Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased to welcome you to the fifteenth ECAD Mayors’ Conference.

The City of Warsaw is honoured to be able to hold the meeting of the members of the organization co-created by our representatives in April 1994, by the European Cities Against Drugs resolution, signed in Stockholm.

Drug abuse is an important and difficult problem, developing mainly in huge conurbations. It is also present in the Polish cities, especially in Warsaw, which is an academic, cultural, show business and business centre. The possibilities of education and professional development the city offers, attract people from all over Poland.
The growing number of inhabitants and Warsaw’s cosmopolitan character attract many foreign companies as well as tourists. This spurs the city to further development but also creates favourable conditions for the development of social pathologies.

Just like in other huge conurbations, the pace of life in Warsaw is very fast and intensive, parents do not always have the time to look after their children properly and the children themselves, left on their own, are not always able to choose the right path and solve their problems on their own.
Hence, the city faces a great challenge related to solving the problem of children who are not properly taken care of. Such children might come both from dysfunctional and so-called “normal” families, where parents devote most of their time to their careers or have to work hard to make ends meet.
Kids left unattended and with no family support are an easy prey for their corrupted friends and people from the criminal environment. Using their freedom, they easily reach for the forbidden, which, before long, may have tragic results.

Children and young people start taking drugs for many reasons –
because of problems at school or at home, curiosity or to impress their peers.
Young people take psychoactive substances because they help them to concentrate and learn faster.
Teenagers and their a bit older friends not infrequently mix alcohol with drugs or buy medicine on the Internet and use it not for what it was intended.
They take drugs because they belong to a specific peer group, because they identify themselves with some youth subculture, clubs, music.
They take drugs because this is what their friends expect them to do, because the substances they use give them a sense of belonging to a certain environment or a certain group.
And first of all – they take psychoactive substances because they are available everywhere.

Since the day the ECAD was founded there have been many meetings and conferences devoted to the problem of drug abuse and its scale in individual countries.
The representatives of European cities have talked about prevention actions, they exchanged views, discussed trends, taken stances on important matters such as legalization of drugs, they have met during conferences of mayors and visited drug addiction treatment centres.
All these actions have been aimed at fighting for health, life and the future of our children.

I am very happy to see so many people involved in combating the drug problem. Your presence here, at this conference, proves that you realize how serious this problem is and that action needs to be taken to reduce it.
I hope that this meeting will become a forum of exchange of experiences. What is most important is the fact that the participants of the forum come from both Western and Eastern Europe, from politically diverse countries where drug abuse prevention policy takes different forms.

We represent regions different in terms of religion and culture, but this diversity, the multitude of solutions used in the prevention and treatment of addictions and also in the post-rehabilitation period, enable us to choose the most efficient ways to achieve our goals.

I wish you fruitful discussions and deliberations.

 
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