by Marco Taradash

Member of the European Parliament

elected on an antiprohibitionist ticket

member of the Radical Party

What are drugs today? If we look at the covers of the most important newspapers of the whole world, if we take a stroll in the streets of Naples, Los Angeles or Lisbon, it is easy to understand that it is no longer a powder or a mixture that some people use to achieve a certain kind of pleasure, and that others use induced by a self-destructive will. And if we read the reports that are periodically published, with technocratic punctuality, the great international organizations responsible for the control and the repression of the drug traffic, we soon understand that it is no longer even a problem of drug addiction, or of common delinquency, or of large-scale organized crime. Drugs are now a historical product, an explosive compound of social chemistry, produced by the combined action of the State laws and of the economic forces sustained by those laws.

The transformation of the chemical drug industry, caused by the increasingly exorbitant profits, has in fact found the governments and the supra-national organizations in a state of slumber that we could define as narcotic. A line of marginal trade and consumption, to be linked to a limited if dangerous criminal stratum, has turned, in the last ten to fifteen years into a market with thousands of international extensions, capable of penetrating any social milieu. Today, with its 500 million dollars of yearly income, which corresponds to the budget of a medium-sized industrial company, the drug industry is capable of undermining political institutions and of altering economic processes all over the world.

And yet, the national governments, not always completely democratic, have chosen not to see all this. They repeat policies of the past, that is, the tragical mistakes that caused this global catastrophe. Stricter laws on consumption, harsher penalties for drug pushers, stronger repressive organizations. It's true: the controlling power of the state apparata on society increases, but cannot reduce by one single gramme the quantity of forbidden drugs that are on the market, nor of a single dollar the profits coming from the drug trade, nor does it increase the security of the people, who are constantly threatened by thefts and aggressions, which often have serious consequences.

Today the war against drugs, only foreshadowed - Hollywood-like - by Reagan, has turned into the bloody invasion of Panama on the part of the marines sent by George Bush to enact a revenge, far from the T.V. cameras (they too forbidden), and at the cost of at least 2,000 casualties, against the wrong-doings of the dictator-drug trafficker Noriega (only to discover that the newly elected President Endara, who for years was the director of one of the banks used by the traffickers of the Medellin Cartel, is against any reformation of the banking laws of the country); Colombia was on the covers of all the newspapers of the world as the theatre of the first civil war on drugs; the United States have enforced a complex repressive mechanism which each year vomits new prisons, built to detain hundreds of thousands of people and restore capital punishment even for offences other than murder; the Parliaments of many countries of the world intend to follow the North American example.

All this is not only useless but harmful. The damage for society generally and for the consumers (the minority) and non-consumers of drugs is terrible. All around the world we are experiencing the risk of a challenge without precedents for the legal institutions: today blackmail, tomorrow the challenge of narcocracy, of the Criminal State.

What is to be done? The answer is awfully simple: we must assert the ancient values of civil freedom: no person can be persecuted for a particular behaviour which does not harm other people. These values are effective, repression is not. Drug consumers need sanitary assistance, or programmes of social and psychological rehabilitation, certainly not prison or other penalties. The drug trade must be regulated and linked under the control of the legal institutions, the monopoly of the mafia on the market must be destroyed.