ABSTRACT: In March 1988, Fernando Savater, the well-known editor of the Spanish daily "El Pais", opened the debate in Spain on the anti-prohibition proposal with the article from which we publish an excerpt.

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

Let us take as an example, the case of Columbia, whose institutional order has been partially destroyed by the colossal degree of gangsterism of the drug pushers: assassins of eminent politicians and judges, generalised corruption etc. How can this situation be remedied? Common sense tells us how, without a shade of doubt: by re-doubling our persecution of the large-scale dealers. If until now this policy's only result has been to increase the price of the product, to spread criminality and to create a specific variant of terrorism, positive results have to be round the corner, it is easy to see them! A few heedless people remember that in the 1970's the Columbian mafia put all its effort into producing marijuana - the splendid Santa Marta Gold, for example - until permissive legislation paved the way to local production in California, and from one day to the next the dealers' traffic was truncated. These destabilisers with a good memory dare to suppose that the day when, in the Rocky Mountains or any other

part of USA territory the legal cultivation of coca is embarked upon, the cocaine mafia which is destroying Columbia will meet its end. It is easy to see which are the absurd conclusions caused by the absence of any rigid prohibitionist moral sense! Certainly, drugs kill: the first things they kill are common sense and civic sense. Prohibition is maintained by these two crimes, and the traffic in drugs continues to thrive.