SUMMARY:

I - The demon of illegality and the illusion of punishability.

II - The damage caused by prohibition. It is the criminal supply which produces the demand for drugs.

III - To thoroughly reconsider the strategies: toward anti-prohibitionism.

IV - Twenty years of Radical answers to face the problem of drugs.

V - The theoretical and practical reasons for our opposition.

5.1. An unconstitutional law.

5.2. A illiberal and authoritative law.

5.3. An inapplicable law.

5.4 A dangerous and deceptively repressive law.

5.5. An unfair and counter-productive law.

VI- The main proposals for the alteration of the law.

6.1. Depenalizing personal use.

6.2. The average daily amount equivalent to the moderate quantity?

6.3. The reasons for the legalization of cannabis.

VII- A disaster is being risked out of political convenience and for the sake of image.

I. THE DEMON OF ILLEGALITY AND THE ILLUSION OF PUNISHABILITY

HONOURABLE COLLEAGUES! - The central and innovative point of the governmental bill which has kept Parliament busy for over a year, and over which a dishonest operation of mass communication has been carried out, is the introduction of the concept of "illegality" of drugs and therefore of "punishability" also of personal use.

Minister of Justice Giuliano Vassalli, in reply to the debate of the Senate of the 28th of November 1989, has once again stated it clearly and authoritatively:

"Because of its judicial and penal aspects, the whole discussion was necessarily centred on the theme of the lawfulness or not of the use of drugs, and on the punishability of the possessor of drugs for personal, non therapeutical use; a fact that is undoubtedly understandable given the fact that the bill contains a significant innovation on this point as compared to the law still in force since December 1975 ..."

"...The position of the government on this point takes as a starting point an extremely clear and simple statement, according to which in the war against drugs it is not possible to simply deal with the part of the supply...but the aspect of the demand must also be dealt with; and that dealing with the aspect of demand doesn't mean limiting oneself to an essential, fundamental work of prevention, but to start from the concept of the illegality of taking drugs, and to give this illegality the only possible feature: sanction. A sanction which, like the penal sanction has an effect of a general prevention, is in a certain sense connected to the educational aspect, to the indication, by means of the infliction of a sanction, of a social dis-value, of a path not to be taken..."

The core of the provision is indicated even more clearly further on:

"...In reality with this provision the State withdraws from the position of neutrality concerning the use of psychotropic substances, and states its social dis-value both for the personal, family and social effects, and for the effects produced in terms of minor and not always minor offences (offences as the means to get drugs) and in terms of the large-scale criminality that runs the market of the supply. This does not lead to an indefinite criminality, but adds to the solidarity-oriented approach an element of strictness consequent to the dis-value..."

The proponents of the governmental bill and their supporters this way give credit to a theory that is based precisely on the innovative aspect of the illegality-punishability as compared to the previous legislation. It has been said and it has been made to believe, that the spreading of the diffusion of drugs in our country, with all the relative burden of violence, suffering, deaths and individual as well as collective damage, would be the consequence of an allegedly permissive society, which in practice would have favoured the uncontrolled spread of the personal use of drugs. The normative aspect that would have enabled this process to develop would have been that "moderate quantity" envisaged by law 685 of 1975, by means of which a capillary distribution and incentivation of drugs would have been carried out.

This premise on which the essential part of the bill is based on is in actual fact false and wrong, void of any scientific and historical base. Most of the international literature concerning the subject, irrespective of the economic, social, cultural or medical starting point, agrees in believing that the main mechanism of the diffusion of drugs in the affluent society consists not in the spontaneous growth of demand but in the increase in supply, which is accurately and powerfully organized by the organized criminality.

If the hypothesis according to which the punishment of personal use would act as a deterrent to the spreading of drugs were true, a correspondence should occur between the strictness of the punitive system concerning personal use of drugs and the indicators measuring the diffusion of drugs and the social and health damages they produce (number of drug-addicts, deaths related to drugs, AIDS sufferers and HIV-virus infected persons due to drugs, offences against physical persons and property related to drugs).

It is instead a fact that such a connection not only is not present in a positive sense, but on the contrary an inversely proportional relation has been remarked. It is sufficient to read the data concerning some European countries that can be compared to ours to understand that where there are more repressive systems like in Germany, all the indicators measure percentages that are higher than the Italian ones, whereas in countries with a more tolerant legislation such as The Netherlands, Great Britain and Spain, the same indicators are much less preoccupying and progress in a much slower way, and even, as is the case of The Netherlands, the phenomenon is found to be regressive or stable.

II. THE DAMAGES OF PROHIBITION. IT IS THE CRIMINAL SUPPLY THAT ENGENDERS THE DEMAND FOR DRUGS

The first question that must be posed is if the diffusion of drugs is really the result of a permissive culture or if it has deeper, more complex roots, of a "structural" kind, so to say. Before giving an evaluation on the bill that is being discussed we must answer this question.

It is useful to quote some passages of the most recent report of the International organization for the control of drugs: "The use of illegal drugs, both natural and synthetic, has experienced such a rapid growth in the last twenty years that it is threatening all countries and all the social strata. The phenomenon is typical neither of the great urban centres, nor of the intellectuals or the illiterate, the rich or the poor: it has spread everywhere, from schools to offices, from leisure time to sport". And further on: "The clandestine production of drugs concerns a growing number of countries, in various regions of the world. Such activities, of preoccupying proportions, are run and financed by criminal organizations that have international connections and benefit of the complicity of the financial system. The large-scale drug traders often use channels that are used by important and absolutely legal multi-national companies. Having access to almost unlimited supplies of money, the traffickers corrupt offi

cials, spread violence and terrorism, influence the application of international conventions for the war on drugs and detain in actual fact a real political and economical power in many parts of the world..." Another recent document of the US State Department says that "the production, the consumption and the traffic of drugs are beyond control, as are the capabilities of each single government of suppressing it" and adds that "the drug traffickers can use their billions to corrupt and even buy the governments of the Western hemisphere". In 1986 an investigative commission of the European Parliament with English conservative Stewart Clarck as relator reached the same conclusion, stating among other things that the traffic of illegal drugs is so far beyond control that drugs are in actual fact for sale freely.

Passing from the general reference on the international power of Narcocracy to the Italian situation, the evaluation made by the daily Confindustria newspaper "Il Sole - 24 ore" can be taken as an index: it calculates that the proceeds of the drug trade in Italy amount to 35,000 billion, a figure close to the proceeds of the most important private company in Italy, FIAT. To this figure one must add the proceeds of the Italian mafia operating at an international level as intermediary between the countries that produce opiates and the consuming countries of Northern Europe and of North America. It is with the enormous power given by such a great fortune that the drug-money invades the institutions of civil society, such as banks, stock exchange, legal and illegal economic activities, and transforms itself into corruption, blackmail, armed violence against judicial and political institutions.

The money coming from the drug trade sustains criminality, and criminality sustains the drug market. The number of heroin drug-addicts is increasing each year, because every new-comer is forced, in order to pay for his daily amount, to become a traveling salesman for heroin. Or else he is forced to steal, kill, prostitute: from Germany to the United States, from Spain to Italy, from Canada to the huge cities of Latin American, drug traffic is indicated as the origin of the vast majority of penal offences, accounting for up to 80% of all thefts, robberies, purse-snatchings and homicides. Each year throughout the world there are millions of victims of an insane violence, that is alien to the nature of drugs or drug-addicts, but belongs to a desperate need for money caused by prohibitionist and punitive laws. Millions of people without a voice, for which the Christian or humanitarian commandment of defending the victim does not apply to. A price of violence that the various states are willing to make pay in the

name of the abstract and foolish idea of a war against drugs. It is the money of these million of anonymous tax-payers that sustains the very enemy that prohibition would like to defeat, and makes it ever more powerful and invincible, whereas the state cannot even scathe its power.

III. RECONSIDER THE STRATEGY AGAINST DRUGS. TOWARD ANTI-PROHIBTIONISM.

Confronted with the failure of all prohibitionist and punitive policies, even when great resources have been used, as in the case of the United States of America, we believe that only a radical reconsideration based on anti-prohibitionism can offer guide-lines to establish an effective battle against the diffusion of drugs. Such a line of thought and of political strategy is becoming more and more authoritative at an international level among experts and operators of the most different fields: criminologists, philosophers, economists, sociologists, prominent personalities in the field of law and medicine, and even people directly involved in local governments, both national and international.

It seemed useful to me to reproduce an excerpt of a speech delivered by Marie Andrée Bertrand, criminologist, consultant of the Canadian government and author of several official reports on the subject.

"When, 15 years ago, after completion of 4 years of study and research carried out in the whole of the country and overseas, I gave the Canadian government a minority report recommending the abolition of control on drugs, I was motivated by the following reasons:

1. the offence of simple possession is a futile means of dissuasion;

2. more in general, the use of penal law in the case of offences without victims: a) is not effective; b) involves the use of procedures which are contrary to the rights of the person: inspections, searches without a search-warrant, informers, double agents; c) it is always strongly arbitrary, because the normal instruments for the detection are inadequate, and only a naive and unwary part of the offenders is subjected to repression. On the other hand several philosophers of law and statesmen have admitted that the use of penal law to reduce crimes without victims is unlawful;

3. The cost of prohibition, or more precisely the costs of prohibition, are huge: social, moral, economic costs; the States squander their honour as well as public funds in it, and such costs are disproportioned as compared to the improbable and slight effectiveness of the law;

4. the educational purpose of penal law, which is to remind citizens of the most important values cherished by the social community, is distorted by the fact of including, at random and in the same law, substances whose harmfulness can vary widely, and of behaviours that also greatly differ from one another as to seriousness;

5. prohibition creates illegal markets and makes all the vices connected to it proliferate;

6. the offence of simple possession or use of drugs authorizes certain states to use compulsory therapy as regards to the accused, a further violation of the rights of the individual but above all an act of ignorance and hypocrisy, because it has never occurred that compulsory therapy has induced anyone to change his or her behaviour; on the other hand it is a well-known fact that prisons and penitentiaries in which a certain number of users are detained are full of psychotropic substances of all kinds, and that drugs are pushed in an equally free, or even freer way than in the outside world.

All these reasons in favour of the abolition of the laws on drugs are still valid. Throughout the years their scope has increased. At a close re-examination of each one of them the following can be recorded:

1. the dissuasive effect has turned out to be nil, if not on individual consumers at any rate on the whole of the peoples involved. The number of consumers has increased, the traffic has refined itself (if this was ever necessary), but more often than not the main part of the illicit transactions relative to small amounts are carried out openly and with the knowledge of the police who have decided not to intervene; it is possible that the consumption of certain drugs that were popular in the sixties and seventies has decreased (LSD, glue, strong hallucinogens) but we know that penal law has had no part in this. The consumers themselves and public opinion have made these substances unpopular, effectively denouncing the negative effects noticed;

2. the penal control of the use and of the traffic of drugs has turned out to be extremely discriminating, affecting first, in the sixties, young people and anti-conformists; then members of ethnical communities and, recently, in several European countries, foreigners, non-wealthy and unemployed persons;

3. the cost of the application of the laws on drugs have never ceased to increase; such laws have implied the creation of special police corps, have over-loaded tribunals, prisons, services for therapy and penal rehabilitation;

4. the epidemiological forecasts have turned out to have no basis; there are, of course, drug-addicts who need therapy, but the first aid departments of hospitals are less crowded, if compared to the seventies, by patients who are ailing due to a "bad trip";

5. abolitionist policy has in fact, as forecasted, stimulated illegal markets; international trade is getting more intense; police Corps of all countries have lost their war against drugs;

6. Compulsory therapy and imprisonment for drug-addicts in order to reduce their addiction have all resulted in dismal failures;

On the other hand, new facts have are to be added to the reasons that induced me then to suggest the abolition of laws on drugs.

1. In several Western countries, the conclusion has been reached that many legal drugs cause an ascertained damage to the health of citizens, and that the costs involved in the abuse of such substances go beyond the limit of tolerance. This statement has two effects. Firstly, it shows the clear incoherence of the states that are so worried about certain substances as to make them object of a prohibition in the penal code, but secretly encourage and publicly tolerate the consumption of nicotine and alcohol; secondly, the social reactions to the damages brought about by these drugs turn out to be far more effective and sound than those related to illegal drugs.

2. As many others, I was impressed by the enormous amount of resistance which the conclusions and the recommendations of all the research commissions of all countries have had to clash against, as regard the drug issue. No less than a dozen countries had taken up, by means of national committees or study commissions, in the late sixties and early seventies, an analysis of what was then known as "the drug problem": its diffusion, its causes, the means to put an end to it. Not one of these committees, not one of those commissions, with the possible exception of the Pellettier Committee in France, have recommended to maintain the status quo. One of them supported the depenalization of certain substances, the other one the abolition of the concept of offence for simple possession, etc. Nonetheless, from nowhere, from no country, did the reports of such Committees produce any relevant effects on legislation. It is true that penal practice has been modified under several aspects, and a certain depenalization de fa

cto has occurred, but with all the arbitrary features that it involves, that is, the persistence of penal prosecution in the case in which the consumer or the small dealer be a foreigner, an outcast, or simply in the case the police or the judge don't like his looks.

Analyzing the origins of such resistances to the modification of the laws on drugs, the obvious immorality, hypocrisy and illegitimacy of prohibition revealed themselves clearly to me.

These resistances are present at a national and international level. All those who are concerned about the modification of the present laws must analyze them in order to fight them".

It has been precisely under prohibition that in many Western countries the serious and dramatic events connected to drugs have developed; they can be thus laid out: a) the huge increase in the number of occasional and regular consumers of heroin and cocaine; b) the vertical rise of the number of deaths due to abuse of these same substances; c) the diffusion, never matched, of violence and illegality as a consequence of the regular consumers' need to illegally get money; d) the development of the most powerful and widely diffused empire of crime on an international scale with an accumulation of financial profits never before matched, capable of corrupting individuals and entire states.

According to us, the right path to effectively counteract the 4 above mentioned phenomena, which have spread tremendously in direct correlation with the rate of prohibition i.e. the repression of personal use, is the legalization of the substances, the production and distribution of which are in the hands of large-scale organized crime.

The legalization of the production, retailing and peddling of the drugs that are currently prohibited, from marijuana to heroin to cocaine, would have the effect of making these substances equivalent to the drugs that are already legalized - in many countries at least - such as alcohol (from wine to liquors) and tobacco. Their price would decrease by 99% and it would be the state's task to fix adequate taxes in order to discourage the consumption, while at the same guaranteeing its quality, in order to reduce to minimum the harmful effects, including infection from Aids and other diseases. The international mafia would receive a blow that not even the coalition of all the armies of the East and the West is currently in the condition of dealing it, losing all at once the main source of its wealth and the reason of its invincibility.

Legalization would wipe out from one day to another the raison d'etre of millions of acts of violence perpetrated mostly against the weakest and defenceless people. It would free the police and the judicial from the burden of dealing with these offences, automatically giving them efficiency and capacity of intervention in defence of the safety of citizens. It would make huge sums of money available for dissuasion campaigns and for the rehabilitation of drug-addicts, money that is presently being thrown away in a useless manhunt.

It is without doubt a problematic path, one that must be covered step by step, and above all one that must be accomplished with an international agreement. In the strategies to be undertaken it is immediately necessary to proceed in the right direction, both in the theoretical reconsideration and in the practical solutions, in order to effectively deal with extremely serious problems engendered by the combination of drugs and criminal organizations.

Today nobody in Italy suggests - because neither the international conditions nor the national conditions are there - an anti-prohibitionist solution. What we are suggesting today, provided that the remarks concerning the effects of the legislation on the phenomenon of drugs, on its diffusion and on the damages it causes are true, is to proceed in the correct direction, one that is capable of reducing to minimum the damage, and not proceed in the opposite direction (hyper-penalization), which would make the situation even more serious.

That is what inspires our attitude concerning the governmental law to which we are opposing a series of proposals.

IV - TWENTY YEARS OF RADICAL ANSWERS TO FACE THE PROBLEM OF DRUGS

"We have no specific reasons to particularly approve of people who smoke hashish. On the contrary we believe that there are sufficiently vast landscapes, both physical and moral, to be explored and probed so as not to need recreations or other sorts of "trips". Morally and ideally speaking, we should all be capable of giving up alcohol, tobacco, cannabis derivatives, tranquillizers, stimulants, which an intoxication of advertisement induces us to consume in huge quantities. However, we simply do not. Morally condemnable as we may be, we are not however arrested, insulted and criminalized for this reason". These are the words with which Marco Pannella, in a letter published on the Messaggero in January 1973, summarized the Radical position concerning drugs. Those words are still up-to-date, not only because in these last years all the scientific research (pharmacological or sociological) has proved the truthfulness of those theses, but because never like today it is true that our culture is operating a deep d

istinction between the various drugs, resulting in a different tolerance towards the people consuming some of them and not others.

Supported by the international scientific literature, the Radicals have always asserted that the level of toxicity of cannabis is extremely low, in any case inferior or equal to that of tobacco and alcohol. Moreover, certain postulates which with shameful superficiality are automatically taken to be true must be discredited, first of all the strong link that is supposed to exist between the use of cannabis and criminal behaviours. These reasons have therefore induced the Radicals to define hashish and marijuana as substances with a low level of harmfulness, and to ask for their legalization already in the seventies.

In order to ask for an immediately effective law establishing the important difference between light drugs and heavy drugs, making a distinction between the consumer and the pusher, providing stricter penalties for the latter, on the 2nd of July Marco Pannella, in an act of civil disobedience, defiantly smoked a "joint", reason for which he was arrested and taken to Regina Coeli (a Roman prison). That provocative act gave rise to a deep debate which, urging what the Parliament was already examining in the new regulation concerning drugs, lead to law 685.

The dissatisfaction for the new law was great. Not only the Radicals, but also certain communities like the Abele group, immediately pointed out that the law would not have served the purpose of slowing down the spreading of drugs, and that certain solutions adopted (above all the one of moderate quantity) were both ambiguous and dangerous. For this reason in 1979 the Radicals coherently expressed their position with the Teodori proposal (Record of Parliament 1077), which received the support of several socialists such as Claudio Martelli, Valdo Spini, Mario Raffaelli, Giacomo Mancini, Loris Fortuna, Franceso Forte and Franco Bassanini. Radicals and Socialists signed a draft bill envisaging the controlled distribution of psychotropic and narcotic substances as well as the legalization of cannabis. The aim was that of breaking the chain of criminal acts which the drug-addicts were forced to commit in order to get the money to buy the daily quantity of drugs, and of providing adequate conditions for the drug-a

ddict, that is, not on the borders of society and therefore not linked to the daily quest for drugs, as well as that of destroying the black market which is the cause of the many deaths related to drugs. Although the Teodori parliamentary bill was the most radical, in the VIIIth legislature there were other bills suggesting a more or less moderate legalization of the so-called light drugs; in particular we will recall the one presented by the Socialist Seppia, suggesting the depenalization of the possession and the consumption of hashish and marijuana in quantities up to 10 grams, proposal which was taken up again by Socialists Formica, Artioli, Aniasi, Marianetti, Piro, Di Donato and Spini.

These proposals were discussed only in the parliamentary commissions of the Chamber of Deputies, and of not much use was the referendum proposed by the Radical Party with which, thanks to the abrogation of certain articles of the 685 law, the liberalization of cannabis would have been achieved. The referendum proposal, with over 700,000 signatures, was declared unacceptable by the Constitutional Court because in violation of the commitments assumed by the Italian government at the Single Convention on narcotics (New York 30/3/61 and at the Geneva Protocol (25/3/72) established by the ONU.

The suggestion of liberalizing cannabis indica has once again been proposed during the Xth legislature (records of Parliament 3095). After that, in December 1988, the first parliamentary bill was presented, attempting to express in terms of regulations the anti-prohibitionist hypothesis: "Legal regulation of psychoactive substances to subtract the drug traffic from the criminal organizations" (Teodori and others, records of Parliament 3461) based on the following points:

1) the legal regulation of all psychoactive substances, i.e. the so-called "drugs";

2) a new classification of psychoactive substances, with the inclusion of alcoholic beverages over 20 degrees, tobacco and cannabis indica in the last three regulated tables (in decreasing order of risk and danger);

3) the inclusion of heroin and cocaine in the official pharmacopoeia and, subjecting them to a condition of monopoly;

4) the legalization of cannabis indica;

5) a taxation with the purpose of discouraging the use of all drugs, establishing a retail price correlated to the risk involved: for example, cannabis indica at the same price as tobacco; heroin at a price ten times superior and cocaine at a price twenty times superior to that of liquors;

6) banning any kind of advertisement and propaganda as well as negative publicity on the risks for all substances including liquors and tobacco;

7) the distribution of all psychoactive substances (including heroin and cocaine and excluding alcoholic beverages, tobacco and cannabis) with a medical prescription;

8) the possibility for each physician to write prescriptions for the substances (a maximum of one daily dose multiplied by three), with the duty of informing the person on the characteristics of the substances, its ascertained effects and the risks involved in its assumption ("informed consent");

9) the possibility of ensuring a continued and controlled distribution of these substances to those drug-addicts who explicitly request it, by means of a special card which guarantees the substance for 90 days;

10) the strict repression, by means of a series of harsh penalties, of all activities involved with the production, manufacture, sale, distribution, purchase, import-export of psychoactive substances (drugs) which are not included in the above mentioned legal procedures.

The proposal which expresses the anti-prohibitionist strategy has the following aims:

a) radically destroy the drug traffic and the criminal organizations that are thriving on it;

b) create the suitable conditions in order for acts of violence on the population for the purpose getting money never again to be perpetrated;

c) dramatically reduce the deaths due to drug abuse, and deal with the situations of abasement and alienation of the drug-addicts, who are forced to lead an illegal life under the control of criminality;

d) to seriously tackle the problem of the spreading of AIDS, which in Italy afflicts two thirds of the drug-addicted risk groups;

This proposal has been recorded in connection with the discussion of the governmental bill, and in a certain sense represents its counterpart as far as inspiration and regulation mechanisms are concerned.

V - THE THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL REASONS FOR OUR OPPOSITION

There are many theoretical and practical reasons for our opposition to the governmental law: we can summarize them in the following motivations. All are of a rational nature.

1) the law is unconstitutional;

2) the law is illiberal and authoritative;

3) the law is inapplicable;

4) the law is dangerous and deceptively repressive;

5) the law is unfair and counter-productive;

5.1. An unconstitutional law

The law is a preoccupying document for the superficiality with which it suppresses fundamental principles of civilization, many of which are laid out by the Constitution.

The first violation is that brought about by the so-called "administrative sanctions" envisaged by art. 14 to the jurisdictional monopoly of the judicial activity established by art. 102 of the Constitution. The application for three times of such sanctions to persons possessing a quantity of drugs inferior to the average daily amount produces the effect of turning the same illegal act, if committed a fourth time, into penal felony. It therefore represents a sort of premise or constitutional element of the offence of possession of drugs entrusted to the penal judgement. It is however clear that on this premise the judge has no power of ascertaining. In what way will he verify that the previous offences have been truly committed? How will he, with the simple bureaucratic certification of the sanction previously inflicted, supply to the lack of guarantees of defence and generally of the trial guarantees, which are the basis of a correct judgement? Furthermore: this distorted and up to today unheard-of mechanis

m also violates art. 101 of the Constitution concerning the independence of the juridical function. It is obvious that the judge is reduced to a mere bureaucrat of the administration, the last link of a bureaucratic chain, simply called upon to to back an administrative arbitrary act.

On the other hand, this same art. 14 violates a second constitutional principle: the reservation of jurisdictionality on the subject of personal freedom, ratified by art. 13 of the Constitution. Of the so-called "administrative sanctions" provided by the new art. 72 for the possession of amounts of narcotics "not exceeding the average daily amount" - the withdrawal of the driver's licence or passport or gun permit, and the prohibition of leaving the municipality of residence - the latter interferes with personal freedom. And it therefore violates the principle ratified by art. 13 according to which "no sort of...restriction of personal freedom is allowed, if not out of a motivated act from the judicial authority".

There is yet another aspect of unconstitutionality, perhaps the most serious, and that has to do with the most paradoxical and unfair regulation of the law. Art n. 13 envisages the incredible penalty of 8 to 20 years of imprisonment not only for anyone "growing, producing, manufacturing, extracting, refining, selling, peddling, giving, distributing, trading, transporting, exporting or providing other persons with", but also for anyone "purchasing", or "in any way receiving" or in any case "possessing" drugs in quantities exceeding the daily amount. It is obvious that such a regulation is in contrast with the principle of equality ratified by art. 3 of the Constitution. The Constitutional Court has always stated that different situations cannot be handled in the same way, and that only a "fair" analogy can justify equality of treatment.

Now: how can the infliction of the same sentence to persons producing or retailing drugs and to persons simply withholding drugs, even just for personal use, be considered fair?

Such an aberration, which is - to be honest - present also in the law currently in force, which punishes the possession of "not moderate" quantities of drugs, can be explained with the assumption that such possession is in real fact destined to be retailed. The structure of the offence is that of an offence of suspicion: in the simple suspicion that the possession of an excessive quantity of drugs, that is in quantities exceeding those for daily consumption, is destined to be sold, it is punished in the same way as the sale is punished, even if there is no evidence of this intention; in other words, to avoid the burden of having to prove the sale, and in order to simplify the judicial work, a type of offence has been created, making repression automatic by considering possession and retailing as equivalent.

The result of this operation is obviously a patent injustice, at any rate for people who believe that the selling of drugs is incomparably more serious than its use, and that the difference between the two things is the same that exists between the causers of death and their victims. All this without considering the criminogenic effects of such a regulation: first of all, in order not to be liable for an 8 to 20 year sentence, the drug-addict will have to get hold of his drugs daily, with the consequent strengthening of the blackmail power of the traffickers, and with an increase of minor offences such as thefts and bag-snatching: secondly, because the same penalty is applied both for possession and for sale, the drug-addict will actually be encouraged to turn into a pusher. It must also be said that character of the drug-addict possessing only one daily amount for personal use is an abstract and ideal character, given the fact that the amounts will in fact continue to be sold (and withheld) in the quantitie

s decided by the mechanism of the market.

A fourth aspect of the unconstitutionality of the law is represented by the contrast between the punitive mechanism provided by art. 13, and the principles of strict legality of the penalties and of the submission of the judges to the law ratified by articles 25 and 101 of the Constitution. The provision of the extremely severe punishment "from 8 to 20 years" for anyone pushing and for anyone in possession of a quantity of drugs exceeding the daily amount, is seconded by the power of the judge to reduce the penalty to one year "for any circumstance inherent to the person of the offender": in other words at his complete discretion. An abatement of the penalty by another two thirds is provided for anyone confessing or co-operating with the accusing part. This means that the penalty can in fact vary between 4 months (obviously liable to a conditional suspension) and 20 years, according to the pre-modern scheme of arbitrary penalties: and that the jurisdiction concerning drugs will become the ground for complet

e discretionality and for uncontrolled abuses.

Lastly, the strict penal legality and the submission of judges to the law turn out to be void because of the complete uncertainty of the boundaries which separate an administrative offence and a crime (punished with 8 to 20 years of prison). This undefined boundary is indicated in art. 14 with the idea of a "average daily amount". What does "daily average amount" mean? Who will determine its quantity? It appears clear that if this power were entrusted to circular letters or administrative instructions, an element of the offence would be entrusted to the public administration instead of to the law, with the consequent violation of the principle of penal legality. And then: is it truly possible to establish this quantity? Is it not true that it varies according to the authors and the circumstances? And how can it be that the conviction of a citizen to a sentence of up to 20 years be remitted to such an uncertain, discretionary and misleading dosage?

5.2. An illiberal and authoritative law

Our opposition is rooted first of all in the theoretical basis of the law, which is in total opposition with the liberal thought and doctrine. It contradicts the very spirit of the constitution, suppressing elementary principles of juridical civilization: the liberal principle of non-punishability of the acts directed at oneself, given that each person is responsible of his body; that of the dignity of each person and of his immunity from more or less forced medical interventions or treatments; the very source of the legitimacy, lastly, of the penal intervention of the State, which can be justified only if it is apt to prevent violence and sufferings greater than those produced in its absence.

The most important and according to us most serious innovation for the proponents is the one concerning the punishability of personal use, which is a direct consequence of the manifesto-like declaration contained in art. 12: "The personal use of psychotropic or narcotic substances is prohibited".

We believe that the theoretical reference which is still valid remains the liberal tradition, which already with John Stuart Mill was opposing prohibition on alcohol and opium because it believed that citizens were not to be treated like children or like savages incapable of understanding. The prohibitionist laws were regarded as an expression of the paternalistic law.

According to the author of the renowned essay "On the subject of freedom" 'the only purpose for which force can rationally be used on a member of a civilized society is to prevent him from harming other people. Over himself, over his body and soul, the individual is sovereign ...Each person is the sole guardian of his moral, physical and intellectual health..."

Concerning the authoritative aspect of the law, we will integrally quote the remarks of Prof. Luigi Ferraioli in a recent speech at the meeting on "Penalty as a drug" on 'Drug-addiction, punishment and the foundations of penal law':

'Punishing the personal use of drugs interferes with a fundamental postulate of the liberal juridical tradition: the non-punishability of acts directed at oneself. This principle, supported by all the illuministic juridical culture of the pre-modern penal law, is a corollary of the separation between law and morals, by which the task of penal law is simply that of preventing behaviours that are harmful for other people. The battles of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Beccaria, Bentham and then of John Stuart Mill against the punishment of acts directed against oneself, such as attempted suicide, homosexuality, adultery and similar acts, may be here recalled. This secularization of penal law gave birth to much of the structural elements of the modern state based on democratic assent: the freedom of acts that are not harmful for other people, the autonomy of the individual, the juridical tolerance of diversity, the impassable limits of prohibitions and penalties, and the fact that their sole purpose is that of defending

citizens from violence committed by others.

But the governmental bill on drugs does not only punish an activity which is not harmful for others, such as the consumption of drugs. By punishing its consumption it inevitably turns into punishing drug-addiction as such: that is, punishing a tragical and sorrow personal condition of addiction and sufferance, which, in extreme cases, goes far beyond the person's will. I will not linger on the fact that such a criminalization of alienated social subjects, who are in need of help and certainly not of punishment, is the expression of a mechanism of an authoritative nature, and in the best hypothesis reveal the never suppressed illusion of repression, leaving the solution of dramatic social and existential problems to punishment. What is very serious is precisely the punishment of a personal condition as such, which violates another typical principle of the state based on democratic assent: the principle according to which it is possible to be punished only for what one does, and not for what one is, for the w

ay one behaves and for one's identity.

There is a third and more important aspect with which this law contradicts the liberal paradigma of penal law. What legitimates a penal intervention is its capability to prevent violences and sufferings greater than those produced in its absence. Well then: it is legitimate to foresee that a law like the one that is being discussed would not be able to prevent and therefore significantly reduce the personal use of drugs and the consequent phenomenon of drug-addiction, but would only increase the clandestine forms and therefore the burden of sufferance connected to it. Considering this aspect, there is a similarity between the punishment of drug-addiction and the punishment of abortion. The most immoral and shameful aspect of the punishment of abortion was that whatever the opinion on the moral legitimacy or illegitimacy of abortion,it in no way served the purpose of stopping it and even of reducing it in quantity, but had the sole effect of forcing abortion to be performed clandestinely and, preventing it fr

om being performed with the necessary medical assistance. Evidence of this is the fact that since the law on abortion has been passed, abortions have not increased but possibly even decreased in number, and appear to be constantly decreasing.

This means that penal law is completely powerless and not pertinent when dealing with phenomena that are originated by strong factors of a social or existential nature such as abortion, drug-addiction, adultery, concubinage and similar: and that therefore to resort to punishment, because it is void of any deterrent effectiveness, has in these cases the sole symbolic purpose of ratifying a moral principle. Which is precisely the function that contradicts the modern secularization of penal law, and against which the liberal culture has been fighting for three centuries.

One is reminded of the great 18th and 19th Century debates which saw Jeremy Bentham opposed to Sir Edward Blackstone, John Stuart Mill to the Victorian judge James Fitzjames Stephen and, in this century, Herbert Hart to Lord Denning on the subject of attempted suicide, homosexuality, drunkenness, prostitution and abortion. To the liberal culture, which in the name of a separation between law and morals asked for the non-punishability of these acts because not harmful to others and above all not preventable by means of penalties, the reactionary moralism opposed the "declamatory" and propagandist function of penal law as a means of juridical assertion of morals. The same thesis, I remember, was supported by the CEI (Italian Episcopal Conference) in the occasion of the battle conducted in Italy for the legalization of abortion: against the argumentation of complete ineffectiveness of the law in preventing or even in reducing the number of abortions, the document issued by the CEI on the 18th of November 1974

proclaimed that the essential thing, apart from the practical effects, was the juridical consecration of the moral principle that since abortion is a sin, it is also an offence.

Now: this thesis, supported throughout the 18th Century and in the past Century, has always represented the distinction between lay and liberal penal cultures and authoritative and ethical-national cultures: the first ones based on a utilitarian concept of penal law as a means of protecting people from other people's offences, the latter based on a moralistic concept as a factor of moral promotion in spite of the harmful effects it causes. It seems to me that this second concept corresponds precisely to the characterization of "fanaticism" given by Richard Hare in Freedom and Reason. The "fanatic", says Hare, is precisely the person who allows his own moral idea to "brutally tread upon the interests of others", also because they do not share his ideal; in other words the person who defends and puts into practice his own moral principles without weighing them, and even remains indifferent as to the sometimes disastrous damages that are produced by their enactment "for the vital interests of a very great numbe

r of people".

it is not by chance that the front supporting the law is the same one that previously opposed, and today tends to question, the law on abortion. Just like the anti-abortionists were concerned with juridically asserting the moral principle as opposed to the ineffectiveness of its punishment but also to the tremendous calamity of mass clandestine abortion, just like the supporters of the law penalizing drug consumption are pursuing above all the assertion of the principle of illegality of drug-addiction, ignoring the lack of deterrent effects and the consistent effects of clandestinity and of further alienation for drug addicts which would follow, the latter being in the impossibility of resorting to treatment, public assistance and social solidarity".

5.3. An inapplicable law

Taking into account the operative mechanisms of the proposal and examining its practical enforcement if it should become law and if it should be applied, a series of aspects that are not only wrong and confused but also definitely unfeasible become evident.

First of all it is necessary to have an idea of the number of the subjects to which penal regulations or even administrative sanctionary regulations should be applied. It is estimated that in Italy there are approximately 300,000 heroin and opiate drug-addicts, to which the users of cocaine must be added, and the non-addicted and non-habitual consumers of the various "hard" substances. It is then necessary to take into account the consumers (whether regular or occasional) of the derivatives of cannabis and hashish, who, it is estimated, are no less than one million. As a consequence, with the punishability of personal, occasional or regular use as well, the individuals to be punished by this repressive system reach a number exceeding one million. This number of individuals potentially liable for punishment would have to be dealt with by the judicial system, the penitentiary system, the administrative system (the Prefect) and the social-medical system.

As regards the judicial system, the burden of proceedings related to drugs which is already quite heavy (about 40& of the total number) would become absolutely unbearable the very moment the law were applied to all persons at which it is directed, given the constitutional feature of our country in which penal action is mandatory. The inapplicability under this aspect derives from the number of proceedings to be activated, but also, under other aspects, from the nature of the matters which the magistrate

is called to deal with, due to the perverse intertwining between penal problems and therapeutical path which the new regulations indicate.

The judge will also have the function of "priest of morality" on the basis of which he must decide on the validity of the treatment that the drug-addict must undertake, rather than on the penalty to be inflicted: the proceeding which he starts must have the purpose of threatening the drug-addict, inducing him to undertake a therapeutical program, rather than to judge on a specific offence.

The foreseen administrative sanctions alternative to the carcerary ones are also characterized by a concrete inapplicability. The system of sanctions which has been created, consequential to the declaration of illegality of Article 12, is a complex and confused mechanism of three succeeding administrative sanctions (which are: the suspension of the driver's licence, passport or shooting licence, or the prohibition of leaving the municipality of residence) entrusted to the prefect and followed, after a person has been found for 4 times in possession of a small quantity of drugs, by the same sanctions plus the compulsion of signing regularly at the Police or Carabinieri station, a norm that becomes a penal sanction because it is inflicted by the magistrate.

This system, which illustrates all the useless effort to bring together two concepts that cannot be brought together, that is to say the "illegality-punishability" with the non-punishment and the non-imprisonment, in actual fact has some grotesque aspects. How is it possible to imagine that the 100 prefects of Italy can deal with the one million individuals to be admonished? Apart from the problem of guarantees, on which we will not linger here, how is it possible to govern such a monstrous machine if not by creating a huge bureaucracy (including archives, files) which cannot but produce effects that are contrary to those wanted?

It goes beyond any logic to believe that such administrative sanctions - granted the fact that they can be managed - can have the effect of inducing a person who consumes drugs to stop using them. By trying to solve a problem that cannot be solved, this part of the law betrays the attempt to avoid imprisonment for the abstract character of the pure consumer, with the illusion of inducing him, by means of a series of grotesque administrative sanctions, to undergo treatment, with the consequence that the judicial and the police-headquarters will be submerged as well.

A complete distortion of the function of the social-medical system will also occur, the latter destined to the rehabilitation and the treatment of drug-addicts, both in its public and private aspects (communities for drug rehabilitation). Fundamentally, the law provides for the public service and for the communities, duties which are also (or mostly) related to the social control, to be carried out in close co-operation with the disciplinary control authorities: such services will in this way end up by becoming the interlocutors mainly of these repressive bodies rather than of its users.

Such distortion is due to a series of articles in which penal and social-medical aspects are mingled.

In article 96 "the public service is compelled to call the person in question for the definition of a therapeutical program" in the case of an indication received by the judicial authority or the prefect; in article 97 "the service for drug-addictions controls the carrying out of the program on the part of the drug-addict" for the individual who has undertaken a rehabilitation program; in Article 97 bis "a periodical report is sent by the competent USL (Local Sanitary Centre) of the territory to the competent authorities" in the case of individuals that benefit from a suspension of the penalty or of the execution of the penalty. The sanitary service is directly concerned with the hypothesis of punishability of the consumer, and must be in contact with the police head-quarters (article 72), with the judging judicial (article 72 bis), with the supervision judicial (article 82 bis); is given the function of controlling and verifying the adhesion to the therapeutical program of the individual by means of a perio

dical report (article 97 bis); and must also report to the judicial authority or the prefect if it knows of people using narcotic or psychotropic substances (article 96).

Concerning the transformation of the role of the communities, it will be enough to quote don Angelo Cupini of the CNCA on the subject: "With the new law communities run the risk of becoming similar to prisons, of becoming the soft arm of law. This would mean the end of our experience, which expresses itself above all in the capacity of being a free space, in which a proposal is made consisting in the collaboration with the drug-addict, and which it must be possible to modify and newly formulate even several times".

The carcerary system is also not immune to the disastrous consequences of this law. Our penitentiaries are presently equipped to contain no more than 35,000/40,000 places which are already over-populated by over 60% by individuals convicted for drug reasons. With the tremendous increase of the number of prisoners - whatever the effectiveness of the administrative sanctions - the whole penitentiary system would blow up (tens or hundreds of thousands more prisoners for drug reasons?) not only because of the quantity of the new potential guests, but also for all the other problems posed by the presence of drug-addicted prisoners and with the many, among them, who are suffering from AIDS or who are infected by the HIV-virus. With the approval of the law the whole carcerary reform is put into question, with the thousands and thousands of drug-addicts that will completely cram the already over-populated Italian prisons, requiring a long series of amnesties and other, more radical measures.

5.4. A dangerous and deceptively repressive law

It has been much insisted, and much propaganda has been made on rendering the penalties contained in the draft bill more severe, underlining and stressing their deterrent feature. We will once again quote Luigi Ferraioli, to understand what this repressive constraint means in actual fact.

"One of the most preoccupying aspects of this law is the incredible minimal penalty of 8 years of imprisonment for the possession of drugs in a quantity exceeding the daily amount, excepting the possibility for the judge of reducing it to one year "for any circumstance relative to the person of the offender" and of another two thirds for anyone who confesses or collaborates with justice. This means that the penalty may in fact vary between 4 months (obviously liable to a conditional suspension) and 20 years, according to the pre-modern scheme of arbitrary penalties; and that with the jurisdiction on the matter of drugs it will become the ideal ground for total discretionality and uncontrolled abuses.

The main effect of such a norm will on the other hand be that the drug-addict, not to incur this more serious offence, will have to get his amount of drugs every day. The blackmailing power of the traffickers and the micro-criminality consisting of thefts and bag-snatching will greatly increase. And to the addiction from drugs other addictions will have to be added: the daily addiction from the large-scale delinquency of drug traffic, and the addiction to micro-criminality in order to survive. The norm will in conclusion act as a criminogenic factor and as a multiplier of violence: no longer the occasional contact with the drug pusher, but a daily contact, preceded by equally daily thefts, purse-snatchings and prostitution.

The most absurd thing of all is however another one: it is that the the possession of drugs in quantities exceeding the daily amount and the retailing of drugs are punished with the same penalty. Such an aberration, which is envisaged also in the law currently in force, which punishes the possession of "non-moderate" quantities of drugs, can be explained by the assumption that this quantity is in actual fact destined to be sold. The structure of the offence is that of the offence of suspicion: in the mere suspicion that the quantities of drugs exceeding the moderate or daily amount are in fact going to be sold, the possession is punished in the same way as the retailing, even if there is no evidence of this intention. In other words, to avoid having to prove that there has been a sale of drugs, and in order to simplify the judicial work, a new offence has been created, making repression automatic by rendering the possession and the sale of drugs equivalent.

The result of this operation is not only a patent injustice, at any rate for anyone who believes that selling drugs is by far more serious than consuming them, and that the difference between the two things is the same as that dividing the causers of death and their victims, but also a sorrow solidarity between drug-addicts and drug-traffickers, which will obviously damage the former and benefit the latter. The character of the drug-addict possessing only one daily dose is an ideal and abstract character, given that the doses will in fact continue to be sold (and possessed) in the quantities requested by the logic of the market.

All this, it has been said, applies also to law n. 685 of 1975, which is still in force. Even today the non-punishability of the use of narcotics exists only in principle, because it is contradicted by the concrete punishability of persons possessing "non-moderate" quantities of drugs. And the current law too - by punishing as an offence of suspicion the possession of "non-moderate" quantities of drugs with extremely severe penalties (from 4 to 15 years) even if inferior to those provided by the law in discussion - amounts to a penalization of drug-addiction as such. The current law as well contradicts the classical liberal paradigma of penal law under many aspects: the aspect of compulsion, of offensiveness and that of the burden of evidence not requested for offences of suspicion. Indeed, what does "moderate quantity" mean? The judicial deliberations can be very different, due to the fact that this expression is not of a descriptive nature but of an evaluative nature, and therefore entrusts the integration

of the penal case to the will of the judge. Moreover, why punish simple possession when the evidence of the sale is lacking, and punish it above all with the same penalty applied to this other, far more serious offence?"

5.5. An unfair and counteractive law

The system of norms envisaged and the mechanisms triggered will reach the opposite effect of the desired one. The overall message of the law, representing its most underlined aspect, is to discourage the use of drugs by means of threats, admonishments, psychological constraints and, fundamentally, by acting on fear of repression.

The various institutions which would have to deal with the drug-addict and the consumer, regular or occasional, of psychoactive substances that do or do not engender addiction, are all distorted in their tasks and their functions. The magistrate is asked to be a therapeutist, the communities and the public social-sanitary services are asked to carry out tasks of social and disciplinary control, the prefect is asked to act either as a preacher or a policeman.

In conclusion, there are all the premises that that confidence which the drug-addict, very often alienated and psychologically frail, has in a certain institutional figure will be destroyed precisely by the distortion of roles that this law engenders.

The most confused theoretical and practical point of the law is that of attempting to solve extremely delicate social-sanitary issues with the penal instrument, and to pretend to give an answer to the offences that it sets out by means of a therapeutical path. Any legislative and operative strategy applied to the world of drugs must start from the assumption that the criminal aspect must be clearly separated from the social-sanitary aspect.

The proposal of using coercive treatment as an alternative to a penal or administrative sanction is void of any basis. Already articles 99 and 100 of law 685 envisaged urgent measures on the part of the magistrate or the tribunal, and in any case coercive measures were provided for, norms which have never been enforced. What is now provided by art. 72 on the alternatives to administrative sanctions, by art. 72 quinquies on the suspension of the penal proceedings and therefore on the suspension of the detention penalty, are all mechanisms that rely on a sort of psychological blackmail as regards to the drug-addict: "either you undergo treatment or you go to jail".

But both doctrine and experience in Western countries, withstanding the experts' opinion, agree on believing that the device of psychological constraint, and therefore the compulsory treatment, produce no effect. The opinion of psychiatrists and psychologists are practically unanimous in believing that forced treatment is useless, and that the fundamental element for any treatment to be successful is the willingness of the drug-addict.

In France, where this institution was envisaged, with the possibility for the drug-addict of benefiting from a therapeutical option during the phase of execution of the penalty, it has recently been dropped. The decision of hyper-criminalizing the consumption of drugs did not stand the test : after 7 years, with no legislative changes, the Ministry for Justice invited the judges, by means of a circular letter, to no longer prosecute simple consumption, leaving to the judges themselves the task of establishing the quantity destined for personal need.

In conclusion, the sanctionary system provided, the different mechanisms in which psychological blackmail and discretionality of action of the public authorities are mingled, will have the effect of driving the drug-addict away from institutions, pushing him back into the submerged world, in close contact with small and large-scale criminality.

If it is true that on the question of treatment and re-socialization of those affected by addictions and intoxications from some drug, the crucial point is the institutional connection, the law cannot but produce a negative effect, of which the main victims will be precisely those weaker and most alienated individuals which the law should be directed at.

VI. OUR PROPOSALS FOR THE ALTERATIONS OF THE LAW

We believe that the governmental bill presently being discussed is very difficult to modify in its normative structure, if not by acting on art. 12 (declaration of illegality) and, as a consequence, on the whole system of penalties and administrative sanctions. Obviously many of the amendments that the Radical Members of Parliament of the European Federalist group are moving are directed at modifying this assumption which distorts, as we have already asserted, every rule of penal law and every individual guarantee.

We are therefore forced to operate on an extremely contradictory text, in which those principles which should be adopted as a sine qua non are often left out. Our alternative proposals basically refer to four fundamental points on which our main amendments for the improving of the text are based upon.

6.1. Depenalizing personal use.

The essential points of our counter-proposal are: a) the depenalization of personal use of narcotic substances; b) the liberalization of cannabis and the consequent differentiation of the market of the so-called soft drugs from hard drugs; c) the controlled distribution to drug-addicts; d) the inclusion of tobacco and alcohol in the tables; e) a different system of penal sanctions laying down maximum severity for large-scale pushers.

The amendments have been formulated according to two guide-lines: a 'guarantistic' one and an anti-prohibitionist one. The anti-prohibitionist one represents our manifesto, aware as we are that at the moment there is no majority inside Parliament oriented in such a way. Concerning the guarantistic guide-line instead, which tends to subdue the useless repressive aspect of the law, we hope in the creation of a majority front aiming at improving the governmental text.

We are operating especially on articles 13, 14, and 15, to obtain at least a minimum of formal coherence; in this sense we have prepared solutions capable of eliminating all administrative sanctions or at least the contradiction by which a certain behaviour represents first an administrative violation and then a penal violation.

The personal use therefore of narcotic substances would be allowed, and the spheres in which there is a small or large-scale traffic are strictly defined.

It is to be said that if the so-called soft drugs cannot be considered dangerous, neither for the individual or for others, the logical solution is that of liberalization; if this is not possible in subordine, the possibility must be granted of possessing for personal use what is to be considered as a reasonable quantity of "soft" substances. For this purpose two criteria have been adopted, suggesting two different solutions: the first one is the one successfully adopted by some of the states of the United States, i.e. the faculty of possessing up to one ounce of hashish or marijuana, the other one is the one up to recently proposed by the PSI (Italian Socialist Party), that is, the faculty of possessing the same substances in quantities of up to a maximum limit of 10 grams.

For hard drugs the limit suggested is 2 grams for heroin and 3 grams for cocaine, so that if our proposal were accepted it would finally solve the never-ending and never solved problem of the moderate quantity, which has been transformed into the problem of the daily average dose.

With the necessity of establishing the limits of possession always well in mind, the limit of small-scale traffic is established for possession of up to 5 grams for heroin, up to 10 grams for cocaine and up to 200 grams for so-called soft drugs. Small-scale traffic, which for hard drugs is often strictly linked to the need of getting the money to provide oneself with the personal dose, must be according to us punished with a fine: up to one year of jail and a 9 million fine for hard drugs, up to 2 months of jail and a 1 million fine for so-called soft drugs. Beyond these quantities there is large-scale traffic, which must be fought against with a regimen of very harsh penalties.

A specific amendment lays down that a distinction between different segments (free possession, small and large-scale traffic) must be made for all the substances included in the tables enclosed to law 685. Our purpose is that of formulating these same tables again, not according to the degree of danger but according to the addiction and the habit-making effect of the different substances. And it is precisely considering this conception that we have suggested to include alcohol and tobacco in the list of psychotropic substances.

Other amendments aim at setting limits to the activity of the police, and are therefore directed at abrogating those "concessions" which would allow too discretionary a use of the power granted by official authority.

We are also operating in the field of prevention, trying to reduce the excess of bureaucracy which pervades every article, and establishing exactly with what criteria the social-therapeutical communities will be conformed. A proliferation of the industry of communities must be avoided, i.e. the easy speculation which could readily develop due to the strong demand.

Other interventions are aimed at protecting certain categories of professionals, who would experience a distortion of their professional role and deontological code. In particular physicians are in the paradoxical situation of having to exert the function of detecting and reporting, thus destroying the necessary relationship of confidence which must exist between physician and patient.

Finally, particular attention has been given to emerging problems such as AIDS, or to particular groups of individuals concerned with the problem, such as prisoners.

In spite of and beyond our efforts, there are in the law aspects such as the concentration of authority and power in the hands of the Minister for Internal Affairs which distorts the visual of the drug problem. Our amendments, if passed, would produce less damage, even though they cannot provide a different formulation, adequate to the problem of drugs.

6.2. The average daily amount equivalent to the moderate quantity?

In the draft bill the concept of "moderate quantity" is substituted with that of "average daily dose" (Art.72); this dose will have to be established 'by an ordinance of the Minister of Health, prior to an opinion given by the Superior Institute for Health, (art.72 sexies) which will be issued within 4 months from the coming into force of the law. It is difficult to imagine what criteria the Minister will be referring to for the establishment of the daily average dose: for one thing, because the individual conditions of each drug-addict vary greatly, the criteria that will be adopted will have a relative value.

According to the experts of the Mario Negri Institute, which in the field of pharmacology is certainly the most reliable source, the concept of average daily dose represents "a contrivance, and is therefore technically a falsity if used in itself, if it is not connected in a very specific way to the single chemical substance and, at the same time, without considering the single problem for which the substance is administered (...) the pharmaceutical or pharmacological category of drugs does not exist, because the family of substances which are used is basically indefinable as regards to bio-availabilty, metabolism and specific dose-effect relation". Further significant perplexities have been raised also by several experts of the Superior Institute for Health which will be called to help the Minister in the definition of the average daily dose: "it is unacceptable to use the definition of average daily dose for drug-addiction, which in the pharmacopoeia concerns minimum amounts of substances and is applied on

ly in therapeutical situations (...) a unanimous negative evaluation concerning the governmental hypothesis has emerged, underlining the technical and scientific limits which have not been taken at all into account in the final draft ot the law".

There is the risk that the average daily dose will become, as was the case in the past with the concept of moderate quantity, an incomprehensible field in which the most diverse hypotheses may find a legitimation. It is useful to recall that one of the most controversial concepts of law 685 was precisely that of the moderate quantity, which caused so many conflicts in the course of its application.

Not even the Constitutional Court has managed to settle the controversy, so much so that it entrusted the Parliament the task of determining the exact contents of the expression "moderate quantity", being this concept absolutely discretionary (sentence n.136 of 16/4/87).

Whatever the decision the Minister will take on the subject of the average daily dose, the more than legitimate appeals to the Constitutional Court cannot but receive similar answers. Also for this reason we thought it more reliable on a scientific level, and more guarantistic on the judicial level, to reply with amendments that exactly define the substances that it is possible to possess.

6.3. - The reasons for legalizing cannabis.

Our proposal of legalizing cannabis is not the result of a cultural vision, nor does it respond to a positive prejudice. It is the result of consolidated scientific observations. As a matter of fact, many countries and scientific organizations have created special inter-disciplinary investigation commissions on the use of cannabis, which have dealt with the problem from all points of view: medical, pharmacological, psychological, social, juridical. The findings of these initiatives have produced a series of reports, the contents of which give rise to the following considerations:

a) there is no causality relationship between the use of cannabis and criminal behaviours; b) there is no causality relationship between the use of cannabis and mental disease; c) there is no causality relationship between the use of cannabis and the use of more dangerous drugs; d) there is no physical addiction to cannabis; the psychical addiction is inferior to that produced by legal substances (alcohol, tobacco); there is no toxicomania due to cannabis; e) the acute toxicity of cannabis is extremely low; international scientific literature up to now has not reported one single ascertained case of lethal acute intoxication; f) the chronic toxicity of cannabis is low; researches carried out on intensive and prolonged use have reported no significant incidence of pathological effects in cannabis consumers; g) as a whole, the toxic effects of cannabis are greatly inferior to those of alcohol and tobacco.

This last statement can be clearly deduced by a series of summarizing data on the consequences of the use of alcohol and tobacco, such as:

a) The use of alcohol is directly responsible for aggressive behaviours; according to US governmental data half of all homicides and a fourth of all suicides are related to the use of alcohol; b) chronic alcohol intoxication among other things produces serious mental diseases; c) alcohol causes physical addiction, toxicomania, withdrawal syndrome (delirium tremens); tobacco too, according to recent researches, causes real physical addiction; psychological addiction from tobacco is, among all substances, the strongest known; d) the acute toxicity of alcohol is very high (324 deaths due to overdose in Italy in 1970 alone); e) the chronic toxicity of alcohol manifests itself in a series of ailments, the most serious of which are cerebral atrophy and cirrhosis of the liver; the chronic use of tobacco above all causes heart attack, pulmonary emphysema and lung cancer, with an astonishing incidence on mortality: according to Canadian sanitary authorities, "the use of cigarettes is one of the most important estima

ted causes of disease, infirmity and death".

In the impossibility of invoking the scientific findings of the effects of cannabis which are even more unquestionable because they are the result of an accumulation of long since consolidated researches, studies and reports, the opponents of legalization answer by resorting to the international restraints to which Italy is allegedly subjected to. Our country - according to the supporters of the status quo - has signed the "Single Convention of the ONU on narcotic drugs", which does not allow any kind of legalization of cannabis, under penalty of withdrawal from the ONU, the Convention, and the consequent destruction of the world control system on narco-traffic.

A similar objection is captious, given that there are many ways to achieve the abolition of legal control within the Convention. First of all cannabis can be canceled by the Convention through an amendment proposed by any country adhering to the Convention itself and discussed by a special conference indicted for the occasion by the social and economic Council (ECOSOC) of the ONU. Secondly, each country may choose to withdraw from the Convention by giving a six months' notice without compromising neither the belonging to the ONU or the effectiveness of international controls. As a matter of fact, the control regulations on international drug traffic is in force in all countries of the ONU, irrespective of their adhesion to the Convention. Thirdly, the 1969 Vienna Convention has introduced the procedure of "selective denouncement", by which each member country can unilaterally refuse part of the Convention on the basis of "factual errors" relative to the contents of the Convention itself.

VII. A DISASTER IS BEING RISKED FOR POLITICAL CONVENIENCE AND FOR THE SAKE OF IMAGE

A political battle is being fought over the bill known as Jervolino-Vassalli, but in actual fact strongly advocated by the Socialist leader Craxi, a battle that goes beyond the merit of the proposal itself. Over a year ago a campaign was launched aiming at discrediting certain images that in reality have little to do with the contents of the norms examined by Parliament and their possible effects. At first it was made to believe that a "tough" bend was needed as regards to an allegedly permissive attitude, and that such a bend would have greatly contributed to stopping drugs. The attempt was therefore made to accredit the concept that whoever is in favour of the law wants to fight drugs, whereas anyone who is against it would foster its diffusion or even be

in collusion with the drug traffickers.

This hoaxing operation went on with the complicity of the mass medias, which have been constantly carrying out a work of dis-information or, in the best of cases, have created a psychological terrorism which is of no purpose for adequately tackling the "drug issue" also in terms of mass education and prevention.

This image of a "tough" law has been corroborated by an impression of parliamentary "decisiveness" as opposed to an alleged sluggishness and inefficiency, greatly owing to the leadership of the PSI. And it is precisely on the basis of these premises that in Parliament the referential examination of the combined Justice and Social Affairs commissions was abruptly interrupted, presenting therefore for discussion in Parliament a patched-up and rudimentary text.

This series of behaviours makes it evident that the fight over drugs, for the people who have wanted and imposed this law, doesn't concern the substance of the law itself, that is, the kind of cultural, penal, social and sanitary response to give to the dramatic problem of drugs, but rather the political image to show, in order to make an element of propaganda out of it.

Unfortunately, this is the reality over which the country and the Parliament have been blocked for such a long time, this is also the reason for which the supporters of the law constantly shun the comparison of merit, after more and more operators and people concerned with the problem have illustrated its many negative aspects.

As far as we are concerned, with this report as well we are making a last attempt to keep the discussion on the subject open, explicitly stating our radical positions and the relative proposals of amendment. As a matter of fact we have been trying since long to face the tragedy of drugs with coherence and persistence and full commitment, a tragedy which is not only such for the victims using it, but also for those who, having nothing to do with it, must bear the violent consequences of prohibition and above all, for democracy which is ever more endangered throughout the world by the power of the drug traffic.

HONOURABLE COLLEAGUES! - To the politicians, more concerned about asserting images instead of tackling real problems, we would like to say that the approval of this law risks turning into a disaster for Italian society and for its weaker parts, but also for those who have at all costs wanted to impose it on the basis of a partisan and mistaken calculation. We hope that a reconsideration of the law will be possible, to avoid the whole operation from turning into a dangerous boomerang.

Massimo TEODORI,

Relater of the Minority