In an interview to the weekly "Oggi", Marco Pannella talks about the continuity between the "old" and the "new" Radical Party, of the broader Radical, Socialist and libertarian movement, of the battle for the depenalization of hashish and against prohibition on drugs, of fast and non-violence. "We are libertarians", says Pannella, "but at the same time conservatives, in that we want to safeguard the highest values of our society".

(Interview to "Oggi" - July 1975 from: Marco Pannella - Works and Speeches - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

Oggi - Mr Pannella, why not start with a bit of background?

Pannella - What background? Personally speaking I have no background. The only proper job I ever had was at "Il Giorno" (1), from '59 to '62 or '63, when I was a correspondent from Paris. Then I quit, cashed my retirement bonus and that was my last real job. During that period, from '50 to '62, I was actively involved in the Algerian war and and in keeping contacts with the different Radical groups that were emerging in Europe. All this corresponded with the critical ripening of the Italian Radical Party; in other words, the schism and all that...

Oggi - But didn't the Radical Party close at that point?

Pannella - This is not true. From a juridical point of view, the Radical Party has never ceased existing. Some of the founding fathers left. This marked the passage from their prestigious "pro-centre-left" political line to our scandalous, libertarian "anti-centre-left" line. For years the papers, your damn papers, avoided mentioning the Radicals even in obituary notices, but what does this have to do with the juridical death of a party? For example, I remember that Ernesto Rossi (2), the economist, died as a member of the Radical Party; moreover, when it proclaimed the intention to continue its action, the Party had a more than prestigious presidency, and this despite the accusations of conducting a "street policy", the attacks against myself and all the other rubbish. But no one knows this, because no newspaper talked about it! Also: who was the President of the Radical Party's Central Committee in March 1962? None other than Elio Vittorini (3)! One of the most respectable Italian writers of our history. A

nd when Vittorini died, years later, he was still our President. Rossi, Ernesto Rossi, died five days before our public demonstration at the Adriano Theatre in Rome; also, Rossi, Villabruna and the others had simply failed to renew their membership for a couple of years, but apart from this their articles had always been published on our newspapers. To this we must add that last year, during our long hot summer (fifty of us were fasting to the bitter end to obtain TV space for the Radical minority), Arrigo Benedetti, former editor of "L'Espresso" (4) and "Il Mondo" (5), broke the conspiracy of silence against us by writing an article on the Corriere della Sera in which, as a lay and radical authority, he stated that the continuity of the Radical Party had never been interrupted, and that if Mario Pannunzio (6) had still been alive he would have been one of us. In December we will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Party's foundation, which is only a part of our broader radical, socialist, libertarian

movement. Our movement is vaster: for example, I am not a member of the Radical party any more, I am just a sympathizer...

We are an anti-Jacobinian, lay, libertarian, Voltairian group; as a consequence, all the anti-centralist and anti-Jacobinian characteristics belong to us...However, a vast libertarian organization cannot exist; in all vast parties, there is the danger of a bureaucratic degeneration; in a small party such as the Leninist Party - meaning Lenin's Party proper - the danger is that of a charismatic degeneration, which is acceptable for a Jacobinian groups, but not for our libertarian, socialist and lay movement. This is also a consequence of today's consumerist society and of its characteristics. In other words: there was the risk, for the Party, to be mistaken with a person, with a "leader", in other words with me: apart from the fact that I am also a founding father as well as a "leader"... So what did we come up with? All we did was open the dictionary. What does scission mean? It is a process by which cells reproduce themselves: it is a positive event. Politically speaking, a scission is on the contrary a neg

ative phenomenon. But we decided to reproduce ourselves through a scission, to separate ourselves in order to reproduce ourselves.

...I remember a priest who began fasting to obtain public assistance for a young boy. After six days of fasting, the papers published several articles on the incident. They were lengthy articles, full of indignation. As such there is nothing wrong about it. However, in that same period, I had been fasting for forty days, and with me fifty more companions, because the state TV denied us any space in political debates, and for a series of other reasons. Not one word in the papers about us, until the very last. Why? Apart from anything else, the press missed the occasion to publish interesting, picturesque stories: in Strassoldo, for example, there was an elderly woman writer who had joined the fast; she lived alone in a beautiful, romantic, eighteenth-Century villa: the atmosphere was dreamlike, it reminded me of some pages of Gozzano. She was fasting alone. She was seventy-two. In Rome, two proletarian youths were fasting in prison and kept fainting all the time. Other companions even went to work while conti

nuing to fast: and yet, not one word on the papers, to the very last. And this despite the fact that we were simply anticipating a sentence of the Constitutional Court on the respect of the rights of the minorities! We are libertarians, yes, but we are also conservatives, in that we want to maintain the highest values of our society.

Oggi - What was the reason for your long fasts?

Pannella - There was not just one "reason": if ever, there were several "reasons". Public virtue, for one thing. I fasted for fifty, sixty, seventy days, I can't even remember, and my friends kept telling me: are you crazy, do you want to die? Of course I didn't want to die! We were fighting against the death of the fundamental liberties of all citizens...Death due to drugs! All these atrocities which only the absolute respect of the Constitution can avert. So far, as a small, "bourgeois" party, we have singled out all the critical nodes of our society: all of them. Whereas the Communist Party or "Il Manifesto" (7) have not even denounced one of them. What should I talk about now? About the latest "Radical crime"? My smoking "hashish" publicly, for example. Why? Let us go back to 1956. At the time, the national press had devoted no attention whatsoever to the fact that many youths were being sent to prison for possessing 2 grams of "hashish". That was the period of the first groups of "provos", of "yippies".

..For us, who have read Baudelaire and his poems on alcohol and "hashish", all this romantic aura surrounding hashish is pure rubbish. You can imagine how much I care about the commonplace of the "maudit" youth who isolates himself from society by smoking hashish: I'm really not impressed. However, the phenomenon was real enough. And the law reacted to it simply by repressing it. We were the first, therefore, to raise the problem. We mobilized ourselves to help these unfortunate companions who had ended up in jail for possessing two grams of "hashish": through a sort of "tam-tam" hotline connecting the different prisons, we informed these prisoners that if they wrote letters to me full of love, ardour, and even homosexual intentions ("Dear Marco, I'm here, I'm suffering terribly, they are persecuting me, help me..."), those letters would have been read by the censorship of the prison and something would have changed for them. In Italy, it was a scandal even to be friends with that public nuisance, Pannella..

But there is one important fact: at the time, I ignored the fact that cannabis derivatives were not drugs. It took a lot of time to convince me about that. What is the definition of a drug? Who is a "drug addict"? Adriano Buzzati-Traverso, while claiming to be my friend, writes an article (while I am detained in jail!) in which he states that hashish affects the body's immune capacities. I am not saying that hashish is good for people. What I am saying, and I can prove it, is that hashish is not a drug, that it does not engender drug addicts; drugs are substances that cause addiction. A drug addict is a person who is enslaved to his vice, who loses any individual control and cannot live without multiplying the doses of drugs, until he dies of it. It must be said clearly: "hashish" does not engender addiction. We have been struggling for years to obtain a law which can control the manufacture and the use of psychotropic drugs and tranquillizers, because it is those tranquillizers and stimulants that are the r

eal mass drugs: they are drugs because they engender addiction.

Two and a half years ago - by that time, we were well informed about the subject, both from a scientific and human point of view - we managed to convince a colleague of ours who works at "Il Messaggero" to write an article about the problem, tackling it seriously, for once. The problem was a group of youngsters, among whom sons of wealthy people, who had been imprisoned after having been caught with "hashish" on them; we wanted to get them out of there, on the basis of the "Valpreda Bill". That article on "Il Messaggero" was followed by a flood of letters, most of which were strongly supportive of our theses. The youths were released. We avoided staging public demonstrations at the time because after forty days only 17 out of 170 youths remained in prison, which was a good result. Nonetheless, I felt I had to launch a warning on the impending danger. I said: "Heroin is about to reach Rome. There is no escape from heroin, which is a real drug. This means that in two year's time, we will start burying the firs

t victims". And now, as we can all see, we are faced to many deaths related to heroin.

At this stage, what is the link between heroin, which is lethal, and "hashish", which is not a drug in that it does not engender addiction? There is no organic relation. But there is a terrible sociological link. Each generation has its own symbols of more or less prohibited pleasures: the symbol of today's youth is "hashish". The fact that this is silly is beyond the point. We must face reality. How does a prohibitionist society such as ours react to this? By criminalizing thousands of young people, who, persecuted by the law which punishes a "crime" which is no worse than drinking alcohol or smoking three packs of "Celtique" a day, like I do, can be prosecuted even if they are caught with hashish for the first time. Consumers must therefore look out for the police, and they end up by depending on the pusher. They can thus be blackmailed. They are in the hands of the pusher, who can "sell" more hashish because each smoker tends to buy large quantities instead of just a personal quantity. As in the United S

tates, the drug market expands.

The result: the pusher offers the consumer heroin instead of "hashish". The first time, he gives it to him for free. He says: "listen, I'm out of "hashish" today. Try this stuff, it's even better". Of course, the consumer occasionally refuses, but this is very rare. The first reason is because he ignores the lethal difference between "hashish" and heroin; then, because he knows that for the law the crime is exactly the same; lastly, because, as I said, he can be blackmailed. From the pusher's point of view, there is no comparison between peddling heroin and selling a bit of "hashish": the profits are higher. Also because the addict, until he dies, is a profitable slave in that he becomes a pusher himself and proselytizes.

Oggi - What does this have to do with your smoking publicly? Wouldn't it have been better to resume your fast?

Pannella - No! Because by doing this I proved the absurdity of the current law. I, who am no "hashish" smoker, and who had been predicting, together with my companions, a heroin plague, organized a public demonstration to urge Parliament to revise the law. I did so openly, with a specific purpose. And yet, as I do it, I am arrested. On the basis of the current law, I must be arrested. But precisely because of this I believe I proved that the law is an inhumane idiocy, and that it purposes are purely repressive and political!

Oggi - Mr Pannella, what sort of a life do you lead?

Pannella - I spend my time alone or with friends. I live in an attic, I pay a L.400,000 rent. I haven't had a proper job and salary since 1963. Some people offer me presents. I collaborate here and there. I haven't been to the movies or to a concert or to the theatre, for years, nothing. No car, no telephone, no radio, no TV. I'm a happy man: a Radical is always happy. I have a positive approach to life.

Translator's notes

(1) Il Giorno: Milan-based daily newspaper, established in 1956.

(2) Ernesto Rossi (1897-1967): Italian politician and economist. Antifascist. Leader of Giustizia e Libertà, he was arrested in 1930 . He promoted the European federalist Movement and was one of the Radical Party's founding fathers.

(3) Elio Vittorini (1908-1966): Italian writer. Collaborator of "Solaria", he divulged the Americal literature with the "Americana" anthology. Major works: "Il Garofano rosso", (1933-34), "Conversazione in Sicilia" (1941), "Uomini e no" (1945).

(4) L'Espresso: Political, cultural and econimic weekly established in 1955 in Rome.

(5) Il Mondo: Political, cultural and economic weekly established in 1949 in Rome by Mario Pannunzio. Discontinued in '66, it was refounded by Arrigo Benedetti in 1969.

(6) Mario Pannunzio: (1910-1968): Editor (1943-47) of the daily "Risorgimento Liberale" and (1949-66) of the weekly "Il Mondo".

(7) Il Manifesto: Political movement and homonymous monthly magazine, established in 1969 by Communist exponents, who were then expelled from the Party. In 1971 it became a daily newspaper. It is currently an independent communist paper.