"... we will never obtain any result as long as we are unable to separate crime from the drug business and the incitement to criminality this causes..."

"The law that prohibits drugs, is an emergency law that, despite having being enforced for three quarters of a century, has not been able to eliminate neither the abuse of substances nor their perverse effects. I believe that today Parliaments should reintegrate policies on drugs in the democratic process legalizing them in order to control them and prevent their unlucky consequences."

"If what America is aiming to do is to deprive criminals of the enormous profits they derive from drug dealing, economic theory and history together demonstrate that the only way is legalization."

"Policies conceived and enforced to control drug-related problems and effects, have lead to disastrous and perverse results. Prohibition is the fundamental principle of drug policies. If we consider the results achieved, there are profound doubts regarding its effectiveness. Prohibitionist policies have been unable to control the consumption of narcotics; on the other hand, there has been an increase of criminality. There is also a high mortality rate related to the quality of substances and to AIDS or other viral diseases."

As Minister of European Affairs, I can officially state that my Government and myself believe that all over Europe we need to open a debate on the "Drug Question" in order to create more coherent and human policies with better perspectives. [...] The policy of criminalizing consumers has failed, creating many problems to our society: a criminal environment that accumulates enormous amounts of money and that undermines our democratic institutions, whether it is the police, the judiciary or politicians themselves; [...] social problems that start when we turn ill people into criminals, obliging them to become the involuntary army of the criminal environment of illegal drug trafficking."

"As regards the liberalization of narcotics, I believe that they should become pure drugs. Why should we spend our life talking about "quality" and leave half of the world to die because of the poisonous quality of a substance that we could easily produce in laboratories? Wouldn’t it be better to say "Would you like to do drugs? [...]. The abolition of a situation in which people are obliged to be clandestine, could help us in creating the necessary conditions to stop a person doing drugs. I am only asking for answers regarding three arguments in favor of the legalization: the abolition of the aforementioned condition of clandestine people; a reduction in the price of drugs; the purity of the substances."

The legalization of drugs would simultaneously reduce the number of crimes and improve respect for the law. It is hard to imagine any other single provision which could make a more significant contribution to the promotion of law and order.