ABSTRACT: On Monday 5 December 1988 over 20 delegates of three parliamentary groups - first signers Pannella, Capanna, Filippini - made an interpellation in the Chamber of Deputies on the social costs of prohibition on drugs.

We the undersigned request the consulted Ministers to urgently provide the following data:

a. the number of casualties, of critically or less critically wounded persons following bag-snatching or other acts of violence, the origin of which can be related to the need to find money for the purchase of drugs on the black market, for the first six months of 1988;

b. the total sum of the expenses relative to the same period for repressive, judicial, prison and sanitary activities connected to the illicit drug trade;

c. an estimate of the total sum which citizens have been forced to spend for the defence of their person and/or of their property (installation of armoured doors and alarm systems, rental of safe deposit boxes, increase in insurance expenses, etc...);

d. a quantitative estimate of the sum collected in the same period for the purchase on the black market of drugs by means of bag-snatching, thefts and robberies, and the global economic damage caused by such acts of violence.

In view of the coming approval of new legal norms providing for the use of even more repressive methods to fight drugs in our country, the undersigned ask to know if the Minsters already have access to a system for the gathering and the systematic control of such data,in order to periodically verify the trend of the social costs of the repressive norms presently in force.