ABSTRACT: Prohibition has produced a culture of deviance and drugs and has created an unprecedented crime industry of unlimited profits. Pannella proposes an international league against prohibition so that free drug use - free to kill and to create profits and power for the Mafia and Camorra - can be turned over to drug regulation. The reaction to this has been a campaign of irrationality. Even the therapeutic communities and the addicts they are assisting have been mobilised. This has enabled the press to present a non-existent alternative between Pannella's proposals and the efforts to rehabilitate drug addicts.

(NOTIZIE RADICALI no.68, April 4, 1984)

Certainly I would have preferred if this time the initiative had come from other quarters, other parties. The wounds are still hurting from when we, by ourselves, and even then after years of waiting, felt that we had to raise the civil standard of divorce, of conscientious objectors, of abortion, of the penal codes, of the public financing of political parties, of sexual tolerance, of the P2 affair... But it is no longer possible to have a clean conscience at a cheap price. The drug problem has become by now the very problem of the health of our society and our nations.

If in 1975, to gain the approbation of at least the more tolerant and effective principles of the law, the most civil and equipped ones, I considered it necessary to let myself be arrested to put pressure on an other wise distracted and paralysed government, I hope today it will not be necessary to use the dramatic weapons of non-violence but that an appeal will suffice to the human and civil rationality and morality of each one of us. Neither can I forget that the most important Radical battle today is still the one against the Horsemen of the Apocalypse of hunger and war, for the approbation of the Piccoli bill for the salvation of the millions of dying and for the vital minimum pensions in our country at once.

We must aim higher, as high as the importance of this scourge requires. I am also ready to say publicly what we are all saying or feeling: however painful and terrible and lethal the direct "consumption" of drugs may be, they are almost negligible in comparison to the effects of producing and selling them.

The immense profits that the regime guarantees through prohibition are not to be compared to those of any other criminal or illegal enterprise. The terrifying power conferred by these profits by now officially determine the institutional life of many countries and weighs on that of many others promoting in wide areas of the entire world the multinationals of crime to subjects of political power (and to subversive political activities), corrupts and bends our society with the tentacles of its organisations, threatening and striking at entire populations. The production and sale of drugs and arms is becoming constantly more closely intertwined, both of them establishing themselves in the grimmest and most tragic results of the disorder reigning in the world. On every step of the social ladder and in every country where the principles of law and liberty are also applied to the economic sector, thousands of criminals necessarily earn by taking the risk of illegitimate speculations and in a short time they f

ind themselves promoted to a kind of new class of power, ramified and self-reproducing, thanks also to the natural and necessary process of laundering their money and investing it in the most disparate, and delicate sectors, all of them above suspicion. The entire financial, political and social system risks being polluted and conditioned by them. The policy of repression by itself has by now revealed its impotence and inadequacy by punishing in general the mass of victims of this circuit and this enterprise of exploitation and death, while only occasionally and marginally managing to cut off tentacles of this gigantic octopus which immediately grow back.

The regime of prohibition is the necessary and perhaps also sufficient cause (in the long run) of the birth and growth of this spreading criminal and deadly enterprise. This Gordian knot must be untied before it is too late, if it is not already too late: this we can only verify by making the attempt with a civil and political struggle of the highest highest risk but of an eequally high morality and necessity.

The complete lifting of criminal penalties for use of drugs, the regulation of their sale, the public control (or monopoly) of production would immediately bring about the beginning of the process of destroying the criminal enterprise built on "prohibited drugs".

This objective would have to be pursued on the international level of the positive law of all countries to be fully realised. But it is necessary to begin from various simultaneous and converging points: the nations, the European Community, the UN.

For this purpose an anti-prohibition international league for the fight against drugs and its Italian committee is being organised. There is no time to lose. This horrible plague, this cancer is being nourished and not assuaged or cured by a culture and a policy that put the victims in the centre of the target rather than very evident and frightful causes and reasons for the plague. Thus we ask each and all to take on their responsibility. Memberships, contributions, suggestions, insults and threats can be sent to me c/o the Radical Group, Chamber of Deputies, Rome. Thanks to all and in first place to the "Corriere" for giving me space.