ABSTRACT: Prohibition means being without a law, drugs circulating freely in the streets and in the prisons and in front of the schools: heroin cut with strychnine, crack sold off for pennies, the periodic disappearance of hash and marijuana from the market in order to induce addicts to use heavy drugs. "Free drugs" sold in the supermarkets - as the newspapers headline it - means, on the contrary, the full control of the law with regard to growing, producing, transporting, and selling. One speaks of a drug war, and not by chance, because war is the negation of law. The victors in the war are on the one hand the producers of consumer goods and, on the other, the ideologists of authoritarianism and state control. The anti-prohibition battle is of an unprecedented difficulty: for the first time it is a question of reforming legislation of a world level.

("IL MANIFESTO", August 21, 1987)

(The two Radical Party leaders discuss their anti-prohibition proposal to fight drugs.)

"As long as we still have some basic legality, however little it may be, we are not lost. Even in a little law the whole of the law is present, for us weak ones (the Weak Citizen: you only discover it now, but it is long that I have been carrying it within me) the law is all. Recent words of Guido Ceronetti (him of all people!) which might be chosen by an assembly of the International Anti-Prohibition League Against Drugs And Criminality. Because today prohibition really means being without a law, means drugs circulating freely in the street, in the prisons, in front of the schools; it means an army of dealers in a product that is often spoiled, of small, very small pushers (often young in years like the Neapolitan "muschilli"); it means heroin cut with strychnine; it means crack sold off today for a few pennies to create a new market; it means periodically withdrawing hash and marijuana from circulation in order to induce addicts to turn to cocaine or heroin.

"Free" drugs sold in the supermarkets (as the newspapers headline it - so then why not at the newsstands?) means, on the contrary, the full and sovereign control of the law over the growing, the production, the transportation, the sale and consumption. It means controls analogous to those which in other times or other cultures were imposed on substances that were or are called drugs (tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea) or for psychotrope drugs. Controls which may be more or less effective, laws which may be good or bad, but barriers in any case, primarily for the defense of the weak, instead of the present hypocritical "prohibition of everything" which is the same as the wildest lack of regulation, the most determined withdrawal of the state from all functions of control and social responsibility.

And it is no accident if the Reagan administration and the UN speak of a "war against drugs" (the UN being in this field Reaganised to the hilt - another proof that the internationalisation of the authoritarian instinct takes no great effort). Because war is the negation of law in the name of an emergency, of victory "at any price". But here is where the troble starts. Thousands of billions of dollars are being spent to "fight drugs" despite which criminal drug dealing is not defeated. On the contrary, every turn of the screw - and this has been the experience confirmed by every police department in the world - only pushes up the price of the prohibited wares and so of the profits earned by the traffickers. And at the same time the "modernisation of criminality" is promoted because, even where phenomena of this kind did not previously exist, it is forced to become a kind of Mafia, which is to say, create for itself an ever more efficient and wide-reaching organisation (also on the international level, o

bviously) and to seek ever more protection in the political and financial worlds.

And here are some of the brilliant results obtained up to now by the strategies of this war: constantly more astronomical profits for the traffickers (the head of the anti-Mafia commission, Abdon Alinovi, during the last months, has let us know - we private citizens and potential investors - that every lire invested in heroin brings a return of 1,615 lire and that the annual budget in this area reaches sales of 25,000 billion lire); constantly greater corruption of political and economic life in various countries and not only, in the "banana (or cocaine) republics".

Partial successes? But of course: a few hundred pounds of stuff taken out of circulation (although current statistics, based on the maximum of guess work, say that at most a fifth of the substances are taken out of circulation); the prisons every year bursting with tens of thousands of poor wretches turned into criminals by prohibition and not drugs. About 70-80% of prison inmates in Western countries are accused of directly or indirectly drug-related crimes. (In Italy, to judge by the statistics, perpetrators of other crimes, homicide and robbery in particular, are not even being sought.) In effect, what we see today is a kind of "maintenance" therapy of the phenomenon, with no hope of defeating it or even of stopping its progressive penetration into society. Let just one person stand up and say that prohibition has been a success anywhere at all, that it has won the war!

In reality, in this war as in others, there are victors, however: the producers of the "consumer goods" on the one hand, and the ideologists of authoritarianism and state control on the other. Because if the failure to attain the goal has totally failed, the success of the means has been equally total: even the freedoms of democratic-liberal countries have been "attenuated" or suspended; even in the leading nations of the West the expansion of the anti-drug "free zone" for police intervention begins to arouse alarm while there is a spreading of the Rognoni-La Torre laws and the whole arsenal of emergency measures - a new gift of Italian civilisation to the world after Fascism.

If, as is generally admitted, the strategic failure of the present policies is total, it is the weak who once again pay the price in terms of human suffering. We are concerned, certainly, about the social consequences of abolishing prohibition, but not in an abstract sense: we will work, we will begin at once to study the question of what to do together with those who have had the most diredct contact in all these years with suffering and at times with death. A meeting has already been set for September with the more than one hundred refuge centres co-ordinated by Don Ciotti of the Abele group. But we see what is happening today, what has happened in recent years: tens of thousands of people forced to live as outlaws, turning from victims into persecutors due to an inhuman law which deprives them of the only thing they need whcih is medical and psychological cures; obliged (as the courageous mothers of Naples would have it) to move from a prison to a therapeutic community when they can find one after mo

nths and months of abject experiences that are incomparably worse than drugs.

To all of this we say no: no to the folly of a policy that survives its own failure and is nourished by it; no to the barbarous acts of those who turn a needy invalid into a criminal with no hope of relief; no to the Philistines who, having nothing else to oppose to the reasonable and humanitarian anti-prohibition campaign, offer entirely speculative future tragedies (predictions which have been contradicted by the rare experiments made in the field such as the Dutch ones) and pretend to be deaf, or worse, not to hear the cries of pain around them today.

However that may be, we now need to move on to moral action, to organising ourselves and the situation. We are grateful and consoled by the generous and rigorous response of the Co-ordinated National Refuge Centres. What we are about to undertake together is, we are certain, a procedure of great value and efficacy.

We note with satisfaction the prompt and open reply of our comrades of Democrazia proletaria (1). We know that the hordes of pro-prohibition journalists express the rotten culture of power, not of the people of the country. And in the past we have picked the right battles against them: abortion and divorce, not to mention others.

This battle is certainly unprecedented in its difficulty. I believe that there has never before been in our time an attempt to reform legislation on a world level. We could spend hours illustrating the difficulties and the improbabilities. But there is also the realistic possibility of succeeding, in the first place of succeeding in creating a transnational Radical Party in the coming weeks and months. On our side there is a fact which has until now caused blindness rather than illumination. Every day there are about 20 million victims of criminal acts throughout the world (tens of thousands in Italy) caused by prohibition and not by some diabolical matter. This is wrecking all policies towards crime and law. The administration of justice and of police forces is prostrate and frustrated by it. Twenty million people are "forced" to be delinquent, to be violent, to commit crimes for which they provide the broadest social base that history records... An end to prohibition would immediately reduce almost t

o zero the addicts' mortality and morbility, and the specific inputs for drug consumption would be annulled. This would not provoke any greater a rush to take drugs than were caused by the breakdown of divorce or abortion laws.

Excuse us if - for the moment - this appears to be little.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Proletarian Democracy, a far-left wing party.