For more than two decades, The City Club of Cleveland has hosted the annual High School Debate Championship. Every year …

39 COMMENTS

  1. Tia's arguement only works if the drug she is talking about has a higher proportion to make you commit a crime while on it. Alcohol for example, is linked to excessive violence and other crimes. I'd be hardpressed to find any evidence showing marijuana use makes someone violent, its a possibility there may be studies but no significant conclusion.

    Tia is the better debater, but by her logic, we should be banning alcohol as well, and her point about criminal justice and rehabilitation being used together is weak because once a person gets a criminal record they are highly unlikely to be employed and recieve societal benefits thus maintaining them in a poverty cycle which we know to cause drug addiction and drug relapse. The other Girl had an easier position to argue but she needed to stop going on about systemic racism as it was pretty irrelevant to the debate.

  2. This makes me want to join debate again :,) I was pretty good for being the youngest one there- At my first little competition, I was in fourth grade while everyone else was in middle school-high school and I got 2nd place-

  3. pharmacist here. Yikes, the claim that opioid abuse is caused by legal prescriptions just makes my blood boil because it's just not true. But I get it's just a competition. If you can get away with saying something untrue and it helps your case, why not?

  4. That's insane. I'm thinking of joining my school's debate team (not that I'm confident and want to win all of them, but instead because I'm a poor public speaker do I wanna learn more of it), but these debaters are INSANELY good at this, speaking and thinking so well on spot😭😭😭

  5. I quit my high school's debate team, because it turns out I'm not so smart after all. In the last competition, I got beat by a guy who's 17 and heading to the tenth grade. And that's not all: I go to my city's public high school; he goes to the much smaller and less popular charter school that accommodates certain students. I know him because he's my friend's cousin, and it didn't take long to know his character. He is slow; he always needs clarification and accommodations to the instructions you give him. I felt for sure I could beat him in the debate competition, but he actually had–and this really does pain me to say this–greater points to counter mine. They were so deep and logical. After losing to a guy who often "doesn't get it" and will be a seventeen-year-old sophomore in a tiny charter school, I realized I didn't have what it takes for debate team after all. I always thought I was so smart, but it looks like I'm stupid, huh?

  6. I'd like to say drug use is not a victimless crime.
    You must have never grown up in a household with a parent who does hardcore drugs if you think this.
    It's not okay. It's an extremely bad childhood experience. It's child abuse and child neglect. There is no functioning crack addict who is a great parent, pays their taxes and cares about the quality of public education.
    So should only single people with no kids or grown children be allowed to smoke meth?
    People should not be smoking crack in apartment complexes next to their neighbors. So should we establish "Safe Meth Smoking Spaces?" next to commercial or residential areas?
    You wouldn't be okay with it if you knew your neighbor was smoking crack frequently with their "friends" right next door to you and your children.
    You wouldn't be okay with finding out the little girl who goes to school with your daughter, her dad smokes meth and drinks every night. That's a recipe for disaster.
    Marijuana, shrooms, maybe acid, maybe even cocaine is one thing.
    But there are things we cannot not allow, and your local mental illness case worker with glasses and a spiffy outfit is not going to stop Florida man from smoking meth and beating his children, unless they plan on hypnotizing him.
    The question is do you think the police will solve it? Will jail time solve it? Community service? Forced Rehab? A mental health facility?
    There are things that human society cannot allow.
    Weakness that must be corrected.
    Broken people who must be forcibly fixed.
    Basically this whole thing was you saying crack isn't that bad.
    Coming from a young person who clearly knows nothing about the life of a woman who got pregnant by a man who smokes crack and he moved in with her and started abusing her and her children.
    Educate yourself and how real those victims are.

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