Insieme, disperatamente. Biopolitiche per la gestione del soggetto tossicodipendente in Italia (1975-1990)

On October 12, 1981, the weekly magazine Panorama published a dossier entitled Insieme, disperatamente (Desperately together) which underscored the collaborative efforts of public institutions and private therapeutic communities, working «side by side to confront one of the country’s most dramatic problems: drug addiction». From the 1970s onwards, both Italy and Europe had to confront the mass diffusion of drug dependence, which had ceased to be a marginal phenomenon and had become a major social and intergenerational challenge. In 1975, the Italian government revised its antidrug legislation, introducing specific welfare measures aimed at assistance and rehabilitation. These innovations partially redefined the State’s approach to the individual’s socio-health needs and sparked a broader public debate on how to manage drug users. This study situates such measures within the interpretive framework of biopolitics and reconstructs the historical development of this dimension of welfare throughout the 1970s and 1980s. By combining top-down and bottom-up analytical models, it links the institutional level of national political debate with local case studies, examining both the practical implementation of ministerial decisions and the responses of actors embedded in local contexts. The limited capacity of state institutions to manage the socio-health emergency encouraged partnerships between the public sector and a range of private organizations. In Milan, for example, the spread of heroin – linked to the tertiarization of the city center and the marginalization of its peripheries – prompted cooperation between the socialist municipal administration, local therapeutic communities, and youth movements of the new left. These experiences produced a heterogeneous landscape in which psychiatric, pharmacological, and medicalized approaches coexisted with radical proposals for the legalization or even liberalization of heroin. At the same time, self-managed anti-drug centers emerged, while an increasing number of private therapeutic facilities received multi-year funding from municipal, provincial, and regional authorities. Public-private interaction also reshaped corporate welfare mechanisms. A significant case is that of Breda Costruzioni Ferroviarie in Pistoia, where in 1982 a collective agreement was signed between management, the factory council, local therapeutic communities, and the local health authority (USL) to support and protect workers with drug problems. In the following decade, this welfare model – born of a highly localized collaboration between public and private actors – was generalized and incorporated into national collective bargaining agreements, eventually informing later legislative reforms on drug policy. Law No. 162 of 1990, which marks the chronological endpoint of this research, sought to synthesize many of these dynamics. For over a decade, the interpenetration of public and private actors had shaped political, medical, and social approaches to drug treatment. Within the renewed framework of the welfare mix, this process promoted a new biopolitical conception of the drug users.