Last week Italy’s Constitutional Court blocked the country’s campaign calling for the decriminalisation of psychotropic substance cultivation.
The motivation for not allowing the referendum to proceed is not yet clear and the campaign has been accused of being misleading, says campaign coordinator Marco Perduca.
Despite handing in 630,000 verified signatures calling for a referendum, Italy’s Constitutional Court stated that the campaign will not trigger a referendum. The Legalizziamo! campaign group has said the decision is a win for the mafia and “the failure of a court that cannot guarantee Italians a constitutional right”.
The campaign aimed to modify the wording of “cultivation” in the Consolidated Law on the Discipline of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances in Presidential Decree 309/1990. The court, however, stated that the campaign would force the country to violate its obligations to the UN regarding the prevention of drug trafficking.
Find out about the global coalition pushing for psilocybin rescheduling
Marco Perduca is co-founder and international co-ordinator Associazione Luca Coscioni and founder of Science for Democracy, the international platform promoted by the Luca Coscioni Association. He has been the coordinator for the Legalizziamo! campaign since 2015.
In a comment to Psychedelic Health, Marco Perduca, said: “The motivation of the decision of the Constitutional Court against the admissibility of our referendum has not been published yet so we can only respond to the words of Giuliano Amato the President of the Court uttered in his press conference on 16 February.
“We were accused of having submitted a referendum that was poorly drafted, with a misleading title and that the whole proposal was not in line with Italy’s obligation stemming from the ratification of the three UN Conventions.
“Mr Amato made reference to the website address on which we collected the signatures knowing quite well that that was the name of the political campaign to collect signatures but not the actual title of the question, which was decided in conjunction with the Cassation Court.
“Italy’s drugs law is very complicated to interpret but once you know your way through that legislative maze you know where it is heading: to punish conducts from cultivation to production, from transportation to export and import of illicit plants and substances.
“Our referendum was deleting penalties only for one of those actions, cultivation, keeping all the other conducts in place – hence only growing for personal use would have been decriminalised, as massive cultivation would have remained illicit. Furthermore, one doesn’t need to be a botanist to know that one grows plants and not substance, one thing is cultivating coca bush, another producing cocaine, one thing is growing poppy seeds, another refining heroin. We do not cultivate wine but grapes.
“Mr Amato made that confusion and “forgot” to mention that prohibition to grow cannabis indeed appears in a paragraph of one of the articles we deleted as well as in the previous one – the 1990 law was toughened in 2006 but changed again in 2014 and sometimes it is difficult to keep track of all the changes, also for jurists – so, the accusation of having poorly drafted the referendum is a judgement that is up in the air as the law says otherwise.
“Until we won’t have the motivations of the decision we can only speculate on the rationale behind it and respond to a brief, if not superficial, summary of the President of the Constitutional Court shared in a very unconventional manner on behalf of the 15 judges that took that decision.”
Speaking to Psychedelic Health, Perduca previously highlighted that the campaign also aimed to allow people to use cultivation for scientific research targeting specific physical conditions or pathologies. Perduca said that Italy is lagging behind other countries in psychotropic substance research.
“We only have one centre at the University of Rome that is starting to study psilocybin for therapeutic purposes. We also grow cannabis for medical reasons, but nobody’s studying it,” said Perduca.
Find out more on what the campaign means for the Right to Science
Perduca is also now involved in a campaign for the Right to Science – an enshrined right in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This entered into force in 1976 and covers freedom of research, freedom of knowledge, including open access, as well as free and open data.
Whilst more studies are demonstrating the efficacy of psychotropic substances, such as psilocybin, for treating mental health conditions, prohibition of cultivating such substances hinders scientific research in Italy that could contribute to this new fountain of knowledge.
To address what the country lacks in the field of psychedelic research, Associazione Luca Coscioni recently published a collection of presentations and international symposia – The Dose Makes the Poison. The collection features psychedelic pioneers such as Amanda Feilding, Rick Doblin, Ben Sessa, Carl Hart and Raphael Mechoulam.
The campaigners have stated they will not stop the fight to push through the referendum.
