ABSTRACT: One hundred thousand poor drug-addicts or addicts reduced to poverty must, because of the law and not because of "drugs", commit a total of many thousands of acts of violence against the poor and the defenceless each year. The Radical Party wants to become, and can become, the party, the league of the victims of the "war against drugs".

(Notizie Radicali n.180 of 26 August 1988 from Il Giornale di Sicilia of 19 August 1988)

It is the prohibitionist regime against certain drugs, the derivatives of opium, coca leaf and cannabis (the latter not even worthy of being considered a "drug"), which has triggered the criminal inferno in which we are plunging deeper and deeper, hitting rock-bottom. If all "prohibitions" against facts and things which are accepted by wide strata of the population are noxious and exacerbate the problems they claim to denounce and cure (e.g. the problems solved with the law on divorce, on abortion, and that on alcohol in the US), the persisting of this, the "war against drugs" unleashed in these last decades, simply claims more victims and is useful only to crime, represents a misfortune and a real system of criminalization of society and states.

The time is ripe for the victims to rebel, and for us to acknowledge the main and almost sole cause of the plague, and for us to immediately and indiscriminately fight against this criminal and criminogenic folly, which a sickly and weak culture of power risks bringing to a situation of massacre of the life of rights and of the right to life of the people.

One hundred thousand poor drug-addicts, or addicts reduced to poverty must, because of the law and not because of drugs, commit millions of acts of violence directed against the poor and the defenceless each year. These victims may not be mentioned, they must be ignored. The state is totally incapable of preventing and repressing these millions of offences. If they are denounced, the police honestly admits to being impotent. I accuse the sordid and infamous moralism of those who, in the name of a "war against drugs", of a defense of "drug-addicts" (who on the contrary turn into murderers or are murdered themselves) "drug" the victims of these millions of acts of forced violence with a dishonest and biased information. I accuse those who - in the name of "public order", of "morals" of "solidarity" (even that!), of "justice", of "health" - slaughter those same values and our society. The legislators, the rulers of the world (some hundred or thousand of powerful-impotents, perhaps ten in Italy), are naked: it i

s foolish to be afraid of being presumptuous and insane by saying it, when it is those same forces and those same strata which are homogeneous to extermination (because of starvation, war, misery, but never because of the destruction of the environment) of tens of thousands of people. Here too, we should declare "war against war".

The "war against drugs" is, in fact, having effects everywhere, as in all "classic wars". The Radical party alone, in Europe and in Italy, in the way it can (very badly) is determined to enter the battle field. A transnational and transpartisan party, it is the only one that can, even in Palermo, even in Sicily, ask for the trust of those who are slaughtered or threatened by resignation, despair and defeat. The Radical Party asks for this trust and relies on it for its endangered survival, so strong is the fear it generates in the cowards of all "powers", be they official or concealed.

The Radical Party wishes to become and can become the party, the league, of the victims of the "war against drugs", that is everyone starting from the drug-addicts, from the slaves of the criminal army made invincible by the noxious prohibitionist law, be they leaders or small-scale dealers, but above the league of all of those who are fed up with being the victims of a violent system, with seeing justice and the police destroyed by this "war", with paying taxes to see them transformed into enormous profits for the organized crime and death. But is is necessary to join it, to subscribe in order for the party to be able to accomplish these things.

I wrote it yesterday and I'm repeating it today, because the prohibitionist law is the ascertained cause of the violence of which tens of millions of people are the victims in a few years, given that the State and the States enforcing this law are not in the conditions of protecting or compensating the victims of this state of affairs, given that we are "war victims", given that all over the world there are "war damages", it is necessary to ask the state to compensate these people, in Washington or in Rome, in La Paz as in Palermo. It is time for us to say that the power of the political parties and the power of the industrial-military complex are the first to be a form of mafia.

It is time to say it is not by chance that no one talks about narco-lire, or that - when mentioned - it is best not to do anything, as for narco-dollars. In Sicily there is a "specific" mafioso-like criminal: and that criminal is created by the influx of mafia money, thousands of billions departing from Rome to bury civil society and the Sicilian "market" of Southern Italy. In the whole of the South it is enough to look "politicians" of different lobbies in the eyes to notice that those eyes all look the same: dilated pupils, blinded by the drug-billions.

But, supporting this "specific" Sicilian, making him international, creating him and using him is no other but the "war against drugs", with the strong, invincible criminality it sustains and is sustained by. "Mafia", mayor Orlando? "Mafia", vice-mayor Rizzo? "Mafia" Green friend Battaglia? "Yes, mafia" booms the President of the anti-mafia commission Chiaromonte, who says there will be big trouble for those who "collaborated" with the "mafia" of the sixties!? Mafia is drugging you, my friends! It already has drugged you. And Muccioli is no use. To detoxicate you I suggest the same treatment I suggest to the mafiosi who would choose to live rather than to die murdered or murderers: a sound dose of Radical memberships, non-violent, antiprohibitionist memberships, for your and our right to life, and for the life of rights.