ABSTRACT: The damage and the failure caused by the "war on drugs" in the United States. The situation in Europe. The Radical Party plan: to create a transnational movement for the reform of drugs policy which opposes lawfulness to authoritarianism.

(THE PARTY new - n. 6 - march 1992)

With the San Antonio conference held at the end of February 1992, George Bush tried to resuscitate the spirit of the "war on drugs", or rather, on cocaine. He did not succeed. The first three years of the "war", declared on July 1989, have proved to be a failure: domestic consumption has stabilized, or according to latest government reports, has increased (instead of the target of a 50% cut by the end of 1991); world output of cocaine paste has doubled, up now to 900 metric tonnes according to White House estimates (although the EC Commission estimates as much as 1,100 tonnes); the opium poppy has began to be farmed in Central America, brought in by the Cali "Colombian cartel" (the only agricultural reconversion programme to be successful, though contrary to intentions).

In Europe things are going much the same. There has been utter failure regarding drug-users: a generalized increase in the consumption of heroine and cocaine; an increase in the number of deaths by overdose (Bavaria, perhaps the most strictly controlled region in Europe, saw a 76% rise in mortality rates in 1991 on the year before); a greater spread of AIDS among and by drug addicts. There has also been utter failure regarding the criminal side of the question: drug seizures continue to be high in absolute terms, and very low in percentage (the latest report issued by the German police estimates seizures to correspond to between 510% of total drugs in circulation). Meanwhile the Mafia has been acquiring ever more political and economic power in Italy, and the German secret services have denounced the laundering of drug money. A European Parliament commission of inquiry, for the first time at an official level, has borne witness to the situation: following a nine-month inquiry into drug trafficking in the Com

munity, the commission has at last called for reform of drugs policy to head off the perverse effects of prohibitionism.

In spite of this, the strategies employed by the UN, the USA and all international organizations have not changed one iota. Here is an example: even the UN, in its most recent report on drug trafficking, has had to admit that the only European country where the number of drug-related deaths is going down and where the health situation is under control is Holland: and yet the same report strongly reprimands the Dutch government for not having conformed completely to the Vienna convention, and requests the government to quickly fall in line. The same attitude has been taken by various EC governments, who have gone as far as threatening to block the process of integration, which provides for abolition of internal borders between the Twelve, if Holland continues to allow the sale of hashish and marijuana in coffee shops.

The reason is clear: the prohibitionist system, and the "war on drugs" which its application requires, works independently of its results. It works because it produces resources: big budgets, bureaucratic machinery, prestige, popularity, votes, and no less important stronger and ever more sophisticated weapons for repression which are easy to exploit for authoritarian ends. Strategic failures have fed greater investment into each of these fields: paradoxically, the very failure of prohibitionism has strengthened its political role.

An alternative policy to the prohibitionist system will certainly not spring from political determinism. There must be constant political, scientific and cultural pressure accompanied by information. Today, the transnational Radical Party, the only political force in the world to have done so, has understood that drugs policy has become a decisive battle ground between contrasting conceptions of state. A battle ground for a clash between laicism or moralism, individual rights or bureaucracy, civil liberties or a crime emergency, lawfulness or authoritarianism, equal relations between states or different forms of colonialism. For this reason, seeing as democracy and freedom is at stake, the RP calls for the collaboration of men and women, national parties, cultural organizations, well-known people in the realm of science and culture, to develop a major campaign to spread the truth. For this reason the Radical Party will collaborate more closely with the International Anti-prohibitionist League, with the utmos

t urgency and commitment, to build a movement for reform of drug policy: a transnational movement for rights, freedoms and democracy.