The “anti-drug policy” of the Meloni government in the intervention in the Book of Facts 2024 by Alfredo Mantovano, Undersecretary of State at the Presidency of the Council of Ministersauthor of the contribution in the volume now in its 34th edition.
Mantovano’s intervention
“In 2023, around 40% of young people aged between 15 and 19 reported having used an illegal psychoactive substance at least once in their lives – mainly cannabis but cocaine and crack are on the rise – while around 30% reported having done so during of the last year. The number of those assisted by health facilities and Addiction Services (SERD) is growing, while the age at which the first contact with drugs occurs is increasingly decreasing.
The human and social cost of this scenario is still underestimated: irreversible damage to the health of young and old, breakdown of emotional and family ties, increase in crimes, huge costs borne by the NHS for treatment and recovery services. This is why the Government has made prevention of addiction a priority.
We started from strengthening scientific knowledge of the phenomenon, creating a network with universities, research bodies and forensic toxicology laboratories to improve the collection of data, such as those relating to the actual diffusion of drugs or the social impact of their use, the number of deaths due to road accidents, sexual violence suffered due to and under the influence of psychotropic substances.
Since we then consider drug addiction not to be an irreversible condition, we focus on strengthening the tools that facilitate recovery. We have worked, for example, to have the agreement on the safety and quality criteria of therapeutic communities for the assistance of people suffering from pathological addictions approved at the State-Regions Conference, a fundamental step towards guaranteeing effective freedom of treatment on the national territory.
We have profoundly innovated the working method in anti-drug policies, focusing on “coordination”, of which the “Fentanyl Table” constitutes the most concrete example: a space in which all the competent administrations share information, data and evaluations, leading to the development of a Prevention plan that also attracted the attention of our partners at an international level.
To support these efforts, we have also provided new forms of financing, such as 8 per thousand for recovery from addictions: an important tool to support a system made up of 591 SERDs and 928 affiliated private structures, which provided assistance in 2023 alone to 132,200 and 26,132 people respectively, through the daily commitment of 6,082 dedicated professionals”.