Phil252 Critical Essay

CRTICAL ESSAY:

“LEGAL DRUGS UNLIKELY TO FOSTER NATION OF ZOMBIES” BY STEPHEN CHAPMAN

As crime and corruption continues to rise in many countries and inner cities, more people and public officials have begun to discuss whether drugs should be legalized. In the passage “Legal Drugs Unlikely to Foster Nation of Zombies”, author Stephen Chapman argues in favour of his conclusion that drugs should be legalized as prohibition of drugs is causing more harm to society. Chapman’s conclusion is based on a convergent argument in which he provides three explicit premises for support that can be stated in standard from like this:

(1) Making drugs illegal has wasted a vast amount of money, prison space, police time, and caused epidemics of violent crime.

(2) Legalizing drugs will not cause people to use or try them more.

(3) Drugs popularity declined in countries that legalized drugs like marijuana.

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(likely) Drugs should be legalized.

Convergent arguments are non-deductive like Chapman’s in which the conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from the premises, but each individual premise makes the conclusion more probable. The premises provided by Chapman are plausible due to the generous amount of statistics, and quotations provided for support. However, inductive reasoning can lead Chapman’s conclusion that it is “likely” that legalizing drugs will do more good for society then the current war on drugs to be false. I will first critically evaluate each of Chapman’s three main supporting premises, and then present the fallacies I believe have been committed by Chapman in this passage.

Premise (1) is stated in this article without any statistics or numbers for support – how can Chapman prove that the money, prison space, and police time being used is not a result of other crimes such as robbery? In the passage Chapman states that prohibition of drugs “has...