2) some drugs are more harmful than others, regardless of their being legal or not

3) some drugs alterate the conscience more than others, and therefore can represent a danger also for other people, if associated to specific behaviours (for example driving a means of transport);

therefore the aim of a drug policy, that is of a system of laws and public services, must be the following:

a) the reduction of the consumption of drugs, and especially of the most directly harmful (for the consumer) or indirectly for society

b) the reduction of the damage associated to the consumption of drugs

c) the elimination of the damages that are unintentionally caused by an ineffective policy (in cases in which the remedy if worse than the evil).

If we agree on the definition of the political problem (as a complex of laws and services it is more effective to pursue aims a,b and c, the need to discuss on the moral issue would drop (is it right to use drugs? can we talk of liberty of taking drugs? is it or is it not my right to makes choices, even if wrong ones?); the inevitable disagreement on the sanitary, psychological, toxicologic consequences of certain behaviours would also drop; the endless anamnesis of the social, family, cultural, geographical roots on the use of this or that substance. There remains one question: which is the most effective means to achieve the common goals which we pursue? Is Washington better, capital of repression, or Paris, capital - according to the promise made by the French health Minister Giorgina Dufoix yesterday - of prevention? Which works better, Liverpool or Milan? The variables, of course, with respect to each suggested instrument, are many, at least as many as the aims which we pursue (to simplify things I red

uced them to three, a, b, c). For example, we admit that with the legalization the number of drug consumers who are presently illegal, would double. However, if drug-related deaths were reduced by half, and drug-addicts no longer ended up in prison for offences against patrimony, and the number of Aids cases were reduced to zero among heroin consumers, could we equally declare ourselves satisfied? Perhaps Tedoldi wouldn't, because he believes that Aids, for example, is a useful deterrent against the use of drugs, and would therefore consider this zeroing as a serious drawback. If, therefore we talk in terms of National Gross Product of drug addicts (so to say), and not of Index of the Quality of Life of drug-addicts, there would remain the opposition between prohibitionists and antiprohibitionists, and fortunately this conference would not be abolished. But at least we would know exactly what we are discussing about.

End of the first part.