Fighting Addiction

INTRODUCTION

“Fazenda’s 82% recovery rate, after a one-year rehabilitation program, shows that there’s still hope for drug addicts and other ill-dependent patients. The fight against addiction is winnable."

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Illegal drugs are a global problem. They destroy people and societies. “Not only does the flow of illegal narcotics do grave harm to those who abuse these substances, but the very structures necessary to facilitate this trade entangle society in a web of corruption, greed and exploitation,” Pope Benedict XVI recently affirmed in his address to Surinam’s new ambassador to the Holy See.

The Philippines is one of the countries most affected by drug trafficking and consumption – especially methamphetamine hydrochloride, locally known as shabu. Qualified information from the Philippine National Police, quoted in Congress, considers the Philippines “a key transshipment point” and “a convenient passageway” due to its strategic location in the Asia-Pacific region and its irregular coastline of the more than 7,000 islands comprising the archipelago, which “provides convenient smuggling routes.”

Trafficking of illicit drugs is connected to other subversive and illegal activities: corruption, bribing, money laundering (either in the national economic system or in fiscal havens), and warfare, since drug money is often used to buy weapons and to finance insurgence and terrorism. Thus, it becomes an insidious menace to national and international security.

The damage caused by drug abuse on human health and life is also incalculable. According to a report presented to the Australian Federal Parliament by the Family and Human Services Committee, it ranges from dental damage to mental disease and even death. There is also evidence of the aging effects of drugs on physical appearance.

The report also testified on the impact of drug use on families. When a child uses drugs, the rest of his family often suffer grief and stress, sometimes withdrawing from social contact. When parents are drug users, children often suffer from neglect and abuse which, at times, lead to death.

Drug addiction is dehumanizing. It makes people lose their freedom and dignity and give up about the future. In order to get narcotics to soothe their immediate and pressing needs, addicts fall prey to drug dealers and commit the most irrational and immoral acts. Lying, cheating and stealing become their usual survival strategies. They become a threat to other people and to society as a whole.

The war against narcotics should be preventive. The Pope says that the eradication of the problem from society implies “cutting it off at its sources and by combating the factors that drive people to self-abusive behaviors: especially poverty, the breakdown of the family and social disintegration.”

In this issue, we report about a successful drug rehabilitation project in the Philippines – Fazenda da Esperança – a Brazil-born new ecclesial community which is already operating in eight other countries. Through community life, prayer and work, youths rediscover their lost sense of life and often a new vocation. Fazenda’s 82% recovery rate, after a one-year rehabilitation program, shows that there’s still hope for drug addicts and other ill-dependent patients. The fight against addiction is winnable. n

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