By Alberto Favaretto, City of Venice, Social policies Dept., Harm reduction Unit.

On October 16th 2011, the Harm Reduction Unit took part into the public event “Venezia in Salute” which was promoted by the Medical Association of the Province of Venice and was organized in collaboration with the City of Venice, the local Health Service, the Veneto Region and the ARS Medica Foundation. The event was a showcase for associations, health services, health professionals, where to present and share the best practices in the Public Health field and to offer the citizens useful information on healthy lifestyle.

The iniziative was largely participated by all subjects who work for the Health locally, by raising the citizens awareness, encouraging them to play an active role in achieving their psycho-physical wellbeing, promoting healthy lifestyles based on a healthy diet, sport, social relations, prevention.

It is on this last aspect that we have been required an intervention, which could send the citizens a challenging and unconventional message on drug prevention.

We made the effort to come out of sterotypes and not to represent the drug user as people usually think of (an heroin addicted young man). We focused on alcohol use and abuse, which concerns all generations today, but also psychotropic drugs and cocain, which people from different social classes use.

Sure enough, we did not forget the new forms of dependance, as sex addiction, game and intenet addiction, although communly people do not associate them with the risk of dependance.

For the Harm Reduction Unit, it was a great opportunity to disseminate the SRAP project by distributing the SRAP leaflet and informing about the project aims and activities. This arose people interest a lot: we were very keen on telling about the different approach of Sinti culture to drugs and many other different and unknown aspects of their culture.

Citizens had diverse reactions, but we would like to underline that nobody expressed opposition to the project scope: it is an optimistic indication towards integration.