RFK Jr lauds Italy's addiction treatment. Can it work here?
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What are the statistics on addiction in the United States?
I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. It's estimated about 50 million people in the United States struggle with an addiction to drugs or alcohol. Most never get treatment. Of those who do, about half relapse in the first year. But in Italy, there's an addiction treatment program that appears to be having huge success at getting and keeping people sober. The program has a big fan in the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I've seen this beautiful model that they have in Italy called San Patrignano. It's good. And that's what we need to build here.
San Patrignano is one of the largest addiction treatment facilities in the world. Recently, Deborah Becker, a senior correspondent at WBUR, went to see how it works.
Well, I've arrived here at San Patrignano in Italy. I'm surrounded by rolling farmland, vineyards, olive trees, mountains. It's beautiful. And I'm going to what looks like a college campus. There's a large terracotta colored building surrounded by black iron fencing. I'm here at the main entrance and I'm going for a tour.
When we come back, a visit to a different style of drug treatment.
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What is the San Patrignano treatment program in Italy?
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We're back with a Sunday story talking about the quest for a drug treatment program that actually works. I'm joined by Deborah Becker from WBUR in Boston. Hi, Deb. Hello. So, Deb, you've been covering the business of drug treatment in the U.S. for years, but you traveled all the way to Italy for this story. So what makes San Patrignano different?
Well, first of all, it's huge. There are hundreds of people there, and it's really like its own self-contained village with a bunch of its own businesses that are run to help keep the treatment program funded. When I got there, I met San Patrignano representatives who showed me around from the various workshops to the medical center to the dining hall, the bakery. It went on and on. And it's just out there in the Italian countryside? Yep. It's at the top of a mountain, really, a 700-acre campus in the middle of nowhere. But it is very well known. It's attracted tens of thousands of people over the years, including some from the United States. And my first day there, I met one of them. I'm from Boston.
Where are you from?
Detroit.
Detroit. Yeah. How long have you been here? Almost seven months now. Yeah. Now, this is Michael, a 20-year-old man who was taking a break from his work in the dining hall when I met him. He asked that we refer to him by Michael, which is his middle name, because of the stigma associated with substance use. He had been struggling for a few years, and his dad heard about San Patrignano and urged him to apply.
I was having trouble staying away from drugs, staying sober. It just kept being a cycle that continued on repeating itself. We have treatment facilities in the U.S. So, I mean, did he really need to go all the way to Italy?
Well, he told me he had been to various programs in the U.S., but he said he needed something like Sanpa, as they call it, that would give him structure for a longer period of time. In the U.S., the model is very different. It tends to revolve around what insurance is willing to pay for. And generally, for someone who needs inpatient residential help, most often insurers will pay for only about 28 days.
And I'm assuming that's not enough.
Right. Right. If someone qualifies for residential treatment paid for by health insurance, they typically have a significant addiction. So first they would go to detox to get through withdrawal and then about 28 days of residential treatment. That typically involves psychotherapy and 12-step meetings. Some research suggests that people's brains need much longer than that to rewire.
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