ABSTRACT: In the document passed by the foundation congress of the International Antiprohibitionist League - LIA (Rome, 30 MArch - 1 April 1989) the goals of the movement are established.

(Notizie Radicali n.175 of the 14th of August 1989)

Prohibited drugs are more and more available in a circle of crime which is becoming broader and broader.

Prohibitionism has failed. This failure has not been acknowledged, neither by the national legislations or from the international directives - from the European Parliament to the United Nations - which formulate the policies on drugs.

The casual link between illegality and the availability of drugs has not been adequately analyzed.

The criminal drug trade is multinational and is expanding from North America to Europe and the Middle-East, from Asia to North Africa and especially to Latin America.

The organizations heading the cartels, the gangs, the mafias and the families threaten private peace and political stability in the whole of the world. The repressive interventions of the state organizations aggravate the dangers.

The failure of prohibition has transformed an issue which basically has to do with health and private choices into a tragedy

of global dimensions. Never have wrong laws, created with good purposes, has such disastrous effects, since when the United States dropped their prohibition policy in 1933.

The modern version of prohibition has turned our big cities into battlefields, without succeeding in protecting those they intended to protect. Those who are tempted by hard drugs are pushed toward crime and disease, the most terrible of which is AIDS.

Occasional consumers risk imprisonment, regular consumers must resort to crime to support their habit, common citizens are exposed to dangers.

The cost of the failed attempt to prohibit certain drugs, while at the same time allowing the advertisement and sale of other drugs such as alcohol and tobacco is universal an inestimable.

Freedom itself is endangered by the war on drugs, with no advantage for individuals or for society.

We participants of the founding coongress of the International Antiprohibitionist League commit ourselves to pursue the following goals:

1. Establish a coordination of people and organizations in the scientific, social and political field who commit themselves to pursue the same goals as the Antiprohibitionist League.

2. To diffuse information and knowledge on the policies concerning drugs and on the harm caused by the present antiprohibitionist system, and its consequences on crime.

3. To oppose the positions and the policies supporting prohibition, presently carrried out by the United Nations and by its agencies as well as the international legislation of the conventions.

4. To undertake and support all actions at a national and international level aimed at dismantling the prohibitionist system, and to assert, even partially, the legislative and social reformation in an non-repressive sense.