Rogoredo drug forest: rising number of young people, alarm over crack and fentanyl
Psychologist Simone Feder, present in Rogoredo forest for nearly ten years, sounds the alarm: increasingly young people and the spread of crack in Milan's drug-dealing plaza.
Rogoredo, psychologist Feder: "More young people in the forest, institutional intervention needed"
According to milano.corriere.it, Simone Feder — psychologist, educator and author of the book "Nel bosco di Rogoredo" (Zolfo Editore) — has worked for nearly ten years alongside volunteers from Team Rogoredo, eighty trained people who take turns at the margins of the drug-dealing plaza along the railway tracks of the station. His perspective on the phenomenon is direct and without rhetoric.
The opportunity to speak publicly again came from an interview published by Corriere featuring Sonia, a woman who recounted her first heroin dose at 14 years old and decades of addiction, ending with a phrase that Feder quotes without mitigation: "Only death will make me stop".
"That phrase shouldn't just make us angry," says Feder. "It questions us. We're not just hearing the voice of someone who uses drugs, but of someone who can no longer imagine an alternative to their own life. That's the part that should scare us most."
"The forest didn't appear from nowhere"
Many comments on Sonia's words, on Corriere's online channels, were harsh. Feder responds with a clear distinction: "Understanding doesn't mean justifying, nor accepting drug dealing. It means trying to look at the person before their behaviour. In these nearly ten years I've learnt that no one is only what they do, what they've done wrong, or what has happened to them. A person is also what they could still become."
Rogoredo forest, the psychologist explains, is not an isolated phenomenon: "It's the visible part of something we often prefer not to see. Underneath there is loneliness, pain, families who no longer know how to help, young people seeking belonging, adults who arrive too late, fragility that becomes invisible and forgotten until it explodes."
Sonia's phrase has been read by some as proof that dependent people don't want to be helped. Feder reverses it: "It imposes a very uncomfortable question. Why can a person come to consider a place that is destroying them as their own home? Perhaps the point is not to choose between security and acceptance, between rules and care. We need both."
Dealers displaced, problem remains
In recent years the forest has been reduced by the authorities, dealers have partly moved away, but Team Rogoredo has never abandoned the position. "If we limit ourselves to removing the forest, without asking ourselves what brings people there, we risk simply shifting the problem elsewhere," observes Feder. "A city is not measured only by how well it can protect itself from hardship. It is also measured by how well it can care for it."
Crack, young people and the fentanyl risk
The most recent alarm concerns two parallel trends: the lowering of the age of those who frequent the area and the spread of crack. "We're seeing increasingly young people. It's a situation that worries us," says Feder. "Crack is now circulating widely at Rogoredo. It shouldn't be considered simply as another substance: it means new consumers and new forms of consumption."
Drug dealing, he adds, is operational at any time, day and night, even for small amounts of money. "This tells us how widespread the market is and how easy it is for a fragile person to enter this circuit."
On the front of synthetic drugs, Feder signals a detection gap: "With the tests we bought in the United States we cannot detect fentanyl. We need institutional intervention aimed at understanding what is arriving before it is too late. Prevention cannot begin when the emergency has already exploded." In the United States, fentanyls — synthetic opioids hundreds of times more potent than morphine — cause tens of thousands of deaths every year.
"Reaching people before it's too late"
The growing demand for volunteering is a positive sign, according to Feder, but not sufficient on its own. "At Rogoredo it's not enough to bring something: you need to know how to meet people, listen to them, build a relationship and, when possible, open a different path. Our task is not only to guard a place, but to reach people before it's too late."
Source: Google News IT — Crime (it)