ABSTRACT: Can the Radical Party be content with fighting against prohibition on drugs? Starting from the consideration that laws are not the Law, but that, on the contrary, penal law is unfair and perverse in its means as well as illegitimate in its goals, the author believes that, with the perspective of abolishing it completely, we must struggle to reform it, to return to more convivial, community-oriented solutions concerning conflicts of all kinds. The first step could be that of adopting a minimum programme, withdrawing all crimes that do not involve victims from penal law, as well as fighting at once for the abolition of prisons.

(Notizie Radicali n. 248 of 14 November 1989)

If the Radical Party had not created an anti-prohibitionist League in March 1989, it would be absolutely necessary to create it now, by conducting a frontal attack on the penal policies on drugs and underlining the fact that the only possible solution involves the complete revision of international conventions. On the other hand, who, apart from the Radical Party and the CO.RA (1), could have invented an international organization by constantly outwitting the public opinion and the penal policies of all Western countries on this subject?

Already the Brussels convention, in October 1988, represented a challenge: to gather the personalities of several countries which had already suggested alternative solutions to prohibition; to run the risk of having them give their opinion on the different ways of abolishing penal policies; to publish the papers of the convention. No one had ever had the courage to represent with such evidence, and gathering so many personalities, gestures which so dramatically contributed to sustain a debate and to make it grow.

The strength of the arguments of the founders of the League and of those of the members of the Party engaged in the anti-prohibitionist battle, was significantly enhanced by the convention, by its papers, and later, by the debate and the declarations of the foundation Congress of the LIA (2).

Since then, anti-prohibitionism has won a space for itself in the political arena during the campaign prior to the elections for the European Parliament, and - thanks to the Radical party, to its transnational and transpartisan choices - elected a deputy for the European Parliament from an anti-prohibitionist platform. These candidatures are the occasion for a fundamental debate on the costs of prohibition, the origins of this irrational and deviant policy, the reasons to explain its persistence in spite of the sensational failures. There is the Bush plan, which increases the terrible problems caused in Latin America - and especially in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru - by the prohibitionist policy of the Northern countries, advocated by the drug-consuming countries and of which the propulsive centre is undoubtedly the claim to control from the outside the country's internal problems. It is the repetition of the mechanism which prevailed on the occasion of the adoption of the first international conventions on ps

ychotropic substances...

For the U.S., the problem is basically to become the champions of the battle for a "moral" order which they are absolutely incapable of enforcing in their own country. It is the attempt to shut down the borders, to control from a distance or, in the contrary case, to impose their order by means of armed force.

The time was ripe to create an anti-prohibitionist and international League; the Radical Party perceived the sense of the moral and political urgency with the challenge of March 1989.

In any case, even if the public opinion and the press seem to be slowly realizing that prohibition is obsolete, even if people are well aware of the fact that the consumption habits of millions of drug-addicts will not be changed by means of armed force, the control of the borders, the extradition of the traffickers and their imprisonment, the legalization of drugs, are not something to be achieved in the near future.

The battle to stop the repressive and penal policies in the field of the circulation and the consumption of drugs is far from having been won. Too many interests clash against the pure and simple withdrawal of international conventions!

But can the party be content with fighting prohibition on drugs?

Will plain moral logic not induce us to oppose all the penal provisions adopted, for example, for crimes without victims, and to defend a minimal opinion of penal repression, that is, a repressive control applied for the sole behaviours involving a real social danger, and for which all other controls have proven ineffective?

I'm referring to the battle conducted by groups of a certain age and a certain social formation in Canada, with the goal of making the laws against prostitution and pornography more punitive. What a hypocrisy on the part of all those who use prohibition in order "not to see" the things sold in the street or at the newspaper stand, but who have sufficient means to provide themselves with the same things at their home or in the "homes" they best prefer.

I'm thinking of the hundreds of clauses of the penal codes which use the pretext of crimes against property and which are doubly harmful, because they consider a burglary in an apartment as an offence to be punished with imprisonment. An occasional delinquency, which becomes an activity induced by need, on the part of young (and not so young) jobless, socially assisted persons, unmarried mothers. What legitimacy is there in a state using penal sanction against a delinquency caused by need and by an unfair social organization?

We know that the laws are not the Law. No one of us has committed this mistake. Our penal laws are voted by legislators, by men (rarely by women), by the upper middle class, by dominant ethnical groups whose function is to serve the interests of their groups and of those of the corporative lobbies supporting them during election period. They are rarely established to ensure the interests of the majority, the way the penal philosophers of the liberal democratic tradition conceived it. After 25 years of teaching and of research in the field of criminology, having thoroughly analyzed the sort of treatment that the States adopt for persons suspected, accused or condemned, I have come to the conclusion that penal law is so unfair, so perverse in its means and often so illegitimate in its goals, that it is necessary to work for its complete abolition. And this regardless of whether we examine it from the point of view of the values it defends (from 40 to 70% of its provisions are aimed at the respect of the privat

e property of the "tax-payers" or of the companies and corporations, which do not "pay" at all, and of companies exempted from the fundamental duties of the respect for the most essential goods for the survival of mankind - let us think for example of professional pollution to which no effective economic sanctions can be applied, or the pharmaceutical companies which, with no shame at all, drugs millions of elderly people, whereas the state imprisons marijuana smokers and cocaine and heroin consumers) or from the point of view of its provisions, which reject from the social system those people whom the economic organization had already alienated. Penal law and the penal system especially, appear as evils themselves and the source of so many iniquities that one reaches the conclusion that it is necessary to get rid of them, especially after several decades of attempts to reform it.

Several members of the Radical party suffered because of it; some died because of it, like Enzo Tortora (3). Alongside the victims of crimes, we must take into account the victims of penal law: these authors of more or less serious crimes, these dissidents who are abused by the most violent and aggressive arm of the state in a completely tendentious manner. The closer the trial comes to the conclusion, the more we come close to imprisonment, the more the aim is evident, the more discrimination is directed against the youth, the morally alienated, the ideological dissidents, those who resist, the lonely people, the poor, the members of minority ethnical groups. All those whom order, or rather environmental disorder, has not been able to effectively "organize".

In the same way as anti-prohibitionists on drugs, abolitionists are not asking for a society void of norms. The majority believes that the fact that the state is charged with so many conflicts in which it finds itself interfering between the victim and the supposed offender, has significantly contributed in diminishing everyone's responsibility: offender, victim, milieu, and that it would be best to return, as soon as possible, to more convivial, more solidarity- and community-oriented solutions as regards conflicts of all kind.

Several initiatives taken in this direction (reparations, restrictions, compensations...) turn out to be convenient as far as the the state's and the individuals' resources are concerned, and reassuring for the parts, who no longer feel to be alien to the negotiations of their own affairs. It is the case, for example, of the limitation of the use of jurisdiction, of the constant use of the victims' testimonial; or the practise of inviting the parts to suggest solutions for their conflicts, without the State and the attorneys having to dominate the scene. With the consequence, hardly foreseeable in the beginning, that the victims who participate in the solution of their conflicts and who have something to say on the compensations due to them, recover from the traumas they endured in half as much time as compared to when they remitted everything to the judicial system and passively accepted their trial. But isn't the abolitionist solution too radical, wouldn't it be better to first adopt a minimum programme, w

ithdrawing all crimes without victims and the offences which are not a real injustice against the social community from the realm of penal law?

What leaves one perplexed as regards the minimum solution is the fact that certain Western countries which attempt to adopt it at different levels (resorting as little as possible to imprisonment, reducing the number of offences, reducing the use of the law as often as possible) - The Netherlands, Denmark - still have to face the permanent temptation of prolonging the penalties,of re-introducing new crimes in the code. So, for example, our Dutch colleagues have had to acknowledge the fact that the long sentences inflicted to people accused of drug traffic or drug use have seriously contributed in increasing the general duration of penalties and imprisonment (Hulsmaan 1983). The penal system has a natural tendency toward inflation...

But even at present it seems to me that anti-prohibitionism on drugs would not be able to fulfil the radical orientations of the Party. If it is too soon to propose a "moral" programme leading to the complete abolition of the penal system, we must however work hard as from now for the abolition of prisons. The ICOPA (International coalition for the abolition of prisons) could be added to this chapter. As far this aspect of the penal system is concerned, its effects of selection, of discrimination, of criminalization, no longer need to be proved.

On the other hand, for the Radical Party this is not much more than a further objection to the juridical, civil and penal order.

It is sufficient, for example, to think of the battles and the achievements of the Party concerning divorce and abortion.

But shouldn't we go even further?

Translator's notes

(1) CO.RA (Radical Anti-Prohibitionist Coordination)

(2) LIA: (International Anti-Prohibitionist League)

(3) Enzo Tortora: former TV showman, arrested in 1983, charged with being a drug dealer and belonging to the mafia. Acquitted after years of juridical and civil debate, he died in 1988. He had joined the Radical Party and was a member of the European Parliament.