A discussion on the decriminalisation of drug use is “urgent”, according to George Grech, the clinical director of the government agency Sedqa.
One of the reasons for this, according to Dr Grech, is that “prison is getting too full”, but the other, more salient reason is prison does not give drug users the treatment they need.
“Prison is not giving results – it’s no secret there are drugs in prison, and we have come to learn that incarceration does not work in people who are purely drug addicts,” Dr Grech said.
Dr Grech raised this issue during his presentation at a seminar on the European Year for Poverty and Social Exclusion, citing it as one of the ways to improve the situation in Malta.
The doctor specified he was not speaking about drug traffickers – “who are another kettle of fish” – and he was not calling for the legalisation of drugs.
Decriminalisation, as opposed to legalisation, according to Dr Grech, would still enable the government to treat these people but would not automatically translate into a prison sentence.
“We have to face this discussion soon, whether we want to or not. The truth is, our prison is already full enough,” Dr Grech said.
He referred to the Portuguese system, where all drugs – including heroin and cocaine – were decriminalised. This had worked and there had been a decrease in drug use.
In Portugal, people caught with drugs are sent for treatment and the government has the option to sentence repeat offenders to community work.
Dr Grech believes Malta already has most of the required framework to accommodate the system, with “only a little fine tuning” necessary to implement the system.
The fact that Malta does not have a drug classification system, which ranks drugs in order of their strength and effects, does not help either, according to Dr Grech, as it is one thing to use heroin and another to use cannabis.
“Drugs and alcohol can’t be separated,” Dr Grech said, adding it’s a “changing and challenging scenario.” He said “we’re seeing more people using cocaine,” but alcohol still remains the biggest problem in Malta, and the support and treatment systems had to be adapted to deal with this situation.
He said there had been a “very good response” to Sedqa’s proposal for random breathalyser tests, which he framed in the context that just under half of road traffic accidents were partly due to excessive alcohol intake.
Dr Grech also warned that people were increasingly buying drugs online, and that rave parties centred round the drugs were being organised in the space of 24 hours, thanks to sites such as Facebook.