Against drugs and crime.

By Marco Pannella

ABSTRACT: Marco Pannella reproposes the idea of creating a "anti-prohibition league against drugs and crime". Drugs are a problem which everyone not directly interested often tends to avoid by considering it an endemic scourge that cannot be cured. And yet drugs continue to make victims at an increasing rate that is terrifying. In Italy in the first six months of this year it has caused 209 deaths (40% more than in 1986). And there is more: since the fear of AIDS has arrived, drugs as such are not so much in the news. Less is said about it without considering that it often causes the disease to spread.

Drugs are not something to be forgotten. If the number of deaths, which is unfortunately only the tip of a gigantic iceberg, were not enough, there are others figures which tell the story clearly: Italy spends 17,000 billion lire annually on light drugs, another 7,900 on heroin and 2,800 on cocaine. Thus it is an enormous problem that cannot always be sloughed off onto others while we compliment ourselves on our good luck in not having had to face it directly.

This is the spirit in which one should understand our initiative in publishing Marco Pannella's article from which "Il Tempo" [a Rome daily,ed.] entirely dissents while we fully share the ideas presented in the article here by Geno Pamplona. But we recognise, even while dissenting, the strong intent of the proposals and certainly the honesty in Pannella's article which aims at bringing to the forefront so important an issue as the fight without quarter against drugs.

(IL TEMPO, August 14, 1987)

THIS IS WAR. There are also the wounded, the maimed, the orphans, the desperate, the maladapted. The scourge is a single one, but the problems differ and should not be confused at the risk of not solving any of them.

"Without any doubt" the drug war in its present form is an exclusive result of the prohibition regime. Consequently it is this regime which must first of all be abolished. It is an international regime nd must be fought on an international level. That is to say, everywhere, beginning right here in Italy, Spain, here in Europe (or the USA, Thailand, Brazil, Bolivia or Beirut).

Alcohol and tobacco and psycho-pharmaceuticals of the widest diffusion are a scourge too. Their direct cost in human lives and social action is doubtless higher. But with regard to the life of the law and the right to life, of institutions, laws, criminality, and mortal danger for society and governments, there is no comparison between the drug problem and these others.

Without prohibition the drug scourge would be reduced to the dimensions of alcohol, tobacco and psycho-pharmaceuticals. Once entrusted to the official, "free" market drugs would lose all its special features distinguishing it from these other products - that is, its most terrible, dangerous, expensive and potentially fatal effects on society.

With the persistence of prohibition the scourge can only grow, and will soon grow geometrically in many parts of the world.

The power of the great criminal organisations produced by prohibition, which is tightly intertwined by now with that of the clandestine arms market, is already beginning to be transferred to and recycled in the institutional and economic spheres where it irremediably animates the anthropological sub-culture which it is developing with its interests and objectives.

What remains in memory of prohibition in America during the Twenties is not so much the victims of addiction to adulterated and unregulated alcohol produced and distributed by criminals. It is rather the plague of gangsterism, of cities and institutions under siege, bloodied and corrupted, of Mafia and Camorra who survived for decades to find unprecedented new life in the last twenty years with the new prohibition. In contemporary society the only "freely" circulating merchandise is in fact the prohibited kind for as long as it circulates. All "freely sold" merchandise is in reality subjected to many controls, direct and indirect. The meat that we at home or in restaurants, for example, is regulated from the time the animal is still alive. In the case of veal, for example, there are controls on what it is fed and its hygienic conditions, how it is transported to the slaughter houses, how it is slaughtered, how it is conserved, its sale, how it is displayed, its quality and its price. This kind of contro

l will certainly be in constant development for merchandise of all kinds, not only for food stuffs.

When merchandise is prohibited, by an ineluctable and fundamental law of the market, its value will increase in direct proportion to demand and the risk of supplying it. By prohibition this merchandise becomes the only kind to be truly "free" in price, quality, supply and consumption. The profits realised with it are totally "free", without competition and possibilities of regulation in a way that is incomparable with any other lucrative activity. By a natural logic of their own, the organisations connected with the sale of drugs reinvest their gigantic profits in promoting the sector and are poured into other sectors with no limits other than the capacity of the offer to be absorbed.

The specific characteristics of the drugs we are concerned with (the "hard" ones, the others not even deserving to be called drugs) is that create addiction, an objective condition of dependence and demand that expands progressively without hardly being influenced by repressive measures. By definition the addict's capacity to understand and to will is damaged, in particular in those moments when he is suffering a withdrawal crisis.

Prohibition, not drugs as such, is what makes him a socially dangerous person and, finally, dangerous to himself as well. The moral rehabilitation and return to life becomes constantly more difficult for a person who knows that he has and will have to commit serious acts of violence against others, innocent people, not rarely against those who most love him and whom he most loves. The anguish, the desperation, the evil of living become deeper and deeper, more direct, and more final. Until death or until the always more improbable cure, he becomes the perfect "machine" for crime and without the possibility of conscientious objection for the limitless performance of such acts.

The situation is different for the victims of alcohol, psycho-pharmaceuticals (not to mention tobacco) which are approved drugs, culturally speaking, supported by advertising and the productive and cultural forces that reign almost unopposed in our society.

It is three years since in the pages of "Corriere della Sera" I launched the anti-prohibition proposal in Italy. Since then I have in fact been silent, partly from choice and partly because the gag put on me has been very tight. The proposal has been talked about infinite times in debates rigorously reserved for others.

I have reflected, studied, taken part on investigating committees, parliamentary and others in Europe and Italy.

My comrades of the Radical Party and I have in the meantime tried to gain the maximum support possible for the work of all those struggling to aid and rehabilitate socially the drug addicts and ex addicts who appeal for such help. The acts of the EEC and the state budgets demonstrate this. We have also tried to support the noble fight, noble and dangerous, being waged without quarter from Vienna by Dr. Di Gennaro a bit everywhere in the world, but especially in the producing countries.

We will continue to do this, but perfectly well aware that is a question of helping and rehabilitating the wounded, the orphans, the maladapted, the defeated and the desperate of the war in progress. Or more precisely of a small part of them. Or aware that one has the moral duty to support the attempt of a struggle, when honest people are engaged in it, even if one is constantly more convinced that one cannot win it. This is the price of tolerance and humility. But it must not turn into an alibi for us. The enemy is prohibition, not a product, a substance or the evil of living, nor the necessary perversity of mankind or a part of mankind. Nor drugs as substances damnable and active in themselves. Nor the drug criminals invincible as such, superior to all others, the diabolical princes of the world. The enemy is also in us, in our tarrying and not organising ourselves, at once, because the battle appears rightly to be immensely hard and the goal too far above our strength. But if we don't begin at once,

in an organised way, we will never win, or only when it is too late.

One may love or loathe the ideas of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winner, and the weight he carries to which is attributed the "excesses" of the Reagan administration, the ultra-liberal ideology and the rigorous, almost messianic anti-Stalinism. But it seems difficult and imprudent to us to deny its seriousness and importance. But it is precisely on the drug front that Reagan and Milton Friedman appear to be the generals of two armies confronting each other. Reagan is openly going over to an ideology and a military and authoritarian practice against "drugs" much more freely and uncontestedly than in his other crusade, the one against the Sandinista demon. The U.N. and other international organisations are feeling this and a natural cultural and strategic convergence is forming between the "anti-drug medical attitude" of the Soviet empire and other totalitarian states and that of the American president and his supporters.

Milton Friedman does not hesitate to denounce this policy as self-delusion, anti-liberal and anti-liberalist, ideological, statist, wildly expensive on the level of law as well as the economy, and a losing policy too. A reading will suffice of the few pages, among many others, of his book "Against The Power Of The Status Quo" published by Longanesi in 1984.

In the course of a hearing - closed to the public - of the Special Commission of the European Parliament on the drugs problem, I asked Mr. Kendall, the director general of Interpol, to reply to a question in his own right and unofficially. He did so, and I beg him to excuse me here if for a good purpose I commit an indiscretion and. The question was the following: "Mr. Kendall, if we were gathered here as the heads of "Cosa Nostra" would we decide to support an anti-prohibition campaign or to defend the status quo of the prohibition policy?" The reply was probably difficult for him, tormenting, clear, but laconic. I will let everyone guess for himself which it was.

In these years, in every country, sometimes at the maximum levels of responsibility, in the world of science, of culture, of politics, of law and among those responsible for order and public security, there have been clear and courageous voices raised against prohibition. But inasmuch as the solution cannot come from the institutions of individual countries (or not from them alone. anti-prohibition in a single country would be useless suicide) but from international organisations or, at least, regions of the world such as the European community, North and Central America, the Middle and Far East, and so on, no steps forward have been taken.

Therefore, one must immediately go over to the organisation of a trans-national campaign, to the creation of an "Anti-Prohibition League".