TV Show Exposes Three Italian MPs As Drug-Users, Is Taken Off Air

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The New York Sun

ROME — A satirical television show claiming that one in three Italian members of Parliaments uses drugs was taken off the air last night.

“Le Iene,” or “The Hyenas,” tricked 50 randomly selected MPs into giving samples during bogus television interviews about Italy’s budget. Producers swabbed their foreheads and reassured them that it was to stop them looking sweaty on camera.

The samples showed that 12 of the 32 MPs tested had smoked cannabis and that four had snorted cocaine. The disclosure of the stunt in yesterday’s newspapers caused uproar among MPs, who quickly blocked the program, which had intended to open its new series on Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset network with the scoop. The deputy speaker of the lower house, Guglielmo Castagnetti, called it “a very serious crime” and the head of the Union of Christian Democrats, Pierferdinando Casini, denounced it as having “zero scientific value.”

Mr. Casini has confessed to trying cannabis when younger, as has the leader of the National Alliance, Giancarlo Fini. Even a promise by the program not to disclose any names failed to stop politicians from branding it an invasion of privacy. Other politicians denounced their colleagues as hypocrites. The leader of the Radical Party, Daniele Capezzone, whose party is trying to legalize cannabis, said: “I have always said that, if a police dog went into the chamber, its nose would first go on the blink, and then it would give up.”

The Parliament passed a harsh new drugs law this year: possession of half a gram of cocaine now qualifies the offender as a dealer.


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