On June 26, 2025, the World Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, Pope Leo XIV issued a powerful appeal from the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City: focus efforts not on punishing victims of addiction, but on dismantling the global systems that profit from their pain.
“Drugs and addictions are an invisible prison that you, in different ways, have known and fought,” the Pope told a gathering of anti-drug advocates. “But we are all called to freedom” (Vatican Media, June 26, 2025).
The Holy Father’s remarks come at a moment of global urgency. The 2025 World Drug Report, released the same day by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, revealed a staggering rise in drug production and trafficking. Fentanyl alone caused an estimated 48,422 deaths in the United States in 2024, and 99% of global fentanyl seizures occurred in North America. Cocaine production surged 34% in 2023, while the homicide rate in Ecuador — a nation torn by cocaine-related violence — has multiplied nearly sixfold since 2020.
Against this grim backdrop, Pope Leo drew a stark contrast between those who profit from human suffering and those who are punished for being its victims. “It is easier to fight their victims,” he warned. “Too often, in the name of security, war has been waged and is waged against the poor, filling the prisons with those who are only the last link in a chain of death. Those who hold the chain in their hands, on the other hand, manage to have influence and impunity” (Vatican Media, June 26, 2025).
Rather than criminalizing addiction, Pope Leo called for action that reflects the Church’s unwavering defense of human dignity. “Our cities do not need to be freed from the marginalized,” he said, “but from marginalization; not cleaned of the desperate, but of despair.” In these words, he echoed the Gospel call to uphold the dignity of the least among us — not as a slogan, but “as a light rediscovered through great effort, and guaranteed by the Lord’s transformative words of peace.”
He also turned hearts and minds toward Jesus Christ, who brings true peace and restoration. “The Risen Jesus still comes and brings His breath,” Pope Leo said. “He gave [the Apostles] the Holy Spirit, which is the breath of God within us.” When dignity withers, when we “lack air,” Christ enters even locked doors, offering the peace the world cannot give.
The Pope urged youth especially not to stand idle. “You are not spectators of the renewal that our Earth needs so much… The Church needs you. Humanity needs you,” he said. “Together, over every degrading dependence, we will make the infinite dignity imprinted in each one of us prevail.”
In closing, he reminded the faithful of the cornerstone on which our hope is built: Christ Himself, who was rejected and crucified outside the city gates. “God does great things with those He frees from evil,” Pope Leo said, recalling the words of Psalm 118: “The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.”
This Jubilee Year, which he called “a year of grace in which dignity, too often diminished or denied, is recognized for all,” offers the Church and the world a renewed call: to break the cycle of organized crime, to accompany those suffering from addiction, and to recognize the inviolable dignity of every soul. As the Holy Father declared, “Let us move forward together, multiplying the places of healing, of encounter, and of education: pastoral paths and social policies that begin on the street and never give anyone up for lost.”
(Sources: Vatican Media, UNODC World Drug Report 2025)
