Malta’s drug laws should be tweaked further to ensure nobody is imprisoned simply for using drugs, legislators were urged during a national conference on Tuesday.

The 2015 Drug Dependence (Treatment not Imprisonment) Act introduced a system of fines and mandatory rehabilitation for those caught in possession of small quantities of drugs, keeping users who would previously have been liable to prison time out of the court system.

But the following year, 10 users were still imprisoned, according to Richard Muscat, a drug expert and professor of physiology at the University of Malta.
“People do not need to go to prison for their drug use; it's the traffickers who need to go to prison,” Prof. Muscat said during the national conference Ħajja ħielsa mid-droga (‘Life free from drugs’) at Parliament.

“The law must be tweaked to ensure that all people using drugs go through the rehabilitation process.”

Read: Drug laws must be tweaked to avoid ruining lives - magistrate

Prof. Muscat said the country’s drugs policy in recent decades had yielded several tangible successes, citing the distribution of syringes to drug users and the subsequent prevention of an HIV epidemic.

He also stressed the importance of evidence-based policy, giving the example of research showing that 10 per cent of teenage cannabis users would become addicted, and the creation of a new Sedqa programme to address the issue.

Addressing the conference on new drug trends, Godwin Sammut from the University’s chemistry department said an average of one new synthetic drug was found every week in 2017, down from around two a week in 2014.

Mr Sammut attributed the decrease to increased legislation and police raids in recent years.

Nevertheless, he said, synthetic cannabinoids and cathinones (used as a substitute for cocaine and ecstasy) remained a serious problem, particularly as they were often cheaper and easier to obtain than the standard drugs and carried much greater risks.

He added that recent years had also seen a rise in in genetically-modified cannabis strains, which grew faster and were more potent than other varieties.

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Opening the conference, Speaker Anġlu Farrugia highlighted the harm caused by drugs to individuals and society. Malta, he said, had the highest rate of drug-related deaths in the EU, stressing the need for policies to help addicts while cracking down on traffickers.

Caritas and OASI Foundations both sounded cautionary notes on the possibility of legalising recreational cannabis, highlighting the dangers of the drug and the risks of increased use were it to be legalised.