For the affirmative:

Jeffrey A. Singer is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. He is principal and founder of Valley Surgical Clinics, Ltd., Arizona’s largest and oldest group private surgical practice. He was a regular contributor to Arizona Medicine, the journal of the Arizona Medical Association from 1994-2016. He served on the Advisory Board Council of the Center for Political Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University (2014-2018) and is an adjunct instructor in the Program on Political History and Leadership at ASU. He writes and speaks extensively on regional and national public policy, with a focus on health care policy and the harmful effects of drug prohibition. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed scientific medical journals as well as major national and regional journals and periodicals. He received a B.A. from Brooklyn College, an M.D. from New York Medical College, and is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

For the negative:

Sam Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and author of three books of narrative nonfiction. His latest book is Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury, 2015), for which he traveled across the United States. Dreamland won a National Book Critics Circle award for the Best Nonfiction Book of 2015. It was also selected as one of the Best Books of 2015 by Amazon.com, Slate.com, the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, Seattle Times, Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Entertainment Weekly, Audible, and in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Business. Quinones is currently working on a follow up to Dreamland. He is formerly a reporter with the L.A. Times, where he worked for 10 years (2004-2014). He is a veteran reporter on immigration, gangs, drug trafficking, and the border.