1. Why are we talking about Drug (in Italy we say "drug" and not "drugs")? Because "drug" today is an organized system of violence produced by a particular political stategy. All the different "drugs", hundreds and hundreds of them, don't produce mafia, wars, delinquency, prostitution, Aids, political corruption, terrorism, submerged economy, parallel financial markets. "Drug" on the contrary does. I personally am not interested in drugs, neither politically or morally. Politically and morally I believe we should be concerned with people, and the social sufferings caused by wrong policies. That's why I'm scared of drug. The forbidden drug. The prohibition. Is it so difficult to explain this concept?
2. Why am I not very interested in the legalization of only recreational drugs? Let me explain. In these last years the drug problem has become very different from the way it used to be in the past. It's no longer a question of addiction and of common delinquency. It has become a problem concerning the State and the States, thanks to the failure of all prohibitionist laws, that have given rise to an economic market that is so incredibly profitable that it has created an organized crime that could very well transform itself into a State itself. I have lately been personally talking, and writing articles on international newspapers about the threat posed by the "narcocracy" for the legal institutions of all those countries in which democracy is a reality.
On the other hand, I am very much concerned about the gradual reinforcement of the State's police apparatus which could, even in countries with the most consolidated democracy, interfere with the citizens' basic rights. It's easy to imagine what use would be made of these extraordinary and sometimes abnormal powers in countries with no or scarce democratic experience.
It is obvious that we must look for newer and more effective solutions than the ones adopted in the past (when, allow me to add, not even the threat of AIDS as main cause of death for heroin consumers and main vehicle of transmission in society was in the air).
These are, I presume, the reasons that have induced people like former secretary of State George Schulz and authoritative and certainly not "permissive" magazines like "The Economist" to ask the internatonal community to quit prohibitionism. Maybe someone could induce people here in Italy too to stop clinging to old minimalist dogmas.
