Home » Maria Teresa Ninni: don’t call them toxic – Francesca Berardi

Maria Teresa Ninni: don’t call them toxic – Francesca Berardi

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Maria Teresa Ninni: don’t call them toxic – Francesca Berardi
Illustration by Andrea Serio

For a Turin woman used to attending the historic Balôn market on Saturdays, wandering around the streets behind Porta Palazzo on a Tuesday has the alienating and calming effect of an empty disco with the lights on.

Maybe it’s lunchtime, maybe it’s cold, but hardly anyone crosses. At the trattoria Valenza, a neighborhood institution where it is almost impossible to find a table on Saturdays, it was not necessary to book. Maria Teresa Ninni, 64, has been coming to eat here since the seventies, when she at the Balôn she met with friends and comrades in political struggles. Informal clothing, a deep look like her voice a little hoarse, she remembers: “If I needed money I would pick up old things and come here to sell them”.

At the time at the Balôn there was still a free trade market, where items recovered from the clearing of attics and cellars, or saved from waste, were sold. Over time, some have called it “illegal” or “poor”. Two years ago it was moved to a suburb of Turin, to make room for modern antiques shops and regular stalls. “Sometimes we are fixated on respecting the rules, but the rules also exist to be broken”, Ninni observes.

The transfer of the informal market is the sign of a trend underway in many cities: to remove from sight what disturbs a certain idea of ​​decoration. In Turin there is only one place destined exclusively to offer support and assistance to people who use drugs: the drop-in housed in a section of the Amedeo di Savoia hospital, on Corso Svizzera, in a point of the city where it passes by chance. Ninni has been working in that center since 1997, the year it was inaugurated.

In the drop-in so-called harm reduction programs are put in place, that is a series of strategies and interventions that aim to offer support and information to drug users, heroin but not only. Sterile syringes and pipettes are distributed to smoke crack, condoms, naloxone to inject in case of overdose. Attitudes towards drugs and their users are totally non-judgmental, different from that of rehabilitation communities.

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In Italy the first drop-in were born in the late 1990s, in response to the spread of the HIV virus. An emergency that involved Ninni personally. “In 1988 I returned to Turin after a few years spent in Spain and I realized that several people around me were HIV positive”. Among them were a close relative and a close friend. “He was gay, so you can imagine how stigmatized he was. In the office where he worked, his colleagues washed the handset after each phone call “.

Together they decided to create self-help groups so that HIV-positive people who used drugs could support each other practically and emotionally. Ninni was one of the few participants who did not contract the HIV virus and she was mainly involved in the distribution of sterile syringes to those who used heroin.

His friend died within a few years, recalls Ninni, who still carries on their struggle today. At the same time he joined the Isle of Arran association, through which he contributed to the opening of the drop-in of Turin, one of the first in Italy. The idea was born from the experience of a mobile unit, that is a camper that distributed sterile material. “At the work table passed the concept that peer support, the peer support already widespread in other areas of Europe, it was an added value ”, explains Ninni, who has never hidden his personal experience with drugs.

At the design of the drop-in the local health company and some associations including the Abele Group participated. In Turin, and throughout Piedmont, today i drop-in they are entirely managed by the ASL. It is one of the few cases in Italy. “I have always viewed the public service taking on the burden and responsibility of harm reduction programs very positively,” says Ninni. “In general, these programs are managed by the third sector”. In 25 years of work, however, she has also realized that the link with public bodies involves the risk of sudden cuts in funds: “It means depending on a different administration each time and it is not easy to make long-term plans”.

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Ninni was hired as a peer operator (peer operator), while today she has a contract as an educator. You are part of ItanPud, the Italian network of people who use drugs, with which you are carrying on a cultural battle. “It’s important not to talk about ‘toxic’, and the term ‘consumers’ isn’t correct either,” she explains. “It reduces people to the substances they use, it is dehumanizing. Language is central, it is through language that simplifications and categorizations are created ”. To explain to me that only a fraction of the people who use substances are “taken”, that is addicted, Ninni points to our glasses of red wine: “It would be like saying that you and I are addicted to alcohol”.

Al drop-in mainly people with addiction problems, but not only that. Many live in poverty, some have no fixed abode, others suffer violence. Women are a minority, except on Wednesday mornings when the center is open only to them and it also becomes a space to dye their hair or share stories. “It is always women who pay the highest price,” says Ninni. “In couples it is not uncommon for them to be forced into prostitution, and for men to leave them alone instead of defending them”.

One of the most problematic drugs, he explains, is crack. “It has a similar effect to injected cocaine – a strong flash – with a down (a decline in effects) quite quickly. People would never stop smoking it ”. But al drop-in there are also people who use controlled drugs, especially in the case of heroin. “I am on methadone therapy and have a normal working life.”

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At this point Ninni tells me about Carl Hart, professor of psychology at Columbia University, known for his research on the effect of drugs on the neurological level, but above all for having publicly declared that he uses heroin. Ninni listened to his speech at the international conference on harm reduction that took place in Porto, Portugal, in 2019. Hart also participated remotely in a meeting that took place on the sidelines of the VI National Conference on Addiction in Genoa, last November. Twelve years had passed since the last conference on the subject. “Interesting ideas emerged from the work tables,” says Ninni. “There was talk of consumer rooms and syringes in prison. Nothing new in Europe, but for Italy it is a step forward ”.

However, he does not have too many illusions. “Listening to the speeches of politicians, my arms fell out,” she says. “It seems that no matter what experience teaches, unfortunately drugs are still an ideological issue.” For many politicians, she says, “trying to reduce harm means encouraging people to do it. As if they decide how people will behave. They can decide to what extent they ruin their life, yes, but people will continue to do what they want ”.

Trattoria Valenza
Via Borgo Dora 39, Turin

1 gnocchi with tomato and pesto € 6.00
1 omelette with herbs and Tropea onions € 7.00
1 sautéed catalonia € 4.00
1 pears in wine € 3.00
1 bottle of water € 3.00
1 quart of house wine € 2.00
2 place settings and a coffee € 3.00

Total with the discount € 28.00

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