The meaning commonly attributed to the word drug is the following: a substance that acts on the mind or on the nervous system, which creates tolerance or addiction, the production, trade and consumption for nonmedical purposes (2) of which are forbidden. The most frequently used synomyms are narcotic, psychotropic substance.

Since the first International Convention on Opium in 1912, 15 multilateral treaties on drugs have been signed. The most important ones currently in force are the following three.

- The Single Convention on Narcotics (New York, 30 March 1961, 133 participating countries) and the amendment protocol (Geneva, 25 March 1972, 106 participants).

- The Convention on Psychotropic Substances (Vienna, 21 February 1971, 106 participating countries).

- The United Nations Convention against the Illegal Traffic of Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances (Vienna, 20 December 1988, 50 participating countries plus the European Community).

Dozens of narcotics and psychotropic substances are listed in the charts enclosed to the first two conventions (3).

Anyone seeking in these documents a list of reasons for which the international community has decided to ban the production, trade and consumption for nonmedical purposes of the various substances, would be deceived. The preamble of the Convention of 1961 simply states that on the one hand "the medical use of narcotics is necessary in order to ease the pain", and that on the other "toxicomania is a plague for the individual, and represents an economic and social threat for mankind". The preamble of the Convention of 1971 on the one hand expresses concern "for the sanitary and social problem ensuing from the abuse of certain psychotropic substances", and on the other hand states that "the use of psychotropic substances for medical and scientific purposes is essential". However, there is no exhaustive general description of narcotics and psychotropic substances, of their effects on the individual and on society - a description which should bring to a distinction between lawful medical uses and unlawful nonmedi

cal uses. Instead, art. 1 of both Conventions contains a circular description according to which the terms narcotic and psychotropic substance refer to any substance contained in the charts enclosed to the conventions themselves.

In any case, it can be presumed that the prohibition of the nonmedical use of drugs is a result of their being substances that act on the mind and create addiction. However, a similar explanation clashes with the well-known fact that the Conventions disregard a variety of substances - alcohol, tobacco, coffee, etc. - which have one or both of these properties. Or they list substances, such as cannabis derivatives, which lack one or both properties: the creation of addiction.

A problem of its own is represented by the degree or the intensity with which the various substances have the aforementioned characteristics - whence perhaps the decision to make the stronger ones illegal. In this case too, however, the legality and illegality of the various substances does not seem to reflect a general agreement on the intensity of their effects, neither from a scientific nor from a political point of view.

For example, the "Report of the committee of inquiry on the diffusion of organized crime in relation to the drug traffic in the Community", filed at the European Parliament on 2 December 1991, suggests the following classification.

- Ultra-hard drugs: heroin, crack.

- Hard drugs: morphine, cocaine, phencyclidine, methadone, petidine.

- Medium to hard drugs: amphetamines, barbiturates, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, chemical solvents, absinth.

- Medium to soft drugs: opium, hashish, khat, coca, tobacco, distilled alcohol.

- Soft drugs: cannabis, fermented alcohol, peyote, hallucinogenic mushrooms, codeine and sedatives.

- Ultra-soft drugs: tea, coffee, chocolate.

The diffusion and legal status of the various psychoactive substances depend on historical and cultural circumstances. During the last century, the West's predominant attitude toward the more common drugs was very different compared to this century's attitude. Opium was sold without a medical prescription, and at affordable prices. Opium-based medicines such as laudanum, were used in all social classes as painkillers and sedatives. Despite the fact that its contraindications were known (Thomas De Quincey published the Confessions of an English Opium Eater in 1822, a book which was widely diffused), no one thought at the time of outlawing it, and Great Britain went so far as suppressing with military force China's attempt to ban opium imports from India (the so-called opium war of 1840-42) (4). Cocaine was also legal in the entire West, until the beginning of this century: apart from being consumed as such, small quantities of it were blended into products of all kinds, from Coca Cola to wine (5).

Chewing coca leaves is still a very common practice in many countries of Latin America. In the Asiatic regions that produce it, opium is traditionally used both for medical and for recreational purposes. In the Islamic world, the consumption of alcohol is severely punished, while that of hashish is not. These important cultural differences are acknowledged, albeit very partially, also by the Single Convention, art. 49 of which guaranties the parties the right to authorize by way of transition on its territory the use of opium (15 years), coca leaf and cannabis derivatives (25 years) for nontherapeutic purposes.

Essentially, the attitude toward psychoactive substances may vary radically from society to society: the trade and consumption of alcohol was banned from 1919 to 1932 in the United States; in Africa, the rise in the consumption of alcohol and synthetic substances is far more consistent and alarming than that of opium derivatives and cannabis (6); for countries such as Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, the drug problem lies not in heroin and cocaine, but in amphetamines and methamphetamines (7).

In any case, it is extremely difficult to classify the various psychoactive substances once and for all, according to their corresponding intrinsic harmfulness (long-range effects on the organism, addiction, etc.). Firstly because it is legitimate to expect extremely different reactions from one individual to the other. Secondly, because the numerous therapeutic uses point to the existence of a subtle border separating the good effects from the harmful ones, between use and abuse. In fact, almost all the substances mentioned in the previous paragraphs have current medical uses: barbiturates and amphetamines among the synthetic substances, morphine and codeine among the opium derivatives (8): more recently, it has been ascertained that marijuana counteracts the negative collateral effects of chemotherapy in cancer patients and those of AZT in AIDS patients or HIV-positive individuals.

It is equally difficult to classify the psychoactive substances according to their social harmfulness. While the consequences of the use and abuse of legal substances - typically, alcohol and tobacco - on a given population can be verified directly, those relative to the use and abuse of illegal substances are much less so. In the latter case, the regime of illegality creates a huge quantity of interferences in the medical and sociological survey, which include the absence of rules on the quality of the product, the absence of hygienic and sanitary controls, and the social peculiarity of the consumer - the latter brought about precisely by the criminalization of the use of the above mentioned substances, chiefly heroin. Estimating the social consequences of the legalization of certain drugs on developed societies, therefore, is necessarily a subjective fact, for the simple reason that such legalization has never occurred. The only available parameters are historical or anthropological cases - societies which

differ greatly from ours as an effect of time or culture.

The prohibitionist initiatives on psychoactive substances from the beginning of the century to date originate in the United States. Apart from the legitimate concern for the noxious effects ensuing from the abuse of these substances, as of the end of the 19th Century, the puritanism and moralism of the American society "played a key role in bringing about the passage of state and federal laws banning opiates, cocaine, alcohol, cigarettes, prostitution and much more. [The] moral belief that every form of intoxication was a thing to be abhorred, touched a sensitive spot in millions of Americans. [Such] praise of sobriety attracted sectors of the American elite, whose paternalistic concern for the lower classes' liability to abuse alcohol and drugs was combined with the fear that this could damage their productivity. [Moreover] the movements for the prohibition of alcohol and drugs drew strong support from the common association of drugs with the feared and despised minorities" (9) - alcohol as far as Catholic

and Jewish immigrants were concerned, opium for Asians, marijuana for Latin Americans, cocaine for the blacks.

The globalization of the American prohibition failed, in the case of alcohol, even before failing on a domestic scale. It succeeded instead, in the case of many other psychoactive substances, especially with opium derivatives, coca and cannabis: the international drug enforcement regime such as we know it is a result of the American diplomatic initiative (10). The reason seems simple: while alcohol had deep cultural roots in the rest of the Western societies, i.e. in Europe, opium, coca and cannabis had only very superficial ones. For their part, the countries of the Southern part of the world refused or were incapable of opposing this entirely Western separation of the psychoative substances between legal and illegal ones: the vast majority of them joined the Single Convention of 1961.

Arbitrary as it may be, the current international drug enforcement regime, supported by the various national legislations, has therefore outlawed the production, trade and - almost everywhere - the use for nonmedical and nonscientific purposes of opium derivatives, coca and cannabis - as well as of many other psychotropic substances. The persistent demand for these substances in the industrialized West generates the drug problem such as we commonly interpret it, as well as a turnover which is hard to estimate, but is surely not negligible.

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(2) In many languages, the word drug has other meanings: spice in Italian, medicinal compound in English and French, etc.

(3) As we said, the words narcotic and psychotropic substance are essentially synonyms. At first sight, one might think that the first refers to substances of natural origin, and the second to synthetic ones. This is not true: the Single Convention specifies that the word narcotic includes both categories. It remains a mystery why two separate conventions were made, rather than a single amendment of the Convention of 1961. In any case, with the Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the regime is extended to many synthetic substances, such as hallucinogens (LSD), stimulants (amphetamines) and hypnotic sedatives (barbiturates).

(4) The English literature of the 19th Century, from Coleridge to Wilkie Collins and De Quincey, was considerably influenced by opium.

(5) In 1863, a Corsican chemical engineer called Angelo Mariani introduced a table wine which contained between 35 and 70 mgs of cocaine per bottle. The "Mariani wine" was much appreciated by personalities such as Zola, Ibsen, Anatole France, Massenet, Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt, and was even awarded a gold medal by Pope Leon XIII. Cf. Ethan A. Nadelmann, "Légalisation: la fin du narco-trafic?", Politique Internationale, summer 1990.

(6) Cf. Jacques Iguel, L'alcool en Afrique noire: le Sud consomme ce que le Nord produit", in Guy Delbrel (edited by), Géopolitique de la drogue, Editions La Découverte, Paris, 1991; United Nations, Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1991 [from now on INCB 1991 Report], Vienna, 1992, pp. 12-15 e pp. 19-20.

(7) Cf. Bill Savadove, "High Society", Far Eastern Economic Review [from now on FEER], 12 September 1991; H. Richard Friman, "The United States, Japan, and the International Drug Trade", Asian Survey, September 1991.

(8) The medical use of opium has remote origins and continues until our days. The purpose of the 1961 Single Convention is precisely that of checking that the global production of drugs does not exceed the quantity considered "essential for medical and scientific purposes". For opiates, such quantity was estimated in 1990 to amount to 200 tons of equivalent morphine. Cf. INCB 1991 Report, p. 17.

(9) Ethan A. Nadelmann, "Global Prohibition Regimes", International Organization, Autumn 1990.

(10) "A key man of this initiative was Harry Anslinger, director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from its creation in 1930 until 1962, and previously in charge of the foreign section of the federal bureau on alcoholic prohibition". Ibidem.