Is the argument "people will do it anyway" a bad one for making something legal?

It is a version of the ad populum fallacy

Since nobody is schooled in the method of logic anymore, lots of folks with sinister intent are getting away with logical fallacies.

So yes, it is a bad argument. But like I said, nobody seems to call out logical fallacies, so what can you say.

@josie I remember learning rhetoric and logical fallacies in my 11th grade AP Comp class. It was not a required class and I don’t know that even all the teachers taught it, but I remember it more than I remember most of what I was taught in high school. It should be something we teach to all students.

That answer could be given about anything. The right thing to ask is how much the activity will be reduced by punishing it.

Of course it is. It’s like, “Why bother making murder illegal? People are gonna do it anyway.”
If no one ever broke the law we wouldn’t need laws.

It’s a question of the lesser of evils. Drug prohibition doesn’t keep anyone from using drugs but it does create even more societal ills and empowers violent criminal cartels.

Yes.

That’s one reason alcohol was made legal after prohibition. They were drinking anyway.

Laws are for the social good, and sometimes making something ilegal creates a black market that causes more harm than good. Black markets usually have money changing hands without taxation. It often has some really bad players involved. You have little to no protection from the police, because they can’t know what you’re doing, while you’re dealing with the bad players.

Yep. Under alcohol prohibition a bunch of petty, semi-literate crooks went from running small-time numbers games, selling stolen merchandise and shaking-down poor shopkeepers to becoming more powerful than law enforcement in this country.

And alcohol is far more dangerous than pot, but less dangerous than meth.