within the existing limits of latitude of the UN drug control treaty
regime. It is within this context that we must view recent policy shifts in two U.S. states and in Uruguay.
There is almost universal adherence to treaties now because there’s a reputational
cost to violating a treaty – the plan normalizes those violations
Guercio et al 12 - New York City Bar Association Committee on Drugs & the Law
(Susan, “The International Drug Control Treaties: How Important Are They to US Drug Reform?”
www2.nycbar.org/pdf/report/uploads/3_20072283-InternationalDrugControlTreaties.pdf)
If the treaties are so destructive, and there is no real enforcement, then why does almost every country in the
world remain signatory to and, for the most part, faithfully comply with them? Pressure from the United States
(and fear of losing aid) is certainly a major factor. But many experts point to the reputational aspect of international
law—many countries do not want to be seen as uncooperative —in effect, “pariahs”—in the international
community.¶ Instead of withdrawing from or disregarding their obligations under the treaties, many countries
have reacted over the years by pushing the outer limits of what is technically allowable, or by broadly
interpreting the language of the treaties .¶ The treaties themselves allow a certain amount of flexibility in their
interpretation. For example, while the 1988 Convention requires that countries make possession for personal consumption a criminal violation,
it does not specify what the punishment must be. Portugal’s “decriminalization” laws take advantage of this grey area and dictate that
offenders are diverted to education classes, treatment sessions, or are given a fine. Holland continues to maintain laws on its books
criminalizing possession of marijuana, but exercises a policy of non-enforcement when it comes to marijuana sold in its famous “coffee houses.”
In the U.S., many argue that “medical use” is not defined in the treaties and therefore, medical marijuana is technically allowed (the INCB and
the DEA do not share this view).¶ These
measures—non-enforcement, decriminalization/depenalization, and
medicalization—known as “soft” challenges to the treaties, skirt the problem by simply limiting
compliance to “technical compliance” in law, while allowing for de facto policies more in keeping with the desired policy change
within each country.

This technical compliance is the central question – plan eviscerates pacta sunt
servanda which is the most fundamental principle of i-law
Lopez 14 –
(German, “How much of the war on drugs is tied to international treaties?”
http://www.vox.com/cards/war-on-drugs-marijuana-cocaine-heroin-meth/war-on-drugs-international-
treaties)
There is a lot of disagreement among drug policy experts, enforcers, and reformers about the stringency of the treaties. Several sections of the
conventions allow countries some flexibility so they don't violate their own constitutional protections. The US, for example, has
never enforced penalties on inciting illicit drug use on the basis that it would violate rights to freedom of speech. ¶ Many argue that any
move toward legalization of use, possession, and sales is in violation of international treaties. Under this argument,
Colorado, Washington, and Uruguay are technically in violation of the treaties because they legalized marijuana for personal possession and
sales.¶ Others say that countries have a lot of flexibility due to the constitutional exemptions in the conventions. Countries could claim, for
instance, that their protections for right to privacy and health allow them to legalize drugs despite the conventions. When it comes to individual
states in the US, the federal government can also argue that America's
federalist system allows states some flexibility as
long as the federal government keeps drugs illegal .¶ "It's pretty clear that the war on drugs was waged for political reasons
and some countries have used the treaties as an excuse to pursue draconian policies," said Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open
Society Global Drug Policy Program. "Nevertheless, we've seen a number of countries drop criminal penalties for minor possession of all drugs.
We've seen others put drugs into a pharmaceutical model, including the prescription of heroin to people with serious addictions. This seems
completely possible within the treaties."¶ Even if a country decided to dismantle prohibition and violate the treaties, it's unclear how the
international community would respond. If the US, for example, ended prohibition, there's little other countries could do to interfere; there's
no international drug court, and sanctions would be very unlikely for a country as powerful as America. ¶ Still, Martin Jelsma, an international
drug policy expert at the Transnational Institute, argued that ignoring
or pulling out of the international drug conventions
could seriously damage America's standing around the world. "Pacta sunt servanda ('agreements must
be kept') is the most fundamental principle of international law and it would be very undermining if
countries start to take an 'a-la-carte' approach to treaties they have signed; they cannot simply
comply with some provisions and ignore others without losing the moral authority to ask other
countries to oblige to other treaties," Jelsma wrote in an email. "So our preference is to acknowledge legal tensions with the
treaties and try to resolve them."¶ To resolve such issues, many critics of the war on drugs hope to reform international drug laws in 2016
during the next General Assembly Special Session on drugs. ¶ "There is tension with the tax-and-regulate approach to marijuana in some
jurisdictions," Malinowska-Sempruch said. "But it's all part of a process and that's why we hope the UN debate in 2016 is as open as possible, so
that we can settle some of these questions and, if necessary, modernize the system."

Countries are only engaging in a form of soft defection in the status quo that respects
the technical intent of the agreements
Bewley-Taylor 14 – prof @ Swansea U
(Dave, founding Director of the Global Drug Policy Observatory, March 2014, “The Rise and Decline of
Cannabis Prohibition: the History of cannabis in the UN drug control system and options for reform,”
http://www.tni.org/sites/www.tni.org/files/download/rise_and_decline_web.pdf)
Depending whether the legal system allows for discretionary powers, in several countries more formalised schemes of non-
enforcement have been established by providing guidelines for the police, the prosecution and/or the judiciary. In other countries
cannabis consumption and possession for personal use are de jure no longer a criminal offence. Many varieties of such
decriminalization schemes exist, in terms of distinguishing possession or cultivation for personal use from the intent to trade; and whether
or not to apply administrative sanctions. Since the treaty requirements do not differentiate between possession
and cultivation for personal use, first in Spain and more recently in some other countries, “cannabis social clubs” have
started to engage in collective cultivation for personal use. ¶ The inclusion of cannabis and its compounds in the strictest
schedules of the conventions was a rejection of its usefulness for therapeutic purposes and an effort to limit its use exclusively to research
purposes, for which only very small amounts would be required. Today, however, many countries have rejected this position as scientifically
untenable and have established legal regimes recognising the medicinal properties of cannabis. ¶ All
these policy practices were
interpreted by the implementing countries as respecting the confines of treaty latitude. Most have a
solid legal basis, others employ a certain legal creativity , not always acknowledged by the INCB. And sometimes schemes
perfectly justifiable in principle have been applied with a “pragmatic” dose of hypocrisy. The strictures of the conventions and the near
impossibility to amend them have impelled some countries to stretching their inbuilt flexibility and escape clauses to questionable limits.
Examples are the legal contradictions around the backdoor of the Dutch coffeeshops; the expansion of
medical marijuana schemes in some U.S. states into recreational use; and the establishment of large-
scale commercial cannabis social clubs in Spain . Indeed, while a fundamental change in cannabis policy is increasingly viewed
as a legitimate option to consider in various parts of the world, the reputational (and possibly economic) costs of treaty
breach are likely to deter most states from moving beyond some form of soft defection .