ABSTRACT: The founding congress of the International Antiprohibitionist League was held precisely in Italy, where a new, harsh prohibitionist campaign is being conducted. The author denounces this blind and demagogic fury, which aims only at the criminalization of consumers instead of tackling the problem of the powerful drug market created by prohibition.

(Notizie Radicali n. 55 of 13 March 1989)

We had met the last time in Brussels, at the end of the International Talks on antiprohibitionism (29 September - 1 October 1988), with a precise commitment: to meet again, after a few months, after having thoroughly analyzed data and reports (after, among other things, the congress of the Drug Policy Foundation, held in Washington at the end of October) to give birth, at last, to a political organization. A league uniting persons and associations, capable of translating into initiatives, legislative proposals, opinion campaigns, that extraordinary richness of knowledge and commitment which exists throughout the world against prohibition and its devastating consequences. We had at first thought of meeting in Zagreb, at the beginning of January, immediately after the conclusion of the congress of the Radical Party; after the NO of the federal government of Yugoslavia, the date had been postponed to the end of March, in coincidence with the conclusion of the Radical Congress. The new postponement, decided in S

trasburg, to enable a last attempt to hold the congress in Budapest, where it was in fact held, made a further postponement impossible from an organizational point of view, and forced us to organize the founding congress in Rome to limit the expenses. But for once chance and necessity seem to coincide: it is precisely in Italy, of all the Western countries, that the most fierce and blind counter-attack of the "status quo" is being conducted, to prevent, by means of an indiscriminate use of power, demagogy and mass-medias, the assertion of reasonable, concrete and humanitarian proposal. In the country of the mafia, the camorra and the 'ndrangheta, of the forty thousand narcobillion of income each year, of the train massacres, organized, according to Superprefect Sica by a "criminal agency which runs the drug and weapon traffic, the Italian government and the Socialist Party in particular have started a witch hunt against a supposed "drug culture" and against "permissiveness" (and the first one to get tangled

in it is precisely the Socialist Party's number 2, Claudio Martelli, caught in a muddle typical of such toxic climate). The government and the Socialist Party invest political prestige, deploy financial resources, charge with unbearable burdens the judiciary administration and the police forces to - incredible but true - fill the courts and the prisons with thousands of small-scale consumers of soft or hard drugs. This is the best favour that could have been made to the criminal world. Not only for the practical effects of this law (which, if applied, would definitely overwhelm the judicial apparatus), but because in the meanwhile the most important thing to be done is being neglected: to attack narcocrime - the most terrible power organization ever existed - in its central point: the accumulation of capitals. Prohibition has failed from a cultural point of view, an epoch of the criminal policy is definitely over. But the harm it causes the whole of society might well become irreversible. If the p

rice that the whole of society was forced to pay and must still pay is impossible to evaluate, in terms of millions of acts of violence - thefts, robberies, murders - and of corruption (the tax on non-consumers Milton Friedman was referring to), to ensure the criminal market, for many more years to come, with a flow of thousands of billions of lire is absolutely suicidal. To allow these sums to return, after some technocratic trick, from the banks to the stock exchange on the legal market, will have the palpable if even more real effect of further reducing the economic, and therefore juridical, freedom of individuals and companies; at the same time it will expose the institutions and the regulations even more to intimidation and corruption, and, as an extreme but not infrequent means, to the physical elimination of the persons charged with these tasks. The International Antiprohibitionist League will play an essential role to invert this process, that seems to be pushing from democracy (or from autocracy or

partitocracy, but in any case from legality) towards more or less covert forms of narcocracy. The long and prestigious list of participants (and there could have been many more, had the Radical party been in the conditions to bear the costs), the message of encouragement and gratitude of Milton Friedman, the number of countries represented, North American, Latin American and European, are the proof of the "need" - to quote Friedman - for this congress.

The relation by Marco Pannella will open the discussion, together with an introduction by Nick Harman, editor-in-chief of The Economist, the most authoritative political-economic weekly of the world, who for several months has been engaged in a campaign to restore a state control over a territory which is left to a savage criminal liberalization. And the discussion will be based on the findings of the Brussels Talks, the papers of which are now available in three languages (Italian, English and French). From those talks, in spite of and owing to different perspectives, juridical, medical, criminological, economic, philosophic, a fundamental truth has emerged: prohibitions turns a sanitary, social and - I would like to add - financial problem (a problem relating to rules, and rules that must be respected) into a problem of public order. In other words, of violence and illegality. Any form of prohibition is an extremely dangerous form of jeopardy of personal freedom, of the responsible growth of the individua

ls, of the development of the awareness of the risks involved in certain behaviours, and any liberal or libertarian form cannot but oppose this. But this prohibition, and its inevitable failure, is at present the worst, most serious threat to the domestic and international security of the states, to life, to the safety and the health of the individual. Those who are aware of this have the duty to prepare for a "war against drugs" which will be - as Georg Thamm says - not a sign of surrender, but, on the contrary, the only effective weapon to achieve those same goals which even the most blind prohibitionists (not, of course, those paid by the mafia) intend to pursue.