PAME unites its voice with the popular movement in the fight against all drugs on June 26, International Day Against Drugs.

Today, there is an even more urgent need to strengthen the fight against all drugs, to support the youth, the young workers, who especially in recent months witness a future for them without a job, without income, without rights, without medicine in hospitals or safety protection measures in the workplaces, but with “free drugs”.

On the one hand, we are witnessing the escalation of repression, the ban on demonstrations, but on the other hand, the efforts of bourgeois parties, big business and other institutions to promote the logic of “legalization” of drugs.

Bosses and governments want the youth “drugged”. They build false paradises and delusions, while depriving them of their future and their rights. They fill the popular neighborhoods with drugs, while emptying schools, crushing young people’s access to sports and culture. They turn young workers into robots with flexible life, without the right to vacation, rest, and free time.

A shocking example is the death of the “American” dream of capitalism, which is once again proving to be an endless nightmare for the poor, immigrants and people of color. After the deaths of thousands because of the pandemic, the system of poverty and oppression is suffocating its own people with 40 million new unemployed, privatized hospitals, traffic bans, protest bans, but imposed free drugs.

The “legalization” of so-called “soft” drugs is presented as a supposedly progressive measure to be imprinted on to the youth’s consciousness as something harmless, even as positive, while it is a huge billion-dollar business with tragic consequences for increasing drug addiction. Characteristic examples

• In all countries that have partially or completely legalized there is an increase in use and dependence – Portugal, Czech Republic, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain (INCB7, 2015).
• In the EU for the third consecutive year, deaths from overdose of heroin are increasing despite the policies of decriminalization (UN, 2017).
• In Europe, 17.1 million students have used cannabis (UN, 2017).
• When schools were closed in the United States, cannabis was considered a “necessity” and cannabis shops remained open throughout quarantine!

 Young workers are experiencing a daily bombardment of frustration, fatalism, individualism and impasse. A cannibalistic lifestyle, which cultivates competition, isolation and “fake paradises” as a supposed response to part-time work-part time life, unemployment and poverty.

But this youth is the hope of tomorrow. The protagonists of life, the new shift of the working class, the heroes of the future.

It is the youth who take to the streets against the anti-educational measures of the governments, claiming Public-Free Education. They are the children of the steelworkers, the strikers of LARCO, the maritime workers. They are waiters, cooks and tourism workers, trade workers, practitioners, students who work 24 hours a day for a piece of bread and continue to fight, to claim, to raise their heads.

It is the generation that has come to the forefront of the pandemic, with its science and humanity, doctors and nurses who do not accept to surrender the health of the people to business groups.

This class does not need “saviors”, “fake paradises” and free drugs.

It has the values of solidarity, collectivity and struggle. It has the history, the conquests and the legacy of the labor movement. It is the class that produces wealth, which moves the world and walks towards the future.

BREATHE-BREAK THE CHAINS OF EXPLOITATION

LIVE FREE-WITHOUT DRUGS