ABSTRACT: José Luis Diez Ripollés is lecturer in Criminal Law at the University of Malaga. He recognises the need to get rid of the present distinction between legal and illegal drugs, a distinction which is not justifiable by their effects nor by the scale of harm they can cause.

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

The actual border line between legal and illegal drugs should be cancelled: such a distinction is not justified by their effects nor by the rate of their harm. The hypotheses based on the cultural integration of certain drugs in our society have lost their validity after the internationalisation of the drug policy, transforming it into a new form of cultural and economic oppression operated by the richest countries: they oblige repression of the traffic and use of those drugs from cultures different from theirs, while supporting the use of new drugs from the western culture.

In spite of this, the drug problem presents another aspect today: the emergence of gigantic, omnipotent organisations of drug dealers with huge economic power deriving from very high profits, the fruit of prohibitionism, are undermining the institutional organisations of various States and threatening to spread rapidly to many others. This imposes an analysis of this phenomenon as a threat at least to the social and economic structure of any one country, if not even to its constitutional basis.