Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-04-08-Speech-2-132"
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"en.20030408.3.2-132"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, there are some Members who have decided to speak not on the Buitenweg report but on motives or on the recommendation on which it is based. These Members like to try and divide the House into those who are against drugs, meaning themselves, those who are for our children and young people, meaning themselves, and those who are for drugs and have got it in for all our children.
First of all, it must be said that, today, drugs are your drugs; they are free: free to be controlled by the Mafia and organised crime, free to kill with overdoses, free to kill with Aids, free to kill in the streets and squares of our towns. If anything, we antiprohibitionists are against your free, criminal drugs; we are in favour of control, we are in favour of the law and observance of the law. We are in favour of treating drug-takers – whether they take legal or illegal drugs – as consumers, in some cases as sick people, but not as criminals. We do not understand how your preventive measures can be applied to people who are treated as criminals.
I am glad to say that, today, the European Parliament is called upon to debate that which falls within its remit: not the issue of free, legal, prohibited drugs, therefore, but the evaluation and possible reform of the current policies. This is what you must debate, and you are refusing to do it. In 1998, under your international Conventions, the United Nations decided to launch a ten-year plan – 1998-2008 – to rid the world of drugs. ‘
.’ This was the great slogan. All sorts of things were tried, even financial agreements with the Taliban – European funding was given to the Taliban regime before September 11 to pay for the eradication of the opium plantations. We paid for the fumigation of Andean valleys in South America. We paid for helicopters and armies. We paid for the militarisation of our society. Five years on, the result is an increase in drug consumption and production and the diversification of the market. Increasing amounts of increasingly dangerous drugs are being produced with new molecules and new substances.
Now, five years later, we are debating the situation as it stands, not expressing ideological points of view. What we are calling for, what the Buitenweg report is calling for, is an evaluation of the results. If our policies had been applied by those in power, I think we would be willing to agree to such an evaluation now. We do not understand why you are against it: when there is ideology, when the individual moral code of any one of us – and I do not consider mine to be necessarily any worse than yours – becomes a State moral code, then we are building an ethical State, and applying prohibition to drugs leads to it being applied to debates and to science, with the result that cannabis and the coca leaf are treated in the same way as heroin. I would like to see you accept this equation of cannabis with heroin if it was your son or your daughter who was smoking cannabis or using heroin.
I could continue but I have run out of time. I hope that the Members of all the political parties will, at least, take up the challenge to debate and evaluate the situation rather than hold forth on ideological views."@en1
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"A drug-free world: we can do it"1
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