The centre-left allies of Premier Romano Prodi have tabled a motion urging the government to actively pursue a plan under which the world's rich nations would buy Afghanistan's opium production.
The idea is that by taking the country's huge opium harvest out of the hands of drug traffickers, Taliban insurgents in the country would lose their main source of funding.
In 2005 some 87% of the world's opium, worth some 40 billion dollars, was produced by peasant farmers cultivating the special poppy flowers in Afghanistan. Much of it was used to make heroin.
But opium, the active ingredient in painkillers such as morphine and codeine, could be sold legally to the world's pharmaceuticals groups, say the Greens, Communists and the Rose in the Fist party.
These three parties argue that this would mean the poverty-stricken Afghan population would not lose a key source of income. At present opium accounts for about half the country's gross national profit.
The idea has been around for several years but is opposed by the United States and the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai. They both favour destroying opium plantations and forcing farmers to grow legal crops instead.
According to the United Nations, Afghanistan's 2007 opium production will rise even higher than last year's record of 6,100 tons.
The non-binding motion urging Prodi's administration to push the 'legal opium' plan on the international stage has been signed by all parties in the centre-left alliance.
It was scheduled to be voted on in the House on Wednesday after approval of financing for Italy's peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Italy's centre-right opposition has poured scorn on the entire idea, calling it "madness" to consider buying opium.
"They want to transform the Afghanistan situation into an institutionalised drug trafficking operation," said National Alliance MP Ignazio La Russa.
Pino Arlacchi, former head of the UN's anti-drug office, said the plan to use Afghan opium for painkillers was impractical because the world's demand for such pharmaceuticals was already satisfied by legal producers such as India, Turkey and Australia.
He also pointed out that the plan would require an "enormous system of control" to make it work.
