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Italy: Zero-tolerance Drug Law Reaches Italian Senate
Phil Stewart Reuters
Thursday 18 Nov 2004 ROME, Nov 18 (Reuters) - Italy's government presented legislation on Thursday that would scrap 11-year-old concessions for consumers of illegal drugs, in a zero tolerance approach meant to curb marijuana use by teenagers. Breaking from a European trend toward decriminalisation, the Italian legislation, put to a Senate committee, threatens up to 20 years in jail for possession -- regardless of whether the person caught is a drug consumer or dealer. The penalty's severity is tied to the amount of drugs in possession at the time of arrest, with small quantities drawing lesser "administrative" punishments, including confiscation of drivers' licences or passports. "Using illegal drugs is not a right," said Sebastiano Teramo, a spokesman at the conservative National Alliance party, which is promoting the legislation it hopes will become law by mid-2006. "The philosophy behind this law is that smoking marijuana can lead to the use of harder drugs." Currently, Italians in possession of illegal drugs won't necessarily go to prison as long as they can prove the substances are for personal consumption. This allowed a 17-year-old student to get away with taking 40 joints of hashish on a school trip last year by telling an Italian court all the drugs were for personal use. "Use of cannabis has clearly risen" in recent years, said Nicola Carlesi, head of the national department for anti-drug policy, and also a member of the National Alliance party, which is part of the ruling coalition. One in every four Italian students has smoked marijuana, compared with a 16 percent average rate in other European countries, according to data from the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (www.espad.org). "REPRESSIVE" The use of other illicit drugs, like heroine and cocaine, is also higher among Italian students, than students in other European countries, according to ESPAD. About 8 percent of the teenagers surveyed used drugs other than marijuana, compared with about 6 percent in the rest of Europe. "As far as cannabis goes, the amount of the active ingredient (THC) has risen sharply in recent years. Today there is as much as 15 or 16 percent," Carlesi said, compared with 1 to 2 percent a decade ago. Critics say the legislation will only increase the jail population, without trimming abuse rates or helping addicts in need of treatment. "(It's) a repressive about-face in drug policy," Franco Corleone, former deputy justice secretary said in a letter, partly published in La Repubblica newspaper on Thursday. "The government today is putting forward a prohibitionist hypothesis...in defiance of a human choice." Under the new legislation, possession of more than 250 milligrams of cannabis' would merit a jail sentence. For cocaine, the maximum mount is 500 milligrams while the limit of heroin is 200 milligrams. The legislation, which could take months to get through both houses of parliament, envisages a minimum sentence of 6 years for breaching the limit. Britain relaxed its laws against cannabis earlier this year. An adult over 17 caught smoking or in possession of a small amount of cannabis -- marijuana or hashish -- will be stopped and searched, but not necessarily arrested or fined.
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