Argument 6-1 题目在内 牛牛帮忙看看

我临时只找到2个点还是有点胡扯的...

6-1

Argument

By assistance of the template

29 min

“As public concern over drug abuse has increased, authorities have become more vigilant in their efforts to prevent illegal drugs from entering the country. Many drug traffickers have consequently switched from marijuana, which is bulky, or heroin, which has a market too small to justify the risk of severe punishment, to cocaine. Thus enforcement efforts have ironically resulted in an observed increase in the illegal use of cocaine.”

In the argument, the author declares that the increase abuse on cocaine is a result of intensive government reactions to prevent illegal drugs from entering the country. To substantiate this conclusion, the author points out that, as the policy against illegal drugs trades getting more intensive, the abuse of cocaine is increasing. He further bolsters his conclusion by the evidence that cocaine is favored by drugs dealers because it is neither as bulk as marijuana nor as risky as heroin of severe punishment. Even though, at the first glance, the author’s argument appears to be somewhat watertight, a close scrutiny reveals that the line of reasoning employed is invalid and hence the conclusion is obviously misleading due to several critical logic flaws. In short, the analysis does not lend strong support to what the author maintains, and lack of credibility in reasoning causes the conclusion to be problematic.

First, most conspicuously, the author assumes that cocaine is the only replacement for marijuana and heroin, yet he provides no support to justify his assumption on the alternative available in underground drugs market. Moreover, the assumption is obviously incorrect in real world while over thousands of drugs have been traded illegally worldwide and many of them are known to public. Without taking other alternatives into account, the author oversimplifies the choices drugs dealers have and thus makes his assumption less persuasive.

Also, notable, it is questionable whether the abuse of cocaine in fact increased after the strict policy. Insofar as we know, even the government police force could not be able to track accurately the amount of illegal drugs trades in the society every year, and so how the author could counts and compares the abuse of cocaine before and after the policy change. He may had conducted a certain surveys or investigations inside the market, but he did not mention the time, locations, responders of his investigation. It is probably that in one area the abuse increases and some other places it decreases, leading to slump a total market size. Hence, unless more information could be provided, the results of the survey are meaningless and deserve a question mark overhead.

Consequently, the author fails to provide sufficient justification for this argument. The evidences used to support his assertion are not only vague but also incomplete. The logic reasoning is also questionable with several mistakes. Absence of essential information on --- results in a unsound conclusion. Only if additional information was provided to demonstrate that the investigation he conducted has a sufficient sample pool and in the market, majority trades are exclusively among marijuana, heroin and cocaine, the conclusion would have been more thorough and convincing.