Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, anyone skimming through Mrs Buitenweg’s report and listening to her statement might think that these proposals of hers are actually quite straightforward and thoroughly acceptable. This is a shrewd piece of work. Let me warn you very strongly, however, against supporting it. You need only read the last section of this report, in which Mrs Buitenweg says quite openly in her explanatory statement that cannabis should purely and simply be deleted from the list of internationally controlled substances. In other words, she is calling from the outset for an amendment of the Single Convention of 1961 and for the deletion of cannabis from the list of prohibited products. The reason why I wish to warn you categorically against backing Mrs Buitenweg’s proposals is that your vote for this report is a vote in favour of freely available drugs and against the health and future of our young people and our society. If you back Mrs Buitenweg, your support will help drug dealers to extend their massive business operations to Europe, and it will damage the programme established by the United Nations with a view to helping farmers to switch to alternative crops and to make a profit from them, because you will be opening a new market for drugs in Europe. And you will ultimately be guaranteeing the proliferation of drugs instead of waging all-out war against them, which ought to be our aim. The Group of the European People’s Party – and I say this here as their spokesman – are resolutely opposed to the free availability of cannabis. We support the preservation of the UN Single Convention. What we advocate is the full application of this Convention, not its amendment. We are in favour of the full entry into force of the programme produced by the European Union, involving simultaneous measures of prevention, suppression and reintegration. Why are we in favour of this approach, and why do we oppose the free availability of narcotic drugs? It is fairly simple: consider, if you would, the horrific situation in the European Union, where one third of our young people have already tried cannabis. Almost 8% of 15- to 19-year-olds smoke pot daily, and 75% of young people think that cannabis is harmless, even though several studies produced by the medical profession indicate conclusively that the use of cannabis poses physical and, more especially, psychological risks and that it leads to addiction. In short, there is absolutely no reason to liberalise the sale and use of any narcotic drugs, including cannabis, or to remove cannabis from the list of prohibited substances. On the contrary, anyone who knows how much harm drugs can inflict on young people will agree that zero tolerance of drugs is the only answer. That is what we are demanding as an alternative to the proposals contained in this report, and we hope that a majority of the House will support us in tomorrow’s vote, because we want to protect our young people, and for their sake we are resolutely opposed to any amendment of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This is why we hope that common sense will prevail in the European Parliament and that we can take this common sense majority view to the Vienna conference in order to reinforce the United Nations in its efforts to combat narcotic drugs and to make it clear to the UN that we support the preservation of the Single Convention and that we shall do our utmost to oppose any liberalisation and legalisation of narcotic drugs. To sum up, unless radical changes are made to the Buitenweg report, we shall certainly be unable to give it our approval. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE