Good evening. Thank you for being here. I feel really honoured to follow after the group Ferentari Studios, the only project, as far as I know, of community center from the Ferentari area. This kids are lucky and we are lucky to have such a project in Bucharest. And if I already went off script, I would also like to point out my respect and personal thanks for the activity of another guest that will be today on stage- miss Georgiana Pascu, whose activity gives a hope for the Romanian psychiatry. I personally thank her very much.
I am here to tell you about a personal experience that happened this year in February, when I received a request that I didn’t get until then. An association in the biggest municipality from a county was asking for my help to find solutions for the problems related to drug usage from their municipality and their municipality. I have 20 years of work in the domain of drug addictions as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, but it was the first time I was called to treat a city. And as it was the case with any patient, please allow me to keep confidentiality regarding the name of the city that I ended up working with.
However, how do you treat a city? Where do you start from? Often times in Romania, the answer is simplistic - we do a prevention campaign with posters and with videos on TikTok! Some want to build centers, others increase the prison sentences. I decided to start by evaluating the situation from that specific city. And, actually, like a needle with a thread to saw a path to almost all institutions and places that were dealing with the phenomenon of drug usage from that community.
So the first stop I made was at the local psychiatric hospital. And not even 15 minutes had passed after I arrived there that the first patient was already getting in the ward - a 19-year-old boy, completely rigid, unable to make eye contact or utter a word. The diagnosis was simple - legal drugs, the so-called crystal. Had been using since he was 15. No matter how much his parents guard him, at some point he runs away and uses again, then is brought to psychiatry, treated for a few days, then the cycle restarts. "I've had user patients whose drug dealers have sent drugs to them in the hospital by drone", one of the doctors told me. What struck me though was that boy's mother - to see your child reduced to a vegetable state, a puppet with eyes drained of light. I can imagine few things more painful than this one.
Then I went to the authorities. I was waiting to be received by the head of the County Council in a room with several public servants. One of them, a mayor of a commune of 2,000 souls, asked me what wind brings me here. I tell him and he shakes his head in concern - "Ah, drugs, yes, it's bad". "Are they at yours, too?", I ask. "Well, sir dear, I have a saying. Drugs are like garbage nowadays, you can find them even on mountain tops."
He then proceeds to tell me how he caught on a video recording from a camera installed on a pole in his village a drug user who had made a line and he was sniffing it from a fence!
The mayor of the town that was hosting me beamed when he heard what business I was visiting him with. "Well, we are actually doing something! A man specialist from Bucharest is coming, he is throwing shows at the cultural center, he has a special method to stop children from taking drugs." Mr. Specialist is a retired policeman who produces one-man anti-drugs shows, with slogans and calls for fighting.
I went after at the school inspectorate where I found out that 70% of the children in the county come from broken families - parents working abroad, children raised by grandparents or even left to fend for themselves, divorces, etc. 70%. Almost 2 out of 3 children.
At DGASPC, the Direction for Child Protection, it was by far the most depressing moment of the 3 days of visits - children in the care of the State are completely left alone in the face of the ethnobotanical wave, they commit anti-social acts, end up in police or psychiatric care, they return to the foster homes and so on, drawing the other kids into a spiral of destructiveness.
At the Police I was proudly told that they had received anti-drug goggles that mimic the effect of drugs and the kids who wear them don’t begging taking them anymore. I told them, "You know that studies show that not only are these goggles inefficient, but they increase the risk of those who try them becoming curious to see what drugs really are."
Preventing should be…should make…to convince a youngster to make a step back from the face of the drugs, not to put on them goggles that make him take half a step towards drugs.
Confusion, a few seconds of silence among the policemen and then: "I don't know, that's what we were transmitted from Bucharest. There they know what must be done."
I then met a few parents - some just worried, others burdened by the experience of many years of going to doctors and all sorts of authorities in search of a solution for their child. I was impressed by the way they described that first moment when they discovered that their child was using drugs. The panic, the shame, the fear of being judged, then the realization that they didn't know where to turn to, who to ask for help, fumbling between recommendations from acquaintances and things they read randomly on the internet.
I would like you to allow me to make the voice of one of the parents I met during those days heard:
"Things got worse, we wouldn’t get along with Cristi at all. He would leave home and wander around the city all day, he wouldn't listen to us anymore, quarrels started. Nothing we, the parents, said was right. He started talking very badly, we started to argue, sometimes I had to resort to violence to calm him down, he started to threaten us, we ended up hiding knives in the house so that he wouldn't do anything regrettable. Slowly and slowly our life became a nightmare. Gradually, we reduced the circle of our friends to zero, because we didn't want anyone to find out about our trouble, we didn't want to give explanations, to answer questions we didn't have answers to, we didn't want someone to come and visit us, having all the chances to have Cristi showing up high, we were hoping that one day everything would end well. So we started to live only in the present. There was no more past. There were no more questions like: what if? Or affirmations like: how nice it would have been if. Also, there were no more plans for the future."
In the end, I met about 60 young people from the city's high schools. Almost all of them had had contact with the National Anti-Drug Agency’s goggles, and with one exception, a girl who said she had gotten dizzy from them, all the others said the effect had been to pique their curiosity. A teenage girl confessed to me that after she tried the glasses, she went up to a classmate she knew to be using drugs and asked him if that's really what drugs felt like. His reply would have been - "Nooo, it's much cooler!"
The second thing I remember from this meeting with the youngsters was one boy's response to the question I asked everyone: what do you think about the prevention programs you've participated in? He said: "Policemen, psychologists come, they give us lectures, tell us what to do and what not to do. They come, they have their prepared speeches, then they leave. They all talk at us, but not with us!"
Therefore I invite you to draw together some conclusions relevant to many, if not all, communities in Romania affected by the scourge of drugs:
- New synthetic drugs are a major public health problem impacting all communities, not just the big cities, as we used to believe until recently;
- There is a deep crisis in the Romanian society, a fraying of the social fiber caused by massive migration, economic hardships and the collapse of the education and of the welfare system;
- The new anti-drugs laws have undifferentiatedly increased punishments, and the unintended effect was to stimulate the trade with the new synthetic drugs, the so-called ethnobotanicals. These are not as easy to identify as classical drugs. What is more, they are also extremely cheap and so we are witnessing an unprecedented drop in the age at which people are initiated in taking drugs.
- From Bucharest, not only are effective solutions and programs not coming, but from there are exported pseudo-specialists and interventions which are proven to be ineffective or downright risky, and local authorities are uncapable to question the orders they receive from the Center;
- Adolescents are seen as passive recipients of ready-made prevention messages, not as a dialog partners and, in the end, the only ones who really know the problems they face
- The focus on punishments, police and incarceration leaves completely uncovered the population of young users and their families who have no one to ask for help for getting treatment.
Yet what happened in the city I told you about? What happened was that the group of people who had invited me decided to stop waiting for rescue from Bucharest. A local association raised funds by auctioning art works, a local investor gave away a house where a day center for young people with drug problems will be set up, we have identified together a German prevention program in schools with published studies proving its effectiveness and this program will start to be implemented from next year, we have developed a questionnaire which is being applied in schools in the county at this very moment by specialists from the Babeș Bolyai University and which will provide real and specific data on the situation of young people in the county. But above all we have built a new model of intervention, where the main driver is the energy of the local community and the willingness of its representatives to do something to support a healthy future for their own children.
Drugs and addiction attack people's ability to form and maintain living connections, they enslave us in our own suffering and shame. Restoring links and creating new ones between people, between institutions, reinvigorating the capacity of local communities to act and stop waiting for solutions from the Center - this is a model of prevention of problems related to drugs that Romania could invest in!
For Cristi's parents and for all parents and children in this country who are struggling with the drug problem, please oppose as much as you can legislative initiatives that indiscriminately increase prison sentences, increase funding for the police and for the prison system.
Support scientifical evidence-based prevention and medical and psychological treatment as the only real solutions in the long term. Thank you.
