ABSTRACT: "Today violence in the cities of the world is the product of drug prohibition, as it was when alcohol was prohibited in the Chicago of Al Capone. But prohibition which fails has become a mortal threat to the life of individuals, freedom, peace, the Rights of States and the States of Rights".

("Single issue" booklet for the XXXV Congress of The Radical Party - Budapest 22-26 april 1989)

The drug trade is a weapon threatening the entire planet. The official documents of individual governments, surveys by the European Community, reports by secret services in the USA, and reports by the UN body for narcotic control, all confirm this. And yet no government has until today, had the courage to modify the policy of repression of the use and trade of drugs, most rigorously enforced since 1961, the year of the UN Convention in New York. To admit the failure of prohibitionism would mean for many, to recognise an error which is almost thirty years old: to continue in the prohibition policy justifies the past and allows time itself to preserve the exceptional economic privileges and status which supranational and national organisations assign to anti-drug professionals. And the UN itself is the one to affirm with harsh clarity that: "the use of illegal drugs, whether natural or synthetic, has seen such a rapid growth in the last twenty years that today it threatens all the countries and layers of s

ociety. The clandestine production and manufacture of drugs involves a growing number of countries in numerous regions of the world. Such activity, which is reaching alarming proportions, is financed and directed by criminal organisations which have international branches and benefit from complicity within the financial system. Having almost unlimited funds available, the dealers corrupt employees, spreading violence and terrorism, influencing the application of international conventions for the fight against drugs, thus exercising a very real political and economic power in many regions of the world".

This is the description of a new governing force, the worst imaginable, the Narcocracy. But we know from the daily events in the press that in the world today the enormous sums which organised crime earns from the drug industry, have become the main source of violence, corruption and social degradation, and at the same time, a very serious obstacle to the development of the potential of the poorest localities in the world and of those situations within industrialised countries. A sum which oscillates between 300 and 500 billion dollars is poured every year into the coffers of the international mafia organisations. In practice, with this industry's budget over two or three years, the whole external debt of a developing country could be paid off approximately a thousand billion dollars. Income from drugs is flooding the institutions of civil society, the banks, the Stock Exchange, legal and illegal activities; it is turning into corruption, blackmail, and armed violence in clashes with political and jud

iciary institutions.

Earnings from drugs support crime, crime supports the drug market. The number of heroin addicts is increasing every year, because any new arrival on the scene is obliged, in order to pay his daily dose, to become a heroin pusher. Or to rob, to kill, or to prostitute him or herself. From Germany to the USA, from Spain to Italy, from Canada to the sprawling Latin American cities, drug traffic is indicated as the origin of the great majority of criminal offences, up to 80% of robberies, kidnappings, pickpocketting. Every year there are millions of victims of senseless violence and murder which are due neither to the nature of drugs nor of addicts, but to a pressing need for money caused by a mad inhuman law. Money which will end by enriching, strengthening and making increasingly powerful the very enemy prohibition is aiming to weaken, the surface of whose power it does not even succeed in scratching. Every year, scarcely 5% 10% of the drugs in circulation on various markets are seized and confiscated.

Legalisation of the production, commerce and sale of drugs, today forbidden, from marijuana to heroin to cocaine, will have the effect of putting these substances on an equal level with drugs which are already legal at least in many countries such as alcohol (from wine to beverages with a high alcohol content) and tobacco. Their price will diminish by 99% and it will be the State's task to fix adequate taxes to deter consumption and simultaneously to guarantee their quality, so as to reduce the damaging effects to the minimum, including infection with Aids or other diseases. The international mafia will suffer a defeat which today not even the coalition of all the armies of the East and West are able to inflict, losing the essential source of their riches and the cause of their power, in a flash. From one day to the next, legalisation will remove the motivation of millions of violent acts, perpetrated mostly against people who are weak and defenceless. It will free the forces of order and the judiciary

from the weight of these offences, automatically restoring their efficiency and their capacity to intervene to safeguard the security of citizens. It will leave sufficient sums available for deterrent campaigns and for the recovery of drug addicts, enormous sums which at the moment are being spent on a useless manhunt.

Today prohibitionism has given birth to violence in the cities of the world, in the same way as alcohol in the Chicago of Al Capone. But prohibitionism which fails has become a mortal threat for the lives of individuals, freedom, peace, the right of States and the State of Rights, jeopardised by laws less and less respectful of human rights (to start with the reintroduction of capital punishment in many of the States which had abolished it) and of court trials.

This is why the Radical Party has included, in the motion which sanctions its transformation to a transnational party, the antiprohibitionist campaign as an essential objective in its political initiatives. This is why we are asking you to join the Radical Party to defeat a policy which creates and supports organised crime, produces violence and millions of victims, encourages the spreading of drugs and makes the lives of drug addicts extremely difficult and often unbearable.