SUMMARY: George Shultz, U.S. ex-Secretary of State, has gone back to teaching in Stanford Business School, where in the last few days, he held a discussion on the fight against drugs during the presidencies of Nixon and Reagan and on the prospects of the Bush plan. In a summary, published by the Wall Street Journal, he maintains that all his efforts to combat drugs by repressive means have failed. The same fate will be in store for George Bush's plan. Instead, there is a need to separate the criminal market from the drug addict. How? by forms oflegalization and the controlled distribution of drugs. (La Stampa, Thursday, November 2, 1989)

A couple of years ago, the effort to prohibit drugs in the Bahamas struck me in a particular way. During the year we had confiscated about five billion dollars worth of cocaine. I don't know how much of it passed. Nobody has credible estimates. Anywy, the GNP of the Bahamas is presumably between one and two billion dollars. So you have an idea of the influence our drug market has there and elsewhere.

I like the way emphasis is layed on the drug problem today. The efforts - to establish contact with people who take drugs and try to help them; and if it is not possible to cure them, at least try to limit their number; to advocate an educational programme to drastically discourage the use of drugs by occasional consumers, to stop the spreading of this plague amoung the young - I think all these efforts are extremely significant.

But I must say that, in my opinion, the conceptual basis of the current anti-drug programme is weak, and therefore it will not work. The concept on which it is based- which comes close to criminal justice - is the same that I worked out in the past, during the Nixon administration, when I was the Administrative Director and Secretary of the Treasury with customs jurisdiction. We worked out an extensive programme and we worked on it with great dedication. Our international efforts were the greatest which have ever been made. You have before you someone whose car escort was attacked by drug dealers in Bolivia. This is what makes me a veteran of the drug war. What we have before us now is essentially the same programme, but with greater resources available for its implementation. These efforts tend to create a market where prices exceed costs by far. With these incentives, in fact, demand creates its own supply and a criminal network around it. So I think that we won't get anywhere until we are able to

separate criminality from the drug trade and the incentives for criminality from the latter. Frankly, it seems to me that the only way to carry out this programme is to make it possible for drug addicts to buy the drug in certain zones at a price which is closer to the drug's actual cost. When this is done, criminal incentives will be eliminated, including the one which I believe urges the pusher to exploit children and to dope them to create his own market. This incentive will no longer exist, because it will no longer have a market.

This is why I believe that the basis of the concept of the anti-drug programme should be completely reconsidered. If what I am saying interests you, do read an excellent and informed article on the problem which appeared in the September issue of "Science", by Ethan Nadelmann. We need at least to consider and examine ways of controlling the legalization of drugs.

I find this is tough subject. Sometimes I advance these ideas at parties, and people suddenly avoid me. They do not even want to talk to me. I know I am just talking a lot of hot air if I talk about what we are doing at the moment. But I feel that if someone doesn't start facing this subject now, the next time, when these anti-drug programmes are presented again, everybody will go on being afraid to discuss the problem. No politician wants to say what I just said, not even for a minute."