In the beginning was 'politics' and it divided us (part 1)

The UK's User's Voice decided to let the left-right divide go and learn more about what neo-liberalism and capitalism and anti-prohibitionism really are. Here MARCO PERDUCA, drug-peace activist and member of the Transnational Radical Party, an Italian gent if I may say so, explains it all most articulately to Andria Efthimiou-Mordaunt...

A.E: What is the International Anti-Prohibitionist League (IAL)?

M.P: The League was born in the late 1980’s with expert politicians, advocates, and journalists to raise the issue of anti-prohibitionist politics at the international level, as there were many working at national levels but not internationally. Even fewer were looking at what we considered to be the problem, which are the three UN Conventions on Narcotic and Psychotropic substances. So a lot of people gathered together at the chamber of deputies in Rome in 1989 and some of them came from all over the world, mainly Europe, America and some experts also from Latin America and they all agreed to work together to provide all activists around the world with a critique of these three UN Conventions. This was a legal analysis as well as a political analysis of these documents. Eventually in 1993; we produced possibly the first study of the UN texts, which was sent to several parliaments. In 1994/5, while some members had started to get active at the national level, the IAL started to have funding problems; as you know it is not easy to raise money to do this kind of job. Some IAL founders evolved into various national groups that launched a series of initiatives on depenalization as well as harm reduction. At the same time, in Europe, some grassroots movements started to thrive.

The main idea of the IAL was to substitute control through prohibition with regulation, through legalisation. So everybody, at that time - I don't know how they have evolved their thinking - was very much in favour of legalisation of all drugs and not to let them free in the world but to regulate them finally and also promoting harm reduction to take care of [chemically-dependent] users.

A.E: Grass roots movements: for example?

M.P: That was also a time when the Green Parties were starting to get active on this issue and anti-prohibition or at least legalisation of marijuana was one of the things that kept appearing here and there on the platforms of those movements. Not only Italy, but also France - Portugal and ..Spain was a different thing because they were coming out of their dictatorship so they had tough laws on a lot of stuff. People were starting to address
drug-related issues from a radical perspective; that is the problem was not the drugs but the prohibition of the drugs that made them dangerous, because you were criminalizing all drug aspects from production to consumption and of course trade; that somebody who was doing drugs or trying to produce them was considered not a ‘normal’ member of society but isolated, possibly put in jail and stigmatized as someone who didn’t have the same rights as the average citizen. They could have been stealing but still, they didn’t have to be to become criminalized.

A.E: Could you describe exactly what the Transnational Radical Party is, for those of us who don’t know?

M.P: Exactly it’s maybe too difficult a task! I can say that it’s a non-violent organization - I do want to stress this aspect in particular. It is struggling to ascertain civil and political rights, because if you can live and be active in a society where you can use all the various mechanisms that the rule of law allows you to use to question the law and to question the way the law is implemented, then you can also promote and acquire reforms through civil actions. We come from a traditional liberal thinking where you do not necessarily need all those laws. We would like to see few specific uncomplicated laws regulating harming behaviours, not non-violent or non-harming behaviour. We also believe that it should not be up to the State to decide what’s harming even against yourself. Once you enter the other person’s freedom sphere then you start to have problems.