ABSTRACT: Commenting Marco Pannella's proposal to legalize the drug market, the author points out that in the public debate the considerations on the reasons for which people use drugs have been censored. In a society in which people live mostly alone, drugs become a way to look for a meaning, a way to escape from an "unhappy conscience". The use of drugs has therefore become part of our customs. As a consequence, Pannella's question and proposal becomes almost fully legitimate, because it raises the problem of civil rights and that of the failure of repressive crusades with a different language.

(Notizie Radicali n.200 of 31 August 1987 from "La Repubblica" of 23 August 1987)

It cannot be denied that Marco Pannella has the capacity to focalize the moral problems as they are: almost on his own, he has managed to create a new sensitivity and a new kind of language as compared to our culture for problems such as civil rights. Civil rights are those rights whose object is not an economic counterpart but the safeguard of man's freedom and of the equality of all citizens. The language of civil rights has gone beyond the language of classes, in which the Catholics and the historic left had reached their common expression. In this way, he has given a new meaning to the word 'laity'.

The very environmental themes are connected with the common root of civil rights: it is not by chance that Giorgio Ruffolo, presently Minister for the Environment, Socialist, has pointed to these themes, as well as to many others, precisely on "La Repubblica", as the essence of a major political and social reform, The new vice-secretary of the Italian Communist Party, Achille Occhetto, has formulated the proposal of the reform conceived by the PCI in the sense of the new rights of the citizens. I'm saying this because the spectacular dimensions in which Pannella is a master tend to make us forget that they go far beyond this aspect.

Even the proposal to liberalize drugs cannot simply be recorded as a form of exhibition. It serves the purpose of recalling our attention on a fact: the failure of repressive policies on drugs. In our epoch, virtually anyone can take drugs at any age and whenever he likes. Prisons become a place where corruption and initiation to drugs thrive. The most powerful criminal organizations of our times, the Italian and Chinese mafias, have taken control over the drug market and defend it with continuous murder. Adulterated drugs involve a death risk and at times even lead to actual death.

Crime, murder, death due to adulterated drugs, general spread of drugs, perverse use of prisons and hospitals: these are the fruits of the penalization of drugs. The policy of removal of the plantations are a failure, not only in Latin America, but also in Turkey and Thailand. These countries are in the political area of the West, the part of the world most exposed to the drug problem. In such circumstances, it is only fair to make an estimate of the results of the repressive policy.

There are, of course, a number of problems as regards a policy of depenalization of drugs: an important one is that of the power of the same interests which sustain the market. But the greatest difficulty is prejudice: that is, the idea according to which not to penalize drugs means accepting the use of drugs as a normal practice and thus overturning the moral and cultural bases of a society founded on production and consumption, which calls for a foreseeable behaviour.

In our culture there is a need for order which is growing more and more. The West is afraid of having unleashed Acheron and thus be forced to return to coercive patterns, at least from an interior point of view. This is the origin of a certain revival of religious and moral values. Freedom is at present accepted only as a political fact, an exterior fact, and not as an inner reality. We are confronted with a sort of renewal of Calvinism: freedom of action but not freedom of feelings. But in actual fact, on the contrary, drugs have become part of our custom: at such a degree, that its very consumption has expanded and decreased at the same time. The individual himself has to some extent succeeded in personally controlling his need to escape. The much feared normalization of drugs is in fact already in force: and it is precisely for this reason that the consumption of drugs has acquired a different aspect. At this stage, we could ask ourselves if the most terrible social evils have been caused by drugs or by t

he way in which drugs have been handled from a cultural and social point of view. The use of drugs has been criminalized first culturally and then penally. The question concerning why a person takes drugs has been censored. Instead, we believe the solution of this question to be the basis of every form of rehabilitation of drug-addicts. Anyone who wishes to help a drug-addict must accept the fact, and take it as a rule, that drugs have had a meaning for that person. It is from that point of view that it is possible to start looking for a new meaning. However, this collective question has never been posed: what is the meaning of the use of drugs in our culture and in our civilization? Here, from the point of view of a culture based on legitimation, from the point of view of common ethics, it has been decided that drugs are an evil as such. It is rather surprising: after having been dominated by the philosophical world of existentialism with its language that referred to a crisis of the civilization, no one se

ems to have understood that a single person could really live in a state of complete isolation. In such conditions, drugs become a sort of quest for a meaning, a way to escape the "unhappy conscience". Still, the "unhappy conscience" of our times has produced less harm to mankind as compared to the florid moral conscience of the first decades of the century, which is responsible, in the name of sacred values, of two world wars and millions of deaths. The drug-addict is not an anomalous character: he is the expression of one of the means to look for a sense for the "unhappy conscience". First of all we should understand that taking drugs is not simply an anomaly, it is the condition to formulate an attitude of human solidarity. One of the best products of these years is the struggle for the rehabilitation of the drug-addicts: the struggle for the overcoming of isolation. Many believers have found in this struggle the sense of their faith, many non-believers have found in it the meaning of their life. The most

effective answer therefore has not been repression. It is in this context that Pannella's question finds its radical legitimacy.

Translator's notes

(1a) Gianni Baget Bozzo: Catholic priest, political essayist, member of the European Parliament for the Italian Socialist Party.