Of Claudio Risé
Source: Claudio Risé
A country with its head in smoke: This is one of the emergencies that the new government will have to face, without wasting too much time. On the consumption of cannabis and its derivatives, marijuana and hashish, Italy is at the top of the charts. His young people (dai 15 ai 34 years) they joint the 6% more than the European average; and this also leads to peaks in smoking and alcohol consumption. A sick youth appears, weak, insecure, scared. Anyone who works with teachers knows this well: Accompanying pupils on school trips is now at multiple risks, illnesses among children, complaints from hoteliers, accidents and unforeseen events of all kinds, not always without deaths, then told in the news. But adults don't joke either: here too we are at 32% against the 26% of EU average. Contrary to the slogan dear to the elites: “the joint does nothing” (and the psychedelic painter Matteo Guarnaccia already made a cartoon about it in the 1990s: “who knows how bored he is”), all this smoke leaves traces first and foremost in hospitals: il 15% of new users end up in treatment for panic attacks and out-of-control states. Also because people don't even know what they smoke: the THC level increased by more than 10% in 10 years. If there is a borderline situation, on the border between psychosis and “normality”, with a couple of joints it suddenly slips where it shouldn't (and “royalty”).
Drugs and cannabis are a particularly urgent emergency in Italy: while its sales force has grown enormously, also for the entry of unemployed illegal immigrants among the sellers, the last two governments no longer addressed the issue. On the contrary, four years ago, during the Renzi government the previous director of the Department for Anti-Drug Policies was fired, the prof. Giovanni Serpelloni, doctor and neuroscientist, international specialist in the field, under whose guidance and prevention and information activities on the effects of the substance, consumption had finally slowed down. A few days ago the Supreme Court declared his dismissal illegitimate, and in the meantime the USA has rewarded him for “the excellent work in the field of soft drug prevention, especially among young people”. But since then it's been an in-and-out of the courts for him, and Italy no longer dealt with cannabis, nor other drugs. The management of the delicate matter has passed to Undersecretary of State Maria Elena Boschi who has appointed a senior bureaucrat in her place, Councilor Maria Contento: then silence. Luciano Squillaci, president of the Italian Federation of Therapeutic Communities ( the only ones who deal with addicts) a year ago he reported this: “It is there for all to see as if it were in front of someone “addiction issue” more and more ferocious, especially among the very young, there continues to be absolute silence…: Italy has abandoned all prevention activities. It stopped all kinds of activities, services are in disarray, there is enormous effort in the area. There is the impression that Italy has surrendered. Something never experienced before: a complete disinterest”. E’ It is unlikely that Squillaci and the others will regret Serpelloni's severity: their visions are different. However, an agency in favor of liberalization admitted: “The stalemate lasts, paradoxically, by the failure to reconfirm Giovanni Serpelloni as head of the Department”. When there is disinterest in issues that affect the lives of citizens, it's because someone else makes money by not making things known. And not from today.
Italy is unique among the large European countries (and even the little ones, like Switzerland) to have never carried out major national campaigns on the roads, i media, means of transportation to warn of the brain and physical damage of cannabis which (among other things) causes hundreds of even very serious accidents a year due to the reduction in driving skills it produces. A lot of time was wasted in discussions “in principle” between prohibitionists and anti-prohibitionists, without ever bothering to at least illustrate the harm of marihuana and hashish, known and documented internationally since the last decade of the last century. All the main research had already been produced then, then monitored and confirmed also with data from subsequent decades on how the “entertainment drug” most consumed in the world, if taken before the age of sixteen it has serious risks of inducing mental illnesses such as psychosis later, schizophrenia, and depression. Regular cannabis intake affects memory, the will, concentration, fundamental faculties for the well-being and functionality of the personality. Weakening them means multiplying disabilities that then weigh on one's entire life. Yet in Italy international statistical data has never even been published, if not in specialized scientific circuits. So much so that out of a sense of duty towards my youngest son who went towards the 13 I introduced them eleven years ago, with the prof. Antonello Vanni, in the book Cannabis, (Saint Paul) con 250 footnotes on documents and original research, since then they have multiplied throughout the world. I didn't expect who knows what kind of debate: but seeing the cannabis phenomenon gradually devour the country and destroy its clarity and mood (as cannabis always does), accompanied by a mock debate all carried out on the megaprinciples (liberalization vs punishment) without ever citing the facts, the youths burned, the lost jobs, failed marriages, undermined health, it was a rather surreal experience. One day I found Fabrizio Rondolino on television, former assistant of D'Alema, what does it do to me: “But how can one still say these things? It is known that no one has ever died from joint!” Ora, apart from even heart attack, 5 times higher in cannabis users, even the most official of international drug reports recognize that cannabis is (dal 15 al 20% of cases) the starting drug for hard substances, and therefore a frequent cause of subsequent early death.
And if taking it is the second cause of hospitalization, it means that it is not very good. In recent months, various data have arrived, most recent, on the “cannabis chaos” and its destructive effects on the West today. Meanwhile the Americans, with the consequences of the gradual liberalization of cannabis, launched in the USA during the second Obama presidency, also violating the current UN conventions on the illegality of this drug. Liberalizing it does not seem to have been a good deal even for the states that had opted for it, because naturally the mafias have lowered prices, and consumers therefore continued to turn to their old illegal pushers, cheapest in the state. On the other hand, thanks to legalization and lower prices, consumption has increased, and so all the”induced cannabis” of car accidents, psychiatric hospitalizations, violence of various kinds, suicides. Once again, the town of Bengodi described by supporters of “wonderful plant” as it is described on the Internet by traffickers disguised as prophets, was shipwrecked in the “Shit”, as it is called by the most knowledgeable consumers. And now, as was predictable, data about the aftermath is starting to arrive; about what happens when cannabis lovers start to age. The large study “Monitoring the future” from the University of Michigan, conducted on university students at the time 18 years since 1976, and checked regularly while they have some 50, tells what happens to long-term smokers, divided into samples according to frequency, of continuity and quantity consumed. All the different samples a 50 years have psychological checks and chronic psychiatric problems. In most of them these problems are associated with high rates of drug problems later in life. The people then who a 50 years who persist in using cannabis show greater cognitive difficulties, physical illnesses and alcoholism. They are sick, chronicles. The researchers, seri, they do not establish cause-and-effect relationships, but statistical correlations, all too clear, unless you want to see them. Along with those from Michigan, the studies of 2017 at Tel Aviv University, and those presented at the Psychiatry Congress in Berlin last autumn shed light on the current surge in schizophrenia and psychiatric illnesses taking place in the world and the increase in the use of cannabis among young people.
“There's no doubt”, concluded Robin Murray in Berlin, professor of psychiatry at King's College London, “that cannabis used by young people increases the risk of developing schizophrenia as adults”. The phenomenon is there for all to see. And the costs, humans, financial, and political-social, they are very tall. There is no crazier action than fueling madness by passing it off as fun.
