Mister President of the Parliament. Your Excellencies. Distinguished Guests, ladies and gentlemen
My name is Andrea Muccioli and I represent the Community of San Patrignano where, since 1978, we have welcomed over 20,000 people with problems of addiction and social marginalisation.
Since the beginning we never resorted to practices as harm reduction or addiction management and this because our conviction is that addiction is not a disease, that drug addicts are not simply sick people that can be treated with alternative drugs and, more importantly, that no one can be so guilty and fragile to be considered unrecoverable. Drug addiction is the dramatic effect of an existential and cultural emptiness which affects many individuals, especially young people. For this reason, the San Patrignano treatment program is a drug-free holistic one, focusing as much on the psychological as on educational, social and professional needs of our people. This approach constitutes the solid base upon which we proved to have the highest rates of success, meaning by it a very low percentage of relapses, in the world.
Im very aware of the utmost importance of your meeeting Alternatives to harm reduction policies, and Im aware of the fact that in the next months the Republic of Lithuania will be called to make some choices on this subject.
Every one of us at San Patrignano has made the choice of defending and preserving the life of those who are lonely and outcast. It is a difficult choice, and inconvenient as well. It is possible to carry it out only if we stick to one principle: that we have to forget ourselves and our selfishness as much as possible in order to let people become part of our lives, to love them and live for and with them.
Wishing you a successful meeting I hope, in the months to come, you will find the time to visit us at San Patrignano. I look forward to welcoming you all.
Thank you.
The San Patrignanos community, located near Rimini, Italy, is the worlds largest long-term residential drug treatment community and it began as the vision of one man, the late Vincenzo Muccioli, who was inspired to do something truly revolutionary in order to combat the toll that drug addiction was taking in his local community. He began by taking just one young drug addict into his home that he and his wife helped to nurture. Several others soon joined the Muccioli family, and as Vincenzo witnessed the recovery of these young people that came about thanks to the care and compassion they received, he resolved to dedicate his life and his assets to helping others conquer their crippling dependence on illicit drugs.
I know you are acutely aware that over the past century drug abuse has become a worldwide epidemic but, before going deeper into the description of San Patrignanos philosophy and methods, I would like to take a moment to report here some of the latest statistics.
Today, an estimated 8 million people around the world use heroin, 14 million use cocaine, 142 million use marijuana or hashish, and 31 million use ecstasy, amphetamines and other synthetic drugs. Drug dependence is especially widespread in North America and Western Europe, and a burgeoning problem in the former Soviet Union, in East and Southeast Asia, in Latin America, and in many African countries.
Efforts to curb drug abuse by eliminating the supply source -- a tactic favoured by the United States and other countries -- have often failed because they are typically unaccompanied by equally aggressive education, prevention, and treatment efforts. The European emphasis on addiction management and harm reduction has fared no better.
This failure must be seen in the context of the social developments in recent years that have led to a more general acceptance of the use of illicit drugs -- along with attempts to combat addiction that emphasize addiction management, the so called responsible use of drugs, and the massive distribution of pharmaceuticals and replacement drugs, such as methadone -- rather than aiming for the complete rehabilitation of the addicted.
A just society has a greater duty than to merely contain the damage that addiction can do. It must devote itself to ensuring the health, dignity and freedom of all its members, including those who face social marginalization and other factors that put them at risk for drug abuse. To fulfill this responsibility to care for all members of societies the world over, drug treatment programs must be offered that go beyond mere addiction management.
San Patrignanos conviction is that drug use and abuse is not a disease, as the World Health Organization continues to define it in an erroneous way, or the mere consequence of the substances addictive properties and is not even an individual act, a civil right, a free choice, but the dramatic effect of an existential and cultural emptiness which seizes many individuals, especially young people. This psychological malaise causes them to seek escape through drugs and to engage in other self-destructive behaviors. For this reason, the common core of all San Patrignano treatment programs is a drug-free holistic one, focusing as much on the psychological as on the physical needs of the addicted.
Nowadays San Patrignano, headed by Vincenzos son, Andrea, has more than 1,800 residents in three locations, and a combined staff of 360. Most of its staff members are former drug addicts who were rehabilitated at San Patrignano and have chosen to stay and work in the community to help others who are making their way toward recovery.
Every year San Patrignano is able to take in about 600 new residents, out of about 3000 requests, from Italy and several other countries around the world and to all of them the community offers free room and board, medical treatment, counseling, degree-focused education and job training in one of the 50 different activities available but, above all, it offers the warm of a family, a family of 1.800 people that decided to open its door to other peoples problems.
Drug addiction is the result of a gap in the growth of someones character and behavior, something which can be different for every single individual and which needs a specific care case to case. Something that needs to be recaptured and completed if we want to beat drug addiction once and for all. Inside the community everyone can verify his limits, raise consciousness and restart the path to growth where it was interrupted by the use of drugs. Self-respect and respect for the others, the ethics of responsibility and the spirit of helping those in need are the founding principles of San Patrignanos educational project.
Beside granting to its residents the possibility to start or complete their education at any level, through the years the community developed several high quality activities, ranging from agriculture and food production to refined craftsmanship, from jumping horses to breeding show dogs to information technologies. During his stay in the Community, a resident can choose the one that fits their skills and needs the most from more than fifty professional training opportunities. In this way his recover does not happen in a vacuum but rather verifying his successes and hardships while relating with other people and participate in providing for themselves. Furthermore, they can understand the meaning of responsibility and are able to establish the independence and the dignity which arise from the work.
Upon entry, all the residents undergo to a general medical examination in the San Patrignanos highly sophisticated Medical Center, particularly experienced in treating drug related issues, such as infective diseases, HIV, odontoiatry, gynecology, etc. It is proven that many pathologies are positively influenced by an emphatic approach and by the support from the people surrounding the patient and, on these basis, the Medical Center grown up in a three-story building able to hosts up to 50 patients in a friendly environment. Professional staff is helped by San Patrignanos volunteers who offer individual assistance services around the clock. Medical records of all the communitys residents are kept and the database developed since 1985, for the quality and the quantity of data, is one of the most important databank in the world for drug-related diseases.
Along the years San Patrignano has took care of thousands of youngs convicted for drug-related crimes, and more than 3,500 prison years have been substitued into educational and recovery programs furthermore allowing the Italian government to save several dozens of million euro.
Since 1978 San Patrignano has welcomed more than 20,000 young people and adults, obtaining extraordinarily positive results, repeatedly validated by research conducted by important scientific institutions, in terms of relapse rates and re-entry into society. Indeed, with the aim to evaluate the efficacy of the rehabilitation therapy, long-term follow-up study of the former residents are periodically carried on by objective, third parties, institutions such as Universities and Governmental organizations. These follow-up studies are based on the examination of the clinical and judicial records of the former residents for the last 3-year period, the administration of a questionnaire in order to investigate their present familiar, social and professional conditions and the collection of a hair sample tested for the presence of the main classes of drugs of abuse, using state of the art, validated analytical procedures.
All the recovery program in San Patrignano is offered free of charge and absolutely no financial contribution is accepted neither from residents nor their families, and although San Patrignano has enjoyed a long standing relationship with Italian government, it does not get any form of public financial support even in the case in which individuals are sent in by public health services. The Community has always tried to be self-sufficient: income earned from our vocational training programs that provide high quality goods and services to markets throughout the world covers fully 60% of the communitys annual expenses while the critical balance of 40% is made up of gifts from individuals, corporations, and philanthropic institutions.
San Patrignano does not believe, nor it is part of its methodology to instill or impose any type of political, philosophical or religious ideology. San Patrignano believes that a person needs to get to know himself in an effort to discover his own moral, human and social values. Only in this way he will find his own identity which will allow him to choose autonomously the ideals and values which then serve as the basis of creating his own existence. This is our way of helping others, of interpreting their needs and of defending through the weakness that drug addicts face - their dignity and their life. This is San Patrignano.
