ABSTRACT: Prohibition is entirely responsible for the scourge of drugs because it turns every addict into a goose that lays golden eggs. Because of prohibition a substance that would not be worth more than tobacco or alcohol is literally worth more than gold. The anti-drug gurus have only one reply: the launching of a war against producers, middle-men and consumers.

(IL SABATO, September 24-30, 1988)

The drug scourge is due entirely to prohibition, to the legislative regime imposed in the illusion that Caesar, the state, can liberate our consciences and those of others, defeat the devil and sin, evil and error.

Prohibition turns every addict into a goose who lays golden eggs until it dies, until it is killed in so doing. To make other people - always more other people - into drug addicts is an absolute necessity: for the addicts it is necessary in order to keep on taking drugs, and for the sellers it is a source of fabulous earnings. A personal or moral drama or tragedy becomes a social and institutional tragedy - by now even a planetary one.

Because of prohibition the drug addict is forced to become a delinquent, is forced to use violence, is forced to degrade himself. Because of prohibition a product which otherwise would have more or less the same value as alcohol or tobacco, with ordinary earnings both for the producers and the sellers, "is worth more than gold" and has created the most gigantic of criminal organisations that tends to get mixed up with the national and multinational power structures themselves. Thanks to prohibition and not to drugs or drug addicts, 60-80% of the Western world's budgets for police and justice activities are consumed or immobilised by the "war against drugs". Thanks to prohibition addicts must continually perpetrate acts of violence, purse-snatching, hold-ups, theft. If for each addict we estimate an average of about thirty thefts or acts of violence annually, in Italy they create about three million victims a year. Yes, thirty million in a decade. It is only just that they too should be represented, hear

d and defended as they have tried vainly to do through the Radical Party for years and years.

At a frightening rate the drug dollar and drug political power are taking over territories, institutions, governments - thanks to prohibition. "Thanks to prohibition" we read of child seven and eight years old pushing and dealing in drugs along with their mothers or grandmothers. The newspaper reports on the Mafia, the Camorra [the Neapolitan mafia, ed.] and the 'Ndrangheta [the Calabrian mafia, ed.] are stories of drugs because prohibited drugs today make up the destiny of the great criminal enterprises contending for control of the market up to the last drop of blood.

The great gurus of drug prohibition and the emergency prophets have only one reply: let a war without quarter finally be unleashed; hit the producers, the smugglers, the merchants, the pushers and the impenitent consumers ever harder; give them years and years of prison, all of them. These are the same people who put hashish on a par with heroin, and thus the criminals are in the millions rather than tens of thousands. No "moderate quantities" will they tolerate, only [therapeutic] communities or prisons. But they do not tell us where we are to find millions of accommodations either in the one place or the other, nor if the army along with the police will suffice to track down and arrest all those millions of criminals or irresponsible people and then guard them, cure them, redeem them and - naturally - in that way give them back "the love of life", "self-respect", and find them jobs - a very simple ambition even if there are already three and a half million unemployed in Italy.

But it is well known that I am not suspected of being a Christian like them.