This article is published in number 39 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 28 September 2021
It is difficult to tell the mixture of euphoria, hope, relief that one lives in this moment in the world that is fighting for legalization of cannabis. It seems to live in that famous sentence of Lenin: there are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. That’s exactly how it is going with the referendum proposed on 12 September, which calls for the elimination of the crime of cultivation, the removal of prison sentences for any conduct related to the substance and the cancellation of the administrative sanction for the withdrawal of the license. The feverish count of signatures shot up as soon as the collection appeared on the Net: 400,000 in 4 days, a race towards the 500,000 mark that not even the Italian 4 × 100 in Tokyo. After Fedez’s Instagram story, there were peaks of four signatures per second, a cruising speed of 7,000 signatures per hour: this is the step of Italy that takes the floor again. We had already seen this with the referendum on euthanasia or along the still impervious road of the Zan Bill. In the promoting committees they must have shouted “It can be done!”, As Gene Wilder in Frankenstein Junior.
Antonella Soldo she is the coordinator of Better legal, the organization born during the first lockdown to create a network between anti-prohibitionist realities in Italy and which played a central role in this campaign, alongside the Luca Coscioni Association. In spring, Better legal he had organized civil disobedience on the balconies: a seedling cultivated in the sunlight for every activist or sympathizer. It was a symbolic protest, but it didn’t take them long to get to the substance of numbers and politics. Antonella recounts this historical moment in this way: «We have bypassed the big parties, we have resisted the lack of interest in TV, we have done everything without investment lobbies. There is an incredible hunger for participation, this issue had been expelled from the agendas, but it concerns millions of consumers, patients, kids who today are forced to come into contact with organized crime and who can see their lives ruined by a round-up ».
Among the many people who are experiencing special weeks there is Ornella Muti, who made legalization a personal battle after seeing the suffering of his mother, a cancer patient with a prescription for medical cannabis, being denied this right due to the lack of access and the taboo that still exists in Italy on this substance . “It was an ordeal. We had no information, if it had gone differently my mother could have had a more peaceful old age. But like her, there are many people with cancer who find themselves in this situation ». Today Muti, together with her daughter Naike Rivelli, is a consumer (she uses it against low blood pressure and insomnia) and activist of cannabis, with the aim of also becoming an entrepreneur in the sector. With the Ornella Muti Hemp Club has created an association to help those with access difficulties, offering information on the use and access to cannabis and products of all kinds: therapeutic, cosmetics, food. “But we are ready, in the hope that it will soon become totally legal, to become the Italian Snoop Dogg: distributors of legal cannabis, with and without THC, throughout Europe”.
In Italy, if the monopoly path was chosen, as with cigarettes, the State would collect tax benefits between 4 and 5 billion euros.: according to Istat, there are about six million consumers, of every social class, geographical origin, lifestyle. Among them there is an important minority: those who use medical cannabis and who – like Ornella Muti’s mother – have this right recognized by law, yet they see it constantly hampered by the stigma that affects everyone. Among them there is Mara Ribera, fifty years old and a complicated body to manage: he has suffered from chronic pain since he was twenty-three, from a rare disease called bacterial cystitis and from a primary, non-curable headache that arrived three years later. After decades, a year ago Mara discovered the only substance that gives her true, reliable and constant relief without the devastating side effects of opiates: cannabis, in fact, in the form of drops dissolved in olive oil. Mara lives in Milan, she did not have to cultivate her own like Walter De Benedetto and Cristian Filippo, patients who are also facing the grotesque legal consequences of the most repressive laws in Europe. She knows the very few pharmacies in Milan that can get her the drops, which we have to import because the only Italian therapeutic production, that of the Florence plant, does not meet the demand. But Mara still lives in constant fear that the pain will come back, because pharmacies often run out of products. “I’m sorry, there isn’t any,” they say, and she waits for the crippling pain to return one morning (the headache comes at dawn) because the state has decided to ignore her right to treatment because of a taboo cultural. “Even the doctors who prescribe it are treated like drug dealers, constantly monitored. For me the referendum is a first step, a beginning “
Cathy La Torre, lawyer for rights, is part of the campaign, as a law expert, activist and citizen. He says he is not surprised by the popular explosion of the referendum, which together with the one on euthanasia could be an explosion of national hypocrisy. “It reminds me of another great season, that of the referendums of the 1970s on divorce and abortion, one of those momentous steps that change history, which happens when people are finally able to speak. The two questions travel together, and I would like them to be accompanied soon by two other issues that politics ignores today: adoptions and a law on citizenship ”. La Torre is a cannabis user, has given up smoking and only takes it for therapeutic purposes. «Today there are still people in Italy who feel mortal shame at the idea of saying that they have smoked a joint. The referendum serves to put the issue on the agenda, to change the narrative and the conscience with which consumers present themselves to society ». Without any more shame, in fact. This referendum is also the story of many Italian anti-prohibitionist realities that have finally decided to unite, each with their own angle of vision and their own skills, instead of working separately. Due to its heterogeneity of purposes and purposes, the world of legal cannabis had frayed over the years. Today teamwork has brought results that seemed impossible: a basic text in the Justice Committee in the Chamber and above all this great digital wave of signatures: however it goes with the necessary scrutiny of the Constitutional Court, it will be much more difficult to put this story under the carpet. Antonella Soldo says: «The result almost got out of hand for how powerful and fast it was. Now politics is forced to have a real conversation on how to govern the phenomenon. Starting from a certainty, a fact: repressive laws and prohibition have never worked. Need anything else”.
If there is one person who can draw a parallel with the great civil rights season of the 1970s, it is the senator Emma Bonino, who fought every single one of those battles. “Today, as then, are issues that the political world did not want to address.” Divorce, abortion, conscientious objection, family law was a long season of struggles, which began in the previous decade. “Even then there was a parliament that didn’t want to see how society had already changed. The two seasons have this in common, it is the club that decides to be seen through the referendums ». Despite the euphoria of recent weeks, the road is still long and complicated, and there is only one wish that Bonino makes to the current generation of activists who are trying to change Italy again: “A persistence and stubbornness so strong that become everyone’s heritage “.
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