We call on every worker and unemployed youth to reflect and realise what is behind the advertising campaign organised by the SYRIZA government, and various organisations, about asserting individual freedom – choice to use drug substances. They present slavery as “individual choice’s” ‘freedom’, when in daily basis they rip out the collective rights that the working class has gained through hard struggles!
Similarly, they treat as ‘individual choice’ and as ‘individual ability’ the need of young people to have access to public, free education, to high-quality health services, to stable work with salaries and rights that meet the needs, to have access to sports, culture and recreation.
The use of drug substances is the system’s ‘weapon’, another “padlock” in the “chain” with which they want to bind workers and youth. Even the ‘controlled use’ that they advertise limits the abilities of the people. It creates false escapes from the serious problems that a young person faces daily, which steadily sidelines him or at best makes that person obedient and addicted to the same system that led him to this path. They extinguish every collective militant claim of the life that a young person deserves and dreams about.
The new law, falsely called “pharmaceutical cannabis”, was recently voted by SYRIZA-ANEL with the support of KIN.AL (PASOK, POTAMI) and the Union of Centrist’s, setting up jobs that earn billions of euros to multinational companies by exploiting the pain of the patients! It should be noted, that the scientific bodies all around the world are only talking about the soothing and not about the therapeutic properties of very specific substances, such as the cannabis plant and for which further studies are needed!
PAME is against all drugs, against addiction to any kind of narcotic substances.
There is no distinction between hard drugs and soft ones, as there are no hard or soft causes that lead you to become a user. There is no ‘hard or soft’ addiction.
Distinguishing drugs into “hard” and “soft” removes any fear, guilt, reflexes that keep a young person away from drugs. The use of narcotic substances is a social phenomenon; and only by treating it as such, a young person can become aware of the real causes.
According to KETHEA (Therapy Centre for Dependent Individuals), 1 out of 4 adults who seeks for help, wants to be delinquent from cannabis, while more than 6 out of 10 teenage users that reach out to KETHEA are dependent on cannabis. In our country, the percentage of cannabis tolerance has doubled (from 12% to 23%) in just four years (2011-2015). Specifically: 36.5% of 16-year-old students believe that trying out cannabis is harmless. According to Hellenic National Youth Council (ESYN), 6 out of 10 dependents used to live under long-term unemployment before starting using drugs. Data from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (UNEP) have steadily recorded increasing use in the countries where hemp has been legalised, even for “therapeutic” purposes (use in 15-year-olds: 9.1 % in Greece, 38% in the Netherlands and 43% in the Czech Republic, countries where use is legal). Fighting against all drugs is fighting for life, for clear thinking and conscious action. Itmeansfightingagainstallformsofcompromise!
We are fighting for a society free of drugs. Exciting moments and real emotions can be found in real life, whilst collectively fighting alongside the youth and the workers who are aware of their rights, who develop a militant attitude in life, who are incompatible with the drug culture that wants them submissive.
Daily, we give our best for both the present and the future, alongside our colleagues in the workplaces and at school or university, and through our unions!
We fight together against the exploitative system that generates injustices for workers and their children, against the exploitation of man by man!
Along with the demands for stable and permanent work and the other demands of the class trade union movement, we strive for:
- Prevention – detoxification – social reintegration publicly and free of charge under the responsibility of the state for everyone. No business activity.
- Dry treatment programmes that meet the needs of each area, under the responsibility of the state. The user needs to be in treatment programmes and not on the streets, in prison and in ghetto neighbourhoods using ‘heroin substitutes’.
- Prevention Programmes in schools, universities, the military, work-and entertaining places, where the youth is. Primary prevention that targets the roots of the causes rather than the effects of drug addiction.
- Mass recruitment and government funding in Drug Prevention – Treatment – Research.
- Measures to protect the unemployed and socially vulnerable.
