«The expenses for prevention and for the creation of therapeutic communities plus their funding should be considered as an investment by the State, since current costs that revolve around the issue of drug addiction, health, law enforcement, detention, cost the government almost 30 billion € a year, heavily impacting the governmental budget».
Pieretti also objected to the excessive and perhaps inappropriate amount of responsibility, in Italy, given to the sanitation department in the resolution of the problem of substance dependence: «Drug addiction is not a disease, it’s not chronic, it is not recurring. I say this because I know people that have a job and are fully reintegrated in society, as a colleague of mine who after a past involving drug addiction, is now a respected professor at the University of Bologna».
Among the problems highlighted by him, the lack of a National Coordination of accreditation and the differences between the networks of communities, «for example Lazio to has a fund of 37 euros per day for each guest of treatment facilities (32 euros is the cost for an animal to be housed in an animal shelter), compared to 150 euros in Northern Italy. A policy that affects the quality of service».