ABSTRACT: The penal repression of drugs is useful neither to society at large nor to the direct victims of drugs. It is a remedy that is a thousand times worse than the evil, a multiplier of violence and sufferings without precedent.

(Radical News n. 51 of the 11th of March 1988)

The strategy of prohibition against drugs is leaking from all sides, and the political thought of the States can oppose only rhetorics and the irresolution of the tragedy of an international failure which involves unspoken sufferings for the individuals and increasingly unsolvable lacerations within the juridical regulations and the institutions.

Each day, on the international press, we read new informations that should rouse people's conscience like and alarm bell, but it is as if the ears of the mass medias themselves were deaf, owing to the idiotic brain-washing of which they are both victims and promoters, and to the ordinary bureaucratic attitude of the anti-drug professionals, who have always been the drug traffickers' best friends.

An institutional alarm, above all. The recent "Report of the international drug enforcement organization" literally states that: 1) "the use of drugs, both natural and synthetic, has experienced such a rapid progression in the last twenty years that it presently threatens all the countries and all the social classes. The phenomenon no longer belongs exclusively to specific urban milieus, and is typical neither of intellectuals or illiterate, rich or poor: it spreads and claims victims everywhere"; 2) "the production of drugs affects an increasing number of countries, all over the world. Such illegal activities, which have reached alarming proportions, are financed and run by organizations that have international connections and that benefit from complicities within the financial milieus. At this point, large-scale drug traffickers behave like large multinational corporations in the selection of the markets, and, having access to almost unlimited funds, can corrupt officials, spread violence and terrorism, in

fluence the application of international conventions on drug enforcement, and personally exert an economic and political power in several regions of the world".

Secondly, it is a political-military alarm. The Medellin Cartel, the powerful holding run by the Colombian cocaine traffickers, is capable, at this stage, of influencing the foreign policy of several Central American states, and the Reagan administration is confronted with a systematic destabilization which it cannot tackle with the common procedures of diplomacy and army. General Noriega, the strong man of Panama, a drug trafficker or a person paid by the drug traffickers, is capable of dismissing the President of the Republic, Delvalle, a puppet president backed by the U.S., and to impose his law to the Reagan administration. "The advantage for the drug traffickers is that they do not acknowledge national sovereignties or borders, unlike our governments" a Colombian minister states on the Herald Tribune of the 25th of February, while retired General Paul Gorman, former commander of the U.S. Southern army, states before the Congress of the United States of America that "the Latin-American drug traffic repre

sents such a wide parallel world, such a rich and powerful one, that it can literally buy governments and destabilize entire societies", adding that "the drug traffic represents a clear and present danger for the very survival of democracy in countries that have long since been friends and allies of the U.S".

Thirdly, a social alarm. A very recent report on the criminal situation of Rome informs that 70% of all crimes committed in the Italian capital and in the Latium region are connected to the traffic and dealing of drugs. Unless we share the ideas of the fundamentalist Right, according to which the use of drugs induces crime in itself (formerly it was said that all poor had an innate tendency toward crime, now they talk about "drug-addicts"), the social plague connected to prohibition, and to the policy of extremely high prices it involves, expresses itself through these figures: the authors of 92% of muggings belong to the drug milieu, as do 88% of the authors of thefts from cars, 54% of the authors of car thefts, 69% of those who steal in private houses, 74% of those who commit robberies in shops and offices, 65% of those who commit robberies in private homes, 94% of those who commit robberies against individuals, 98% of those who commit robberies that end with a homicide. Frightening figures that correspond

to those of other large cities: the Chief of the Police of New York City recently stated that, in his area, 90% of crimes have but one source, drug traffic.

Fourthly a sanitary alarm. The culture that is connected to the strategy of prohibition is the culture of silence, of taboo, and therefore of disinformation. To ban hashish and marijuana, which are practically harmless drugs and also cheap ones, with the same resolute determination with which potentially lethal and extremely expensive drugs are prohibited, has irresponsibly favoured the interests of the traffickers, who make profits that are immensely superior to the diffusion of heroin or cocaine.

In the same way, the fact of attributing perverse sanitary effects to drugs, with an implicit strategy of disinformation, has created a social calamity without precedents.

Not drugs, but infected needles are at present the cause for the diffusion of AIDS, as in the past - and even nowadays - it has been the cause for the spread of hepatitis. Years and years of disinformation now weigh on the sanitary anti-AIDS strategies of all countries. Having circumscribed the homosexual contagion thanks to the responsibility of homosexual individuals and their associations, AIDS is spreading in the world, transported with incredible swiftness by the drug-addicts, by the tip of their needles and by their sexual intercourses. Prostitution, which is a common side effect of prohibition, multiplies by millions of times the risk of a contagion. Even countries such as the United States, where, unlike Italy, the contagion through drug-addicts has not represented, up to now, the main vehicle of the disease, acknowledge the new projections on the development of the disease: and today the president of the U.S. Commission for the Prevention of AIDS, Admiral James Watkins, asks that three quarters of t

he funds allotted by the government (2 billion dollars) be used in programmes for "addicts".

A wealth, a political, economic and financial power without comparisons for the criminal organizations; corruption of the state officials and of the leading classes; lethal threat to the sanitary security of the populations. All this, to a person that is not intoxicated by the ideological propaganda, appears like the poisoned fruit not of drugs, nor of the drug trade, but of the proxy given to the criminal world to trade drugs, with the relevant expropriation of the juridical institutions, of the trade organs, of the consumer associations. The power of the producers and traders of wine and alcohol is that of a powerful lobby, contained and curbed by the laws and the control organs. A lobby among the thousand existing lobbies, similar to that of the producers and traders of tobacco. Only "drugs" are the source of criminal power, of political corruption, of social devastation.

Not because it is more dangerous: the ratio between the deaths related to "drugs" and those related to alcohol and tobacco is one to one thousand, one to one thousand and two hundred, in each country.

Not because prohibition on drugs has hampered its diffusion. The United Nations report acknowledges the failure of prohibition openly, even the prohibitionist professionals amplify its cry: "The truth is that the traffickers' power is so strong as to dominate and penetrate any market", Giuseppe Di Gennaro, general director of another UN "anti-drugs" agency, Unfdac, explained in the middle of February: "On the one hand there are the traffickers' organizations: well structured economic powers, and with specific interests, a great coherence, and that know how to pursue their targets. On the other hand there are words, and too many compromises with those that operate on the opposite side. I therefore believe that the situation, in its present configuration, is desperate".

The CO.R.A., Radical Anti-Prohibitionist Coordination, created with the purpose of organizing the political battle on the basis of the thoughts and proposals of Marco Pannella and of the many associations that operate - in the clandestinity of disinformation - in many countries of the world, suggests to the parliamentary organs of the different states, to the international community, to the supra-national organizations, a radical and immediate change in the strategies of containment of the diffusion of drugs. Penal repression is useful neither to society at large not to the direct victims of drugs. It is a remedy that is a thousand times worse than the evil, a multiplier of violence and of suffering without precedent.