First of all there are already several million CP images and videos, so there is quite a large supply. Only very large trading groups manage to exhaust the currently available supply of CP, and if an individual spent ten seconds looking at every CP image available in a row it would take them a year or two straight before they came close to exhausting the supply. Second of all, thrill seekers who aren't even pedophiles are the primary type of people who view CP. Third of all, it isn't like someone literally consumes CP in the sense that after they view an image it is gone forever. The same image can be copied a billion times and seen for the first time by an unlimited number of people. The only scenario in which I see supply and demand apply is on the massive trading platforms that have upload quotas for continued membership. Certainly supply and demand does not apply to P2P networks, it isn't like someone downloads some CP and then some magic happens that causes some random pedophile to sense the increased demand and molest a kid to add the photo to the P2P network. There is no incentive to share CP on P2P networks and it is extremely risky, finding people with CP has become literally like shooting fish in a barrel you just make a simple software program that searches P2P networks for some keywords, downloads the files that match the keywords, compares their hash value to known CP image hash values and spits out thousands upon thousands upon thousands of IP addresses at a time. The only reason they haven't arrested millions more people for CP distribution is because of the overwhelming number of people who are downloading CP from P2P networks without realizing that they automatically share everything they download. If P2P network software didn't automatically share everything that a person downloads, the amount of CP available from such networks would be a tiny fraction of what it currently is. Anyway I think I have pretty exhaustively argued against you with this strategy, and now I will take a slightly different approach. Before I argued that legalization of child pornography possession and distribution will not lead to increased levels of child molestation, and in fact will decrease the levels of child molestation. Now I will argue while pretending to hold the incorrect assumption that legalization of child pornography will increase the amounts of child molestation. Imagine alcohol. A lot of people enjoy alcohol, others find it to be quite immoral to drink, many are neutral regarding it, and essentially nobody really needs to consume it, it is purely recreational. Now I think that the majority of people do not think that drinking Alcohol is immoral, but a lot of people think that drunk driving and crashing your vehicle into an innocent bystander should be illegal. Now, it is correct to say that if alcohol is outlawed, the rates of drunk driving will plummet. But clearly it is wrong to restrict the rights of those who drink responsibly simply because some people are irresponsible and do immoral things related to alcohol. The same logic applies to child pornography, even incorrectly assuming that legalized possession and distribution will lead to higher rates of child molestation. A lot of people enjoy viewing child pornography, others find it to be quite immoral to view, few are neutral regarding it, and essentially nobody needs to consume it, it is purely recreational. It is the producers of child pornography, those who molest children, that are engaging in immoral behavior (these are the drunk drivers). The possessors and distributors of child pornography are not engaging in immoral behavior, and thus far your argument that they are is that their demand for child pornography leads to a supply being created, thus leads to child molestation. Likewise, the demand of people who do not get drunk and crash into innocent bystanders is a large part of the reason why people who do get drunk and crash into innocent bystanders have a supply of alcohol. Following your logic, it makes sense to prohibit alcohol, restricting those who do not harm others, in order to prevent drunk driving and protect innocent bystanders from being crashed into. According to my logic, we need to put the blame for immoral activities on the perpetrators of immoral activity, and it is immoral to punish others for the perpetrators immoral actions, even if this punishment would reduce the ability of the perpetrators to engage in their immoral activities. Another argument I could present to you is more in order to reveal your inherent desire for child pornography to be illegal regardless of its relationship with child molestation rates. When people go with the flawed supply and demand argument for child pornography possession and distribution criminalization, I like to point out a technology known as private information retrieval. This is a cryptographic system in which a client can request an item from a server or group of servers, with out the servers knowing the item that is being requested. Although hardly practical, it is entirely in the realm of possibility to have a group of servers that store every single child pornography photograph ever created, and allow people to download them without the possibility of the servers knowing how many people are downloading child pornography (although the servers would need to contain at least one item that is not child pornography as well). the servers can determine how many people are downloading items, but they are completely incapable of determining which items are being downloaded, and thus they are incapable of determining the demand for child pornography. Do you think that if such a system was put into place, that the rate of child pornography production would plummet? Do you support legalizing the possession and distribution of child pornography so long as the possessors and distributors use a PIR algorithm ??