Through repression the ethic state has surrendered to the drug lords

ABSTRACT: Raymond Kendall, for many years Interpol Secretary-General", says that "the war on drugs is lost", and that the "drug mafia has wiped out its opponents". Like Giuseppe di Gennaro, former "U.N. anti-drug tsar", Kendall also announces the disastrous results, "with military catastrophes, failed agricultural missions and waste of money". But even the Italian Minister of the Interior, Mancino, warns that "the presence and the power of the mafia is in constant rise". Prohibition "forces everyone to pay an absurd tax of violence, corruption, disease, civil and institutional decay". Underlying the repression policy is "the symbolic value of prohibiting". "Is it possible to change method?" CoRA, IAL and the Radical Party itself have launched a struggle in this direction.

(1994 - IL QUOTIDIANO RADICALE, 4 November 1993)

Raymond Kendall is not an antiprohibitionist. He is a British policeman, for many years Secretary-General of Interpol. Today, therefore, he is the highest international authority in the field of the struggle against crime. The war on drugs has been lost, Kendall says. And the drug mafia has wiped away all its opponents on all the most important fronts, i.e. production, distribution and consumption. His words are prompted not by ideological prejudice, or by a logical intuition. It is his experience in the struggle against crime that leads him to issue statements that have the concerned tone of an appeal. An appeal to change policy, to choose more effective and material weapons.

Any person with common sense would do so, in the face of a score of problems such as the ones brought about by prohibition: urban and juvenile crime in constant rise, AIDS spreading unchecked, the drug money that continues to flood the international economic and financial markets, ignoring the sacred rules of competition among companies, insinuating the demon of easy profit and violence in every social class, and ultimately destroying all hopes for a civil recovery of entire regions.

Kendall's is not the first declaration of surrender to organized crime which comes from anti-drugs supermen. Remember the book-confession by Giuseppe Di Gennaro's, the U.N. anti-drug tsar for nine years, until 1991? A negative result, scattered with military catastrophes, disastrous agricultural missions, and waste of money. Precisely in early October the Minister of the Interior Nicola Mancino disclosed that the presence and power of the mafia is in constant rise, "in Palermo as in Lecco", despite the blows it has been dealt.

The United Nations, Interpol, the enforcement agencies in Italy are all circulating similar results. This does not appear to be enough to persuade the world' leaders of something: that the struggle against crime and drug addiction is not a matter for the police, and that only a society and a State that renounce the fundamental task of educating to freedom with freedom can turn an individual and social problem into a criminal plague of unprecedented power. While the use of illegal drugs concerns a very small number of people, the law that makes them illegal concerns everyone, and forces everyone to pay an absurd tax of violence, corruption, disease, civil and institutional decay. Thus, instead of circumscribing the problem and facilitating personalized interventions on drugs users, prohibition expands its size and, while it makes the evil it wants to eliminate incurable, causes hundreds more, and even worse.

Underlying repression-based policies is the belief in the symbolic value of prohibiting: prohibiting the use of a dangerous substance appears to many as an extraordinary exception to the rules of the liberal law according to which only behaviours that damage other people should be prohibited. And yet, never as in this case, the representatives of the ethical state are wrong. An apparently small exception to the rule of freedom has turned into a threat to the existence and happiness of everyone, and the "banal" prohibition of smoking a joint is causing a global tragedy of which we ignore the conclusion.

Is it possible to change strategy? Years and years of radical struggles show that it is. The referendum against the Jervolino-Vassalli bill promoted by the Radical Anti-Prohibitionist Coordination (CORA) and the Radical Party, won after years and years of biased information, shows that the match is still open. Despite the money of the narco-mafia, and despite the privileges of the anti-drugs bureaucracies. In Italy CORA is committed to legalizing Indian cannabis and its derivatives--the first step towards a complete and clear regulation of all prohibited substances. Internationally, the Radical Party, in close cooperation with the International Anti-Prohibitionist League (IAL) has started a campaign to denounce, within five years, the Vienna convention and the other conventions that force governments to blindly accept the prohibitionist regime.