Italian drug users rehabilitation program in San Patrignano prison in Italy sets tone for new ‘life-changing’ centres in Australia - Charles Miranda in Italy - News Corp Aust. Network - March 6, 2015
IT’S a drug rehab program like nowhere else in the world and as Charles Miranda in Italy discovered no one comes out the same again.
Rehabs.com have released a video that shows the tragic downfall of several healthy men and women after addiction to hardcore drugs. Courtesy Rehabs.com
IAN doesn’t look like the sort of bloke
who would cry.
But standing in a noisy commercial graphic printers workshop, the 39-year-old looks away for a moment as if distracted, then bows his head and pinches the bridge of his noise and wells up as he thinks about his 10-year-old son Joshua outside the boom-gates and fence that encloses Ian in San Patrignano.
“I made mistakes and I lost everything I lost my wife, my house, my car, my motorbikes and ...,” he pauses, “… and my son.”
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Moving forward ... Ian, left, a former railway welder, motorbike mechanic, Sky TV audio engineer — now works in the printers sector in San Patrignano.
“I am building a relationship with him now on the telephone, it’s some sort of relationship and with my family as well. He understands, he is not stupid, he’s an intelligent boy and he knows the situation.”
Ian is not in jail although anyone who goes into San Patrignano never comes out the same again and for society that is no bad thing.
San Patrignano is a drug users rehabilitation program the likes of which are not mirrored anywhere else in the world.
Indeed, there is no other place like San Patrignano, tucked between the Apennine Mountains and the Adriatic Sea in north Italy, at least not yet anyway. But it’s success rate is astounding through a lot of hard work, tears and emotional breakdown and it’s now to be a model for at least two rehab communities being established in Australia.
Changing lives ... Residents working in the vineyards which produces award winning wine.
San Pat, as some residents like to call it, began in 1979 when a local businessman wanted to do something for the youth of nearby Rimini and took a couple off the street to work on his small single shed cooperative farm.
Soon the number grew to five disaffected youth mostly drug addicts, then 25, then 50. Yesterday more than 1300 were sitting down for lunch in the dining hall of what is effectively a fully fledged self-sustaining township.
Unlike other rehab centres, San Pat does not treat users with more drugs or methadone over a few months. but rather removes them from society for between three and four years where for the first year they have no direct contact with the outside world except through old fashioned letter writing. They can leave but if they do they are not allowed to come back. All are substance abusers and many are on house arrest, probation or alternative sentencing so incentive to stay is strong.
Beating addiction ... Hannah (second from right) in the laundry with other female residents.
Instead they work all day at 52 skilled sectors whether it’s in the 120 hectare vineyard that produces 500,000 litres of award winning wine each year, the dairy shed that produces 4000 litres a day that then gets used to make a range of cheeses at its factory, or the pigs that get used to make salamis now sold in shops across Italy.
There is also the indoor and outdoor international championship equestrian arena and stables that has produced an Olympic gold medal horse, its pedigree puppy breeding program, commercial printers, laundry, graphic artistry, plumbing training, furniture making workshops, TV production studio and even a world-class 45-bed hospital that in the 1980s was a leading institution in the study of Aids and whose chief medical officer today Doctor Antonio Boschini was himself a resident on the rehab program 30 years ago.
Learning new skills ... Left to Right Daniele, Michael and Alessio in the cellar of the rehabilitation community of San Patrignano near Rimini, Italy.
All these facilities are staffed and run by either those on the drug program or former addicts who have stayed on at San Patrignano, a huge community that even generates its own electricity through solar and methane programs and has its own sewerage treatment works.
“It really is like a town and there is absolutely nothing else like it,” said Gold Coast-born Danny McCubbin who volunteers part-time at San Pat.
McCubbin, 50, was a distinguished artist in Melbourne before moving to London when 12 years ago he began working for Jamie Oliver when he was just starting out as a TV celebrity chef and pioneer of social enterprise giving disadvantaged youth a fresh start as apprentice chefs. It was the latter that led to McCubbin coming across San Pat, that now provides some of those apprentices to Oliver’s top East London noshery “15”. McCubbin splits his time between Italy and London where he has established a San Patrignano Association to help those from the program find jobs, many within the Jamie Oliver Foundation enterprises, and new starts back in society.
Frederico in the cheese factory ... The dairy shed produces 4000 litres a day of milk that gets used to make a range of cheeses at its factory.
“San Patrignano is recognised now as the world’s most successful rehabilitation centre with a 75 per cent success rate, no other rehab place in the world comes close to that” he said.
“I became so enamored with San Patrignano because I’d seen at ‘15’ (restaurant) after just a year we could turn the life of a young person who has been addicted to heroin or whatever, to spend three and half years you couldn’t tell the difference between people there on the program or external working on the outside … they teach them a skill but also self respect.
“One of the best attributes of San Patrignano is they believe that they are not former addicts when they leave and they don’t believe addiction is a disease. It’s a very simple philosophy, they give you the context for why you took drugs in the first place so often that is quite painful … after you confront that and get through the pain you then build your life again and do that through becoming very good at something. We are getting now 30 or 40 applicants a week and the community is growing as more people learn that their answer to addiction is social and not medical so more people want to come so it is bursting at the seams.”
Food preparations for the evening meal ... Everyone eats together and takes part in a two minute silence at the beginning.
The standards are high at San Pat that their handcrafted products, now exported globally, is such they have long been bought for artisan quality over any sentiment of the social enterprise. It is a global brand synonymous with fine quality that brings in 10 million euros, about half the cost of running the facility that gets no government handouts, does not charge those on the program or accept donations from their families.
Everything is exacting down to the filling and placements of water jugs at lunch tables, exacting, matching the idea being that there be strict order in the lives that were once chaotic. A clap of hands from someone at the front of the dining hall and the room falls instantly silent as the 875 men and 450 women and 109 volunteers stand to attention and give two-minutes silence to those who have completed the program and those now on it.
Scott, 36, had been smoking cannabis for 20 years before he moved onto cocaine. He looked at getting off but couldn’t then saw an episode of Two Greedy Italians starring chefs Antonio Carluccio and Gennaro Contaldo who filmed an episode at San Pat and recorded the love and passion put into work by those on the program.
Life changing ... Scott who is living at San Patrignano is pictured at work in the graphics department.
“I just broke and I thought this is where I need to be,” he recalled now five months into the program.
“It’s three and a half to four years but then again I’ve already wasted 20 years, with the time I wasted with drugs so this is nothing. And there is tough times, it’s a roller coaster, there are ups and downs but here I have friends, genuine friends and people I will always want to be a part off. I’m so happy it’s untrue.”
Those on the program at San Patrignano come from all over the world, including Australia, but now the extraordinary model is being exported everywhere, again including Australia with one in Western Australia and another in Victoria.
The one in WA is 30km inland from Geraldton and the one farmhouse and guest cottage property will from this month begin to grow.
Modelled on San Patrignano ... Residents pictured at the drug rehab centre, Hope Springs in Geralton, Western Australia.
Monica Luppi, who had been involved with the program in Italy and was now living in Australia, said “Hope Springs”, named after an all year round spring on the property, would start small, much the same as when San Pat began.
“With the landscape and culture you have to make some adjustments but the spirit, idea and model is the same, but you cant transplant an idea from Italy into regional Australia,” she said. “The culture and climate are different the issues are exactly the same but they don’t manifest themselves in the exact way.”
She said the 27-acre property had a social enterprise business plan through a range of courses certified through the local TAFE including tourism and a commercial kitchen would teach cooking, farming and selling organic produce.
Starting small ... Like in Italy Australia’s version of San Patrignano will begin small but grow over time.
At the moment there are 15 people already set to live on the property and with construction on a new accommodation block to begin this month they will be joined by 10 others, some of whom may be seconded from Italy as volunteers. Residents on the program would live there for up to at least one year; less than the minimum three at the Italian program. In Victoria a parcel of land has been given by a farmer to a local charity group whose managers have now travelled to San Patrignano to view how it is done to export the model home.
“It’s very hard, I’m not going to say it’s easy because it’s not,” said Ian. “The end result for me is I walk away from here strong in the head and be a dad, a father for my son like my father was for me. Heroin is a horrible drug, it takes hold of you but since being here I feel it can be beatable, it is beatable you can get past it.”