ABSTRACT: Following the arrest of seventeen students guilty of having smoked "light" drugs, on January 16, 1973 Marco Pannella published this open letter in the newspaper "Il Messaggero". It was the first time someone took a public position on this issue. In the course of succeeding years, the Radicals' attitude on this question will evolve until reaching its present anti-prohibi- tionist commitment for all narcotics. Their position will remain constant, however - and it is already evident in this article -

with regard to the personal responsibility of the individual and the conviction that there should be no legal punishments or sanctions for acts regarding the personal and private life of the individual.

(Letter to the Messaggero - January '73 from "Marco Pannella - Writings and Discourses - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

Threats of more than a hundred centuries of imprisonment made in five years. For nothing. Enough of that. For this reason Radical representatives will smoke hashish publicly.

With the arrest of 17 youths in Rome because some of them smoked hashish or marijuana, the number of "delinquents" brought to justice in all Italy within eight days has reached more than a hundred; thus they will pass at least two centuries in prison. In

five years, six thousand people, most of them young, have accumulated penalties for at least ten thousand years of detention, condemned for a hundred centuries to live in a prison universe that sociologists, doctors, jurists, social workers of both left and right almost unanimously recognize to be strongly crime producing and not "rehabilitating" of personal and social responsibility. I have read the declarations of the families of these bourgeois youths: poisoned by the drug of disinformation and lies, terrorised within their empty and pathetic shell of

respectability, they seemed convinced themselves that their

children are criminals and perverts. Because of the school, of bad friends, of whatever bad influences are around to blame:

Marxism, Radicalism, divorce, abortion, drugs, conscientious

objectors, anti-militarists - it doesn't matter.

Allow me to ask these parents not to be - not to be the first jailers and executioners of these kids. Let them not project against their children their obsessions, their fears, their guilts. Let them not judge too hastily.

These kids are more victims of crime than criminals themselves. Not a day passes in which the police do not announce new victories against the new enemies of the fatherland who smoke marijuana and hashish; but not a day passes, not one, without science affirming and re-affirming proofs that the derivatives of indian hemp are, if not innocuous, at least less harmful certainly than substances of vast and vastly advertised consumption (such as alcohol and - according to many - the tobacco of inveterate smokers) and that they neither poison nor addict.

Not a day passes in Italy without the "americanisation" of the armed underworld manifesting its free and sovereign growth with only laughable preventive and repressive measures taken against them, while the police are always more mobilised against the young people.

To this picture we must add that the government has prepared a fraudulent law against hashish smokers and whoever is or gets into contact with them: against the freedom of the press and scientific research - a leg-pulling law inasmuch as it proclaims the right of hashish smokers to opt for a cure whereas medical science is in no position to recognise a pathological condition in their behaviour on any level, physical or mental. In reality, they risk being subjected to "cures" and "psychic drugs" and crash therapies to exorcise from their lives not a "malady", which they do not have, but the demon of dissent and disobedience. This proposal is the proof that a socially aberrant policy of repression is about to be unleashed and stepped-up on all levels based on delirious and unfounded figures with regard to the diffusion of "drugs" among the young.

We have no reasons to particularly esteem hashish smokers. We believe, on the contrary, that there are sufficiently vast moral and material horizons to explore so that there is no need of evasions and other "trips". Morally and ideally we all ought to be capable of giving up the floods of alcohol, tobacco, the derivatives of indian hemp, tranquillizers and the anti-depressants that a poisonous advertising campaign induces us to consume. And yet we don't stop. Morally culpable, we are still not arrested, defamed, incriminated.

But the current persecutions lead to the risk of a "scourge"; tens of thousands of kids incriminated, traumatised, marked for life by the only blind, obtuse act of violence in this whole affair: that perpetrated by the institutions and the party of the regime.

We need to defend ourselves. Attack. For my part, I have never had the occasion to smoke hashish, nor the intention, nor the need. But I am not, we are not disposed, I and my comrades of the Radical Party to sit and watch passively these crimes which every day are proclaimed as victories of public morality. We do not have, we don't want to have any other weapons than the civil ones that are non-violent, respectful of others, that alone can prefigure the type of society that we want to help construct. These are the direct actions against the cases of legal injustice: civil disobedience, conscientious objection. We will use them.

For this reason I declare here and now that in the near future I will smoke hashish publicly at least on one occasion, giving

advance notice to the forces of "order" as is my duty and my desire. Furthermore, if in the meantime a campaign and a political struggle is not begun to rip thousands of young people from the current criminal actions of the State, I, with other comrades and friends who have never before "smoked" in that way, will do so in a pre-announced and public act of civil disobedience. We will do it in the most opportune places, in the high places of public "morality", of the State, before politicians and magistrates so that they will have us, wrists and conscience, ready to be arrested.

Let us hope that things won't have to reach that point.

Certainly by smoking hashish we too will go to jail with and like the 17 youths of the other day. Like them, science, conscience, our morality, all in agreement, will tell us that we go without guilt. It pains us that this should seem to us to be necessary: but if it is necessary we will do it. Once we are condemned, justice will have had its say. But which of us, those who judge or those who were judged, will be in the right, is another story. And it is there that we feel sure of being absolved and victorious.