Watch out for the State's pharmaceutical drugs: What is forced sanitary treatment? by Massimo Marini July massimomarini@yahoo.com Forced sanitary treatment is a kind of psychiatric treatment which is prescribed in the most grave of cases and needs a special order of the mayor and medical consent. In Genoa, the mayor has ordered that this condemnable practice (which consists in the giving of ultrapotent psychiatric drugs) for all protesters who are agitated and..... The world, people, current events, stragely enough are something which since last Sunday I can understand much better. Everything seems more clear, and the opaque reflections from which we normally glean reality seem to have disappeared: the powers that be have shown their violent face, shamelessly and cruelly, turning, without any hesitation, a strategy into an objective. The handling of the G8 event, having been studied meticulously for over three months, has been planned with a rigour that seems monstrous: Orwell surely had knew how to do much better than this!! The latest (at least for me) of the aberrations to which we have been impotent spectators (stuck, let's face it as we are between molasses and chaos) comes to us from the direct testimony of the writer, which I hope will be of some use in giving a new slant on what happened in Genoa, in adding another voice to the many which are trying to reconstruct each piece of the map of subtle villany with which the State's suppression is perpetrated. On the Sunday of cadavers in beaten and humiliated Genoa, I was at the San Martino hospital to look for a friend, a brother who like many has felt on his own body the violent arm of the law: That guy is called Roberto Sarlo, videomaker and artist of the people, you can see him close up in the photograph on the second page of the Manifesto of Sunday 22 July, with his hands held up and a swollen face. He has been brutally beaten by 5 policemen, was treated at the first aid station, was released and immediately thereafter he was locked up again at the psychiatric ward to be subjected to the dreaded FORCED SANITARY TREATMENT. I have found him stuffed full of psychiatric drugs, given him absolutely against his will - he was knocked out by a super potent mix of Serenase and other garbage. At that point I discovered the nice part of the game, another weapon which has always been in the hands of the powers that be, used to isolate those that are not conforming. The city of Genoa has sent a special order to all the hospitals of the metropolitan area, to be applied during the days of the G8 meeting, which ordered to use forced sanitary treatment on any protester who got angry or who complained too much about the beatings they got. That is another kind of violence which the government has bestowed on us, just to say how tight the net is knit, how many ways there are in which the State's injustice may be exercised; the umpteenth insufferable abuse which utilizes the weapon of the State's drugs to quiet the consciences and silence the voices which feel they must say NO! LET'S SAY NO! ENOUGH! That which happened in Genoa will forever remain in the minds of those who saw, but not enough: we all have to know what really happened and we all have to feel personally indignant about living in this country, we all have to use our critical conscience as a weapon, staying on guard against the manipulations which information always produces. We are a great many, all we have to do is to keep the tension high, not with bombs or instigation, but with the force of a compact, beautiful and proud multitude!!! Massimo