Discuss Debate: Legalize Drugs

Not a formal debate, but which one of these cops do you think had the better arguments?
I think the argument about all people doing drugs are already starting with it illegal.
Discuss.

The show was obviously biased towards the pro-legalization side

Here's a more professional hosted debate

This debate made me wonder. On edeb8, we are a primarily text based website, whereas professional debates are more worldly. How long is it appropriate to make your speech in a professional debate. I realize different organizations set different times, but what would be considered a general grace period? How should that contrast with debates that are written?

Blackflag: I tend to find, in RL debates, 5 minutes is really short, 10 minutes is really long, and about 7-8 minutes works really well. This is true for about 90% of styles out there.

As for written speeches, it's similar. I find I can make about a minute's worth of spoken arguments in 1000 characters (could well be my writing style being less succinct than my speaking style) so I find 5000 characters pretty short, 10,000 pretty long, and 7-8000 is about right.

admin: I think 8000 is to small for debates with lots of points. Whenever I do 10,000 character debates I usually stop at 9000 characters.

admin: When I watch hosted debates and tournaments, a speaker usually doesn't go above 15 minutes. That's why I like having a 15,000 character maximum. I can see having up to a 25,000 character maximum if your 1000 character = 1 minute argument holds true.

Admins comment speak volumes about my quick debate reform proposals. I love quick debates, because they force debaters to argue effectively with limited time before rebuttals. This is usually how a non-formal debate develops in real life. BUT....... 100-400 character debates with 1-4 rounds are simply ridiculous. I don't think they should be allowed on our site. I would like quick debates to be generates randomly, but I would like a 5 round minimum and 500 character minimum requirement to accompany it. 300 character/3 rounds is not an actual debate.

Blackflag: The idea behind that was originally to emulate arguments on Twitter. It wasn't my idea. Twitter allows only 250 characters.

Blackflag: What formal debate tournament allows 25 minute speaking times? Or even 15?

admin: Many debates have allowed 15 minutes. I think I've seen one which went to 25 minutes, but it was an actual congressional debate.
I think twitter debates were a good idea originally, but they evolved into something else. I would scrap the 0-400 characters and focus on 500-900 characters with a range of 5-10 rounds. Anything else isn't actual debate. Even twitter debates are meaningless rants.

Blackflag: Doesn't answer what I asked. I didn't ask about individual one-off debates. You claimed you knew of tournaments with 15 minute speaking times. I'm asking what tournament does that.

What formal debate tournament allows 25 minute speaking times? Or even 15?

admin: Probably not any professional tournaments

Blackflag: Yeah... I would consider anything above about 12 minutes to be something of an exception and not really worth supporting with specific character count limits.