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The 3rd national Congress of the CORA, met in Milan on 23 and 24 March 1991

Denounces the behaviour of those who, despite the predictable and predicted failure of the Jervolino-Vassalli Law, a further version of the prohibitionist strategy, continue to fuel the fraud according to which it is possible, with this kind of policy, to reap anything other than violence, corruption, underdevelopment, alienation, limitation of civil liberties, further decay of the administration of the law and of public health.

The tremendous waste of human, financial and institutional resources which is under way is implicit in a political system whose democratic bases have long since been jeopardized, and which, by causing ever new emergencies, can provide the inefficient and cynical public bodies and agencies with influence, money and prestige, thus ensuring that system of patronage which is necessary to preserve power.

The Congress underlines that the first government report on the law and the surveys made by the CORA's Observatory of the Laws on Drugs, an indispensable tool to carry out researches and initiatives, confirm the progressive and steady deterioration of all the phenomenons that are caused by prohibitionist norms, from the increase in mortality owing to the use of street heroin, the surge of violent crime, especially bag-snatching, thefts and robberies against people, to the fact that a great number of people, often very young, are unjustly imprisoned or prosecuted as a consequence of an illicit norm such as that relative to the daily average dose.

The Congress states that if 1990 was the year that marked the passage of the new prohibitionist law and of the consequent confusion and indifference, 1991 can and must be the year of the antiprohibitionist comeback.

The CORA Congress invites all antiprohibitionist militants to give life to concrete initiatives aimed at a radical reform of the drug policy, including the legal impeachment of norms which are clearly illegitimate, such as the De Lorenzo decree on methadone, which violates both citizens' right to health and physicians' deontological freedom.

The Congress wishes to thank all those, militants and antiprohibitionist elected candidates, who activated the Charter of Commitments passed by the general Council of 15 July 1990, presenting or ensuring the presentation of needle-exchange schemes in regional, provincial and municipal councils, and more generally for having promoted a health policy on drugs not conform to prohibitionist principles.

The Congress believes that the success which such initiatives have often been rewarded with are an important indication of the antiprohibitionist policy's power of attraction, and thus invites all militants to reinforce the national campaign under way.

The Congress stresses the special importance of the Frankfurt resolutions, so far signed by the municipal administrations of four major European cities at the centre of the illicit drug trade, and deems it necessary for the highest number of mayors of Italian cities to endorse the reasons of good administration that induced their colleagues in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Zürich to proclaim the failure of the current drug policy, and to promote a new policy based on decriminalization and depenalization, as well as on the reduction of harm, to denounce the unsustainable costs for the regional governments of the policies established by the highest international and governmental fora in the total indifference toward the ensuing human and social costs.

Therefore binds the executive bodies of the CORA to organize the necessary initiatives, by means also of popular petitions and information campaigns, to involve the highest number of Italian cities in the movement born in Frankfurt, and for the summons in Italy of the 3rd conference of European cities in 1992.