"We do not think that punishment and prison are the best measures to improve the behaviour of these young people..."

Caritas, the arm of the Church that reaches out to drug addicts, has called for the setting up of a specific " drug court" and appealed for drug users not to be sent to prison.

In a speech yesterday, Caritas director Victor Grech said the organisation's management and staff believed that " youths seeking help are not criminals, but people who need care".

He was speaking during a graduation ceremony where 15 former drug users celebrated the end of their successful rehabilitation course.

" We do not think that punishment and prison are the best measures to improve the behaviour of these young people except in cases in which the person would be a huge risk to society such as in drug trafficking and organised crime," Mgr Grech said.

He said a drug court would have at its disposal a multidisciplinary team to examine in detail the degree of responsibility of someone suspected of a crime and provide for " intensive treatment according to the person's needs".

This, he said, would reduce the number of pending cases " drastically".

" I'm saying this to safeguard the welfare of the person, and for a balance to be struck between the rights of a suspect and those of society. If we believe in the need for a drug court, the human and financial resources will be found," Mgr Grech said.

He said that those who undertook a long-term drug rehabilitation programme and reintegrated successfully into society " should not be sent back to prison on criminal and civil cases which had been pending for years," adding that supervised community work would give better results. The reasons for a drug court mentioned by Mgr Grech are very similar to comments made by Sedqa clinical director George Grech in his call for the decriminalisation of certain drugs, when he argued this would lead to better treatment of drug users rather than sending them to prison.

Mgr Grech, however, spoke against the decriminalisation or liberalisation of drugs as proposed by a report drawn up by the UN " because the damage that is being done will keep growing".

" We affirm that all drugs are harmful, including cannabis, and there are cases where the damage could not be repaired," Mgr Grech said.

Young people are starting to take drugs " early and hard" Mgr Grech said: the most common age of the first use of heroin was 14 years old while cocaine and cannabis users typically started at 15.

In the light of this, preventive education should be intensified and young people should be led to make the right choices, he urged.

In 2010, 644 people sought treatment at Caritas, with the most common age being 28.