ABSTRACT: The new bill on drugs being discussed in the Chamber of Deputies contains a glaring contradiction: on the one hand, it allows for the use and possession of a "small quantity" of drugs for personal use, and on the other hand it prohibits the commerce, the sale and the production of drugs. And it also continues to consider derivatives of Indian hemp as drugs. Marco Pannella states that the law is crime inducing because it makes commerce in drugs a crime, forces drug addicts to enter into a criminal circle and augments proselytism. He concludes with a dramatic prediction: deaths from heroine will double within a few years if this bill becomes law.

("Il Mondo" - October 1975, from "Marco Pannella - Writings and Discourses - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

The deputies are examining the new bill on drugs sent to them from the Senate. Their responsibility is a particularly grave and terrible one. They must legislate with the urgency that the diffusion of this scourge demands - which was largely foreseen and has punctually occurred in the general indifference of all parties except the Radicals.

But they have before them a hypocritical and contradictory proposal that accepts the most civil principles that for almost ten years we have fought for and in practice denies them. Neither can the deputies deny the fact that in our prisons thousands of innocent and sick people by now continue to kill themselves, to be murdered, literally and morally. But what, in reality, are these "drugs", these "drug addicts", that they frighten us so? The drug user appears to be, and is, the modern "possessed" man, possessed by the "devil". He is a slave who has no choice but to hook others on drugs and kill them as he is killing himself, if he doesn't want to die immediately amidst atrocious suffering and/or in prison. The slave of a society and profit industry, of consumerism, with its values and its bosses who are called "mafia" only because and when it is convenient. At the source of the opiates industry there are officially states, even democratic ones, and, notoriously, the international of the secrets services of

almost all countries, not only the French and the Americans, and the mafia multinational.

We are afraid of these drugs and these drug addicts and we must defend ourselves against them, we must concern ourselves with them on the legal level and with a human and civil commitment. Not only of these, but at least and prejudicially of these. Thus we Radicals and Socialists have tolerated for now the scandal of the lack of public control of production, illicit propaganda, and

mass prescription in regard to so many psycho-pharmaceuticals that are themselves frightening drugs and whose consumption is painfully exalted and prescribed as a productive social measure of exploitation.

These clarifications, these choices, are necessary, indispensable. Is strychnine a drug? No, it is a deadly poison. And more than that, words must have a meaning, after all. Are the derivatives of Indian hemp drugs? No. Hashish and marijuana are not drugs. They may perhaps be poisons and only that. Whereas nicotine, tobacco that is, and alcohol are drugs, poisons that are drugged and drugging. The social cost of alcohol consumption in Italy is staggering, enormous: seventy percent of the beds in clinics for old people who by now are incurable, are occupied by alcoholics. Half the fatal traffic accidents are due, directly or indirectly, to alcohol. Liver and other diseases due to the habitual consumption of our cherished hard liquors, our excellent table wines are a real massacre, are among the first on the list.

And yet, even this we tolerate for now.

Who has ever heard of anyone dying (or being killed) from marijuana?

And most of all, science is unanimous - I repeat, unanimous - after eighty years of intense official research, in maintaining that nothing, nothing of scientific value indicates that the products of Indian hemp are habit forming, produce physical dependency. The tables of the World Health Organisation are explicit in this.

So then? What have our senators - whom we have had to awaken from their lethargy - decided on this point? Continuing to consider hashish a "light" drug, but a "drug" for all that, they have decided to allow its use, but only in the toilet at home like the first cigarettes of their far-off childhood. If on the other hand someone becomes a "receiver", buys, smokes, transports, sniffs, offers it or praises it in public, or allows others to smoke it in his living room, he will be punished either by forced public "cures" or else by fines and prison until healing, failure or death arrive.

And how in the world are the marijuana smokers to be mercifully cured? By psychoanalysis at the expense of the State to remove their Oedipus complexes and the reasons for their unhappiness?

By the anti-capitalist revolution come to remove the social and instrumental causes of the underworld of these criminals or vice-ridden elements? Since there is no clinical picture of drug addiction or dependency into which these law breakers fit, one can see no other cure for them other than the electric or insulin shock therapies based on psychiatric-ideological values. "Is marijuana a drug and are you an addict?" they will be asked; and if the answer is no and they seem to be trying to act smart, zap them with an electric discharge. "Will you smoke the cigarettes of the State tobacco monopoly from now on?" No? Zap them again. "Six extra-parliamentarians and Corvisieri (an extra-parliamentarian, ed.) haven't convinced you?" Do you believe in God and Cardinal Poletti? Will you abandon the Communists in the next Rome city elections?" Another zap. This is the way, remember it, that the State, the Church, the medical profession, the family and the psychiatric profession cured the ideologicall

y drugged Giovanni Sanfratello, he of the "Braibanti Affair". I'm afraid we would still be tolerant and resigned if it were only a question of this. But the bigger problem, dear deputies, is another: it is tragic, anguishing, you cant pretend not to see it. Try to apply, in fact, such an "anti-consumption" policy (so dear to the heart of Senator Generoso Petrella) to hard liquor. What would happen? What happened with America's prohibition. To prohibit with violence the consumption of something that society demands, tolerates or exalts, means pushing immense numbers of citizens into an illegal position and creating the most illegal, uncontrolled and promiscuous profits for the empire of underworld enterprise. It means organised crime will swim like fish in the water of the general illegality. The drugs, alcohol and gambling empires will win the traditional victory of thee mafia and the gangs. Now, like it or not, in many parts of the world and in our country we aren't succeeding in imposing our nicoti

ne on a large part of the younger generation, just as they (unfortunately from the standpoint of our health) aren't succeeding in imposing their hashish smoking on us.

With the permissiveness of the Senate, hashish consumption will not diminish, it will continue at an accelerated rate if anything. Therefore there will be an increase in the social mechanisms that follow on the logic of profits, earnings, proselytism, illegality and of placing the consumer and the dealer on the same level. Thus there will be a strengthening, even isolation and destruction, of the supporting structures of real drugs, of the opiates, the industry of death, atrocious and ever more rapid, diffused and victorious.

Honourable deputies, there are three elements involved in the production of "drugs" and of drug assassins and massacres: nature, chemistry and the law. The laws, like that criminal one that has given powerful support to criminals for the last twenty years and has made of the State a hangman; or like the one that we risk having because of our ineptitude, our negligence, our hypocrisy, our lack of rigor and civil morality.

As with abortion, so with drugs and the "reform" of the (State, ed.) radio and television, the behaviour has been ignoble, fascist: much worse than Bernabei's (erstwhile general director of the RAI) - which yet received not only our, but also the Constitutional Court's seal of approval - that accepted, for its part, the four-hour debate between the LID and its opponents in the single month of September 1969; a hard, tightly disputed debate during prime time, much to the pleasure of the listeners and the advantage of democracy. However tardy, this was a fundamental contribution to the knowledge of the problems, to collective reflection, to your work. But this time, to avoid putting the "protagonists" of the reforms in the video and radio limelight, the parliamentarians and politicians who are responsible for the administration of public information have preferred to impede all true debate and thus leave you all to yourselves with your tremendous responsibility for which we do not envy you. In order to provid

e some small compensation for the lack of civil and democratic information regarding drugs as well as divorce, we have had to risk going to prison deliberately and so at least send a signal through the press, not public, but in spite of all not so ignoble as the RAI-TV of Finocchiaro (general director of the RAI) and his patrons.

For this, honourable deputies of the Chamber's Justice and Health Commission, you are only relatively responsible. For this reason too we ask you to use your prestige to save at least whatever trace of life that there is still left in non-violent, non-criminal republican institutions.

Otherwise I am obliged to make a prediction that is at least as well founded as the one I made publicly three years ago when in asking for a new law we forecast at least three hundred fatalities due to heroin in 1975. In the second half of 1976 alone these will be more than one thousand five hundred, and as many again in the Spring of 1977, the year of new parliamentary elections.

Others have already written of the other huge contradictions of the law: you know what they are. What counts now therefore is to distinguish on the legal level the "drugs" from the "non-drugs". At least that much must be done. We must isolate the heroin industry, isolate it in order to kill it, this infamous industry, by all possible means. For this reason we urgently appeal to you, with a deliberated, duty-bound faith. For the first time in ten years of political battle, we do it not so much with the hard and certain conscience of militants for a new society, but rather with the deep anguish and humility of people - men, women, comrades, parents, children, brothers and sisters of potential victims or also potential, wretched murderers. Otherwise we must admit that this political democracy too is operating in this country like a lethal drug.