ROME (Reuters) - Cocaine and ecstasy not only cause addiction and raise the risk of cancer but also provoke genetic mutations, Italian scientists said Friday.

"Cocaine and ecstasy have proved to be more dangerous than we had imagined," said Giorgio Bronzetti, chief scientist at the National Center for Research's (CNR) biotechnology department.

"These drugs, on top of their toxicological effects, attack DNA provoking mutations and altering the hereditary material. This is very worrying for the effects it could have on future generations," he said.

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Government Proposal Would Recriminalize Drug Possession, Including Marijuana

Ten years ago this April, Italians voted to decriminalize simple drug possession. Now the rightist government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi wants to undo that, and then some. A proposal floated by Deputy Prime Minister Giancarlo Fini, leader of Italy's former neo-fascist party, and approved by Berlusconi and his cabinet in mid-November, would make possession of even the smallest amount of drugs an offense, and possession of more than the "daily minimum dose" of even marijuana could lead to a six-year prison sentence.

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Italy's centre-right government has approved a proposal making it an offence to possess and use even the smallest quantities of mild narcotics. The move could give Italy some of Europe's most severe anti-drugs laws.

People caught with modest amounts of cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy and other drugs will be subject to penalties such as deprivation of their passports and driving licences. Those with larger amounts will face prison sentences of up to 20 years.

The proposal, adopted by the prime minister and his cabinet on Thursday, must still be passed by parliament. But approval seems likely because all four parties in the coalition government, headed by Silvio Berlusconi, supported it. The coalition controls both legislative chambers.

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Cannabis and Ecstasy Users Face Tough Penalties in Crackdown

ROME -- Furious argument erupted in Italy yesterday over plans by Silvio Berlusconi's hard-right government for a sharp u-turn on drug control.

A bill drawn up by the deputy prime minister and leader of Italy's former neo-fascists, Gianfranco Fini, abolishes distinctions between "hard" and "soft" drugs and introduces stiff penalties for possession as well as trafficking.

Cannabis users caught with more than a few days' supply face jail sentences. Clubbers found with a single ecstasy tablet could have their passports impounded.

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Are you experienced?" guitar legend Jimi Hendrix's loaded question helped define the mind-altering LSD culture of the late-1960s youth scene. In early 21st century Italy, there's a different query on the lips of young people: "Have you gotten smart?" No, they're not talking about university courses. And they're not talking about drugs, either. Well, not exactly.

The D word is carefully avoided by the nine friends who recently opened the PuraVida Shop in downtown Rome, even though most customers refer to their merchandise as "smart drugs." The store, along with similar "smart shops" recently opened in Milan and Bologna, gives Italy its first sniff of a quietly burgeoning Europe-wide market for all-natural, mostly herb-based substances that advertise an out-of-the-ordinary physical sensation without the ugly side effects of synthetic drugs. Both scientists and customers say it is a much softer experience than Jimi's acid trips. But what really makes it smart is the fact that it's 100% legal: none of the psychoactive ingredients show up on the Interior Ministry's list of banned ingestible substances.

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Italian teenagers can smoke joints on school trips, as long as they are sharing them rather than selling them, an Italian court has ruled.

Francesco, a student from Rome, was caught with enough hashish for 40 joints during a school excursion two years ago when he was 17, and fined €1,250 (?830) for selling it to his classmates.

He appealed saying he had bought the hashish on behalf of a "smoking group" of friends and simply collected their financial contributions afterwards.

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Drug Tourism New Fight For Italian Tax Police

MILAN, Italy -- On a sunny Saturday on a highway surrounded by the lakes and mountains between Italy and Switzerland, a young man watched Italian tax police inspect his sleek motor scooter.

His cross-border jaunt into Europe's newest drug paradise came to an end when police discovered the first of five small pouches of top-grade marijuana.

"Any more than that, then he could be going to prison," said Loredano, a plainclothes border tax policeman. "Our dogs would have been all over him with that amount."

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ROME: Maverick Italian politician Marco Pannella drank his own urine while on a hunger strike against what he claims are anomalies in the Italian electoral system, party officials said on Saturday.

The 72-year-old founder and president of the small Radical Party, who is also a member of the European parliament, has declared six members of the Italian lower house represent "phantom electorates" due to anomalies in the system.

Pannella, who is in the sixth day of a hunger strike, is no stranger to controversy following his campaigns to decriminalise cannabis and to abolish the Vatican's status as a separate country.

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FLORENCE, Italy - The council of Italy's northern region of Lombardy approved on Tuesday a motion in favour of marijuana-based medicines, asking the Italian government and the parliament "to regulate the medical use of cannabis and its derivatives."

While Canada, the UK, Spain, Australia, Holland and some US states allow the use of marijuana as a treatment for chronic illnesses, at least in clinical trials, in Italy there is no legal way to obtain it but to ask for a magistrate's ruling.

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FLORENCE, Italy - A judge has forced Italy's national health system to allow a woman with terminal lung cancer to use marijuana-based drugs for pain treatment.

Venice's magistrate Barbara Bortot ruled Tuesday that the local medical authorities of San Dona di Piave, near Venice, where the woman lives, must obtain the drugs abroad and then provide them free of charge to the patient.

The patient asked the permission of the magistrate, since cannabis-based painkilling drugs are banned in Italy.

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ROME, Italy - American volleyball player Prikeba Phipps was suspended Friday by the Italian Volleyball Federation after testing positive for marijuana. Her Bergamo teammate, Maurizia Cacciatori, also tested positive for banned substances in a second analysis. Both players were tested after the Oct. 20-21 Supercopa Italiana in Vicenza.

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ROME -- Italy's financial police face a huge challenge unraveling the money trail from the Mafia's illegal drug trade to find the strand that leads back to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"You'd need a crystal ball to tell how much of the money generated from the Mafia's illegal activities can be traced back to the Taliban," said Sandro Senatore, head of the Guardia di Finanza's operations to combat money laundering. "There's no way to tell until you get to the very end of the money trail."

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VINE growers in Sicily are being coaxed by the Mafia to abandon their vineyards for a much more lucrative crop - cannabis, say local investigators.

In a full-page report yesterday, the newspaper La Repubblica said an area stretching for "thousands of square kilometres" had been nicknamed il triangolo d'oro di marijuana.

The capital of the "golden triangle" is Partinico, a Mafia heartland 12 miles from Palermo, where cannabis grows in greenhouses among the vineyards.

During the most recent of 10 seizures at cannabis plantations in the area, paramilitary police arrested nine farmers, including Antonio Bonomo, son of Don Giuseppe Bonomo, the Mafia godfather of Partinico.

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AVIANO AB, Italy — The war on drug use has hit home for Air Force officials as they continue their battle against airmen using illegal drugs. Concerns have grown as officials watch more and more airmen find trouble with designer drugs such as Ecstasy.

A recent set of recommendations by the Air Force Drug Abuse Reduction team concluded that there "was an increase in drug use in the Air Force," according to Maj. Janice Pegram, the team's chief.

That's based at least partially on an increase of airmen caught using drugs.

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ROME--Professional cyclists throughout Europe on Friday condemned the sweeping drug raid at the Giro d'Italia in which police searched the hotel rooms of riders.

The raid at the seaside city of San Remo comes a month before the Tour de France, the showcase race that was thrown into chaos in 1998 because of police raids.

The International Cycling Union described the latest raid as "deplorable" and "excessive." The search of the rooms and vehicles of all 20 teams began Wednesday night. It lasted until 4 a.m. Thursday.

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