President Meloni’s message to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Don Pierino Gelmini, founder of non-profit organisation ‘Comunità Incontro’

Dear friends,
I am delighted to send both my personal greetings and those of the entire Government to mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Don Pierino Gelmini, founder of the non-profit organisation ‘Comunità Incontro’. I had the privilege of meeting Don Gelmini, and I vividly remember his enthusiasm and determination. He was a visionary who rekindled hope in the hearts of those who felt lost, and gave form and substance to that hope by founding one of Italy’s main therapeutic communities. He was a real fighter who never gave up, not even when faced with the difficulties and attacks he encountered. To the very end, he fought for the common good and to defend what he had created.

Don Gelmini’s legacy lives on. It is being carried forward by those who worked alongside him, and his teachings continue to inspire an extraordinary community, made up of so many professionals, care providers and volunteers who, day after day, give a part of themselves to help those struggling with drug addiction to get back on their feet and have a second chance.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank not only Comunità Incontro, an extraordinary community I was able to warmly greet in person not so long ago, but also all of Italy’s therapeutic communities and their care providers, professionals and volunteers who work tirelessly to support those caught in the trap of drugs.

For it is not true, as some wickedly insist on saying, that drugs give you more freedom. Drugs promise you things they cannot give you, and demand things from you in return that they cannot give back. Addiction fools you into believing it can make your life better, but it actually prevents you from living it to the full. It makes you believe it can make you stronger, but it really weakens you. Drugs destroy who you are, leaving you with nothing but a huge void. This is a simple message that Don Gelmini had the courage to reiterate throughout his life, and one that we too will not tire of repeating. 
We must have the courage to tell our young people that, if they feel a sense of emptiness, then that emptiness should not be filled with addiction; that, if they have a problem, they can ask someone for help; that, if they are in difficulty, they have someone to count on who won’t look the other way. This Government and I have not looked the other way.

We have said enough is enough to the era of indifference and drugs being normalised, and we have chosen to turn the tide, on the one hand by trying to spark a cultural change and, on the other, by working on concrete measures that this sector has long been asking for.

We have invested in communication and prevention. We have launched new instruments to make additional resources available, such as the possibility for citizens to opt for their ‘8xmille’ IRPEF [personal income tax] allocation to be directly managed by the state, also for prevention and recovery measures for drug addiction and other dependencies. With our latest budget law, we have created a specific fund worth more than EUR 90 million to, among other things, permanently hire health and social care workers to provide public addiction services.

We have established a forum for ongoing discussion between the Department for Drug Policies and representatives from therapeutic communities, ‘Ser.D’ public addiction services and scientific organisations in order to address and solve the many problems that had been forgotten about for decades by those who came before us. Among these, I am thinking for example of our commitment to standardise, at national level, health system accreditation procedures for therapeutic communities, or the work we have done to allow individuals to choose their preferred community, regardless of where they live. In fact, before we intervened, a person living in Rome wanting to seek support from a community was not able to freely choose which organisation to turn to, but instead had to contact locally based communities only. This mechanism was not working, and we corrected it through a specific provision in the recently approved budget law.

There is still a lot of work to be done in order to tackle an emergency that has been ignored or underestimated for too long, but I am proud to be able to say that there is now a step change and we will keep working to consolidate it. We will continue to do so together with you, as you have always believed in this battle, even when very few others did.

I wish to thank you once again and tell you something very simple: you are no longer alone in this battle, because we are there by your side.

[Courtesy translation]