Drugs are an ‘invisible prison’, says Pope: governments must target pushers, not victims
Charles Collins/Crux • June 26, 2025
Pope Leo XIV has said that drugs and addiction are an “invisible prison” for their victims, while urging governments to do more to “dismantle” the criminal and corporate organisations and networks that profit from victims of addiction.
The pontiff made his comments while making an address to mark the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking on 26 June.
Most of those attending the Pope’s address came from Italy’s San Patrignano community, which works with those suffering from drug addiction and offers them rehabilitation.
One member of the audience, Paola Clericuzio, who was 18 years old when she started using cocaine because of her boyfriend, addressed the Pope during the meeting.
“I didn’t want to be below [my boyfriend] and I decided to be like him through alcohol, joints and drugs,” she told the Pope.
It wasn’t easy breaking her addiction, Paola said, but the community helped her learn how to get back to dancing, singing and school.
“I’m starting to understand that true love is something else, starting first of all to love myself,” she said.
Leo said the presence of the San Patrignano community was “a testimony of freedom”.
He added: “Drugs and addiction are an invisible prison that you, in different ways, have known and fought, but we are all called to freedom.
“As I meet you, I think of the abyss of my heart and of every human heart. It is a Psalm, that is, the Bible, that calls the mystery that dwells in us an ‘abyss’.
“Saint Augustine confessed that only in Christ did the restlessness of his heart find peace. We seek peace and joy, we thirst for them. And many deceptions can delude and even imprison us in this quest.”
The pontiff went on to say that the San Patrignano community is engaged in a battle that cannot be abandoned “as long as, around us, anyone is still imprisoned in the various forms of addiction”, before turning his focus on the profit-driven moral malaise and hypocrisies that underpin drug taking and addiction in modern societies.
“Our fight is against those who make their immense business out of drugs and every other addiction – think of alcohol or gambling. There are huge concentrations of interest and extensive criminal organisations that states have a duty to dismantle,” Leo said.
He then decried how it often appears easier for governments to target the victims of drugs rather than the criminal organisations and vested interests behind narcotics and drug distribution.
“Too often, in the name of security, war is waged against the poor, filling prisons with those who are merely the final link in a chain of death. Those who hold the chain in their hands instead manage to gain influence and impunity,” the Pope said.
“Our cities must not be freed of the marginalised, but of marginalisation; they must be cleared not of the desperate, but of desperation,” the Pope said.
He told the young people in the audience that they are not mere spectators of the renewal that the earth so badly needs, rather, he said: “You are protagonists.”
He explained: “Jesus, who was denied, invites all of you, and if you have felt rejected and spent, you are now no [longer rejected or spent]. Your mistakes, your sufferings, but above all your desire for life, make you witnesses that change is possible.”
After the meeting, Paola said that speaking to Pope Leo had caused a “unique emotion”, and added that the Pope demonstrated “the importance of the union that must exist between us young people to overcome the problem”.
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Photo: Pope Leo XIV leads an audience for the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, Vatican, 26 June 2025. (Photo by FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP via Getty Images.)