ABSTRACT: "The fight against drugs is no more than a new chance for a tremendous clash between the Jacobine-authoritarian-efficiency illusion, and the democratic-liberal proposition". "Prohibition makes each drug addict a golden goose, which produces golden eggs each day until it dies or is killed".

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

A society whose predominant culture has produced in one century the atrocities and exterminations we have witnessed (through wars, famine and wretchedness) and which leaves to the next century an inheritance of lethal wounds to the planet and the life within it, is a condemned society. To radically reform its principles, its laws and its the sense of the right to life and the life of rights, some have made the radical choice of the Radical Party.

For me personally, several "bedside books" I read between the age of fifteen and twenty, did not prevent this choice, indeed they made it more convincing: "Le drame de l'humanisme athée" by Father Henri de Lubac, the issues of "Esprit" by Emanuel Mounier, and " Le dialogue des Carmelites" by Bernanos.

For a quarter of a century now, I have been persecuted for the blossoming of my antiprohibitionist convictions and actions (not only on the subject of drugs) which are supposed to be the expression of laxity, cynical indifference, sterile and desperate hedonism, and not as in fact it already is the choice of compassion, of assuming responsibility out of solidarity, and of morally binding freedom. I often find myself facing moralists, preachers who are bent on giving another form to their own inner demons, fanatically intent on fleeing from any civil responsibility and determined to profit from the chance of defeating once and for all, the demon of the century, the root of any other evil. Since these evils have become precious and indispensable to this war, it is immoral to wish to overcome their peculiarity and immanence.

On the drug front, in one fell swoop they have rehabilitated sulphur, the cursed material of omnipotent evil, and the gold of Mammon. The wronger they are, the more they generate disasters with their choices, which several want to impose and aggravate. It is a vicious circle, of which we and they are prisoners, and from which there is no escape if we do not decide to fully assume the morality which makes it imperative to face them openly free from prudence and the fear of persecution. What is at stake is of major historic, social civil, and human significance.

The onus of the drug scourge lies fully on prohibitionism, and the existing legal system which is based on the illusion that Caesar the State will be able to free our consciences and the consciences of others, to defeat the demon and sin, evil and errors.

Without the prohibitionist regime, prohibited drugs would do all the damage that legal drugs do today, as a matter of fact a lot less, for reasons which we have not the space to explain. But the prohibitionist regime is no other than the second face of the moon: determined prohibitionists are those who have been in advertising, creating needs, encouraging the consumption of alcohol, nicotine, psychotropic drugs, the world's third most lucrative economic source. Authoritarian laws, laxity and transgression proceed at an equal pace, one cannot move without the other. For every victim, for every drug addict subjected to a prohibitionist regime, society, the institutions, the family and the drug addict himself pay the price of a destruction literally without comparison. "Prohibitionism" makes each drug addict a golden goose, which lays a golden egg daily until it dies or is killed. Turning others into addicts, more and more others, becomes an imperative need. For some it is the condition necessary for them

to be able to continue to take drugs, for others it is the sole source of a fabulous income.

A personal drama or tragedy becomes an institutional tragedy; indeed, this has now become the tragedy of our planet.

Because of prohibitionism the drug addict has to become a criminal, resort to the use of violence, and degrade himself. Because of prohibitionism, a product that would be worth more or less as much as alcohol or tobacco with the usual profits earned by production and sales, is worth more than gold and has created the furthest reaching criminal network which is tending to intervene with the very organisation of multinational and national powers. Thanks to prohibitionism, and not to "drugs" or "junkies", 60% to 80% of budgets and judicial and police activities in the western world are directed at the anti-drug war or blocked by it. Thanks to prohibitionism, drug addicts are constantly forced to commit acts of violence: petty theft, kidnapping, or burglary. If for each of them, we established an average of thirty thefts or or acts of violence, in Italy there are at least three million victims of this type of violence every year. Yes, thirty million in a decade! Isn't it permissible to expect that they

too should be represented, heard, and defended, which is what I have been trying in vain to achieve with the Radical Party, for years and years? The narcodollar and the narcocracy are invading our territories, institutions, and States at a dreadful rate, because of prohibitionism. Thanks to prohibitionism, we read of seven or eight year old children who have become pushers or dealers, with their grandmothers or mothers; and the histories of the Mafia, the Camorra, and the 'Ndrangheta are the histories of drugs, because the fate of the major criminal organisations relies on the drug trade, in their skirmishes to compete for the market, down to the last drop of blood. Thanks to prohibitionism, at this very moment, in hundreds of thousands of families spent and destroyed nobody knows whether a son, or a father or a mother might be dying of an overdose, contracting Aids, stealing or kidnapping, hauling in the sad booty of new converts, or killing. There is a single proposal, a single answer from the ra

nks of the big anti-drug gurus and those opportunists of every hour and occasion: finally, a war without an escape is breaking out, the producers, the transporters, the dealers and the unrepentant users, are harder and harder hit; they are all sentenced to years and years in jail; the same people who equate hashish with heroine, for which reason there are therefore millions of criminals, not tens of thousands. No "reasonable quantities" tolerated, only "communities" or prison. But they do not show us how to find a million "beds" in either. Neither is the army sufficient, backed by the forces of law and order, to ferret out and arrest those million criminals or irresponsible citizens, put them under surveyance, care for them, redeem them, and give back to them naturally in such a way, the "love of life", "respect of themselves" and find them work, a perfectly simple undertaking even if there are three million unemployed in Italy. But it has been noted that I am not suspected of being Christian like the

m.