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MT 29 June 2014

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maltatoday, SUNDAY, 29 JUNE 2014 Opinion 18 T he discussion on drug decriminalisation has taken a sudden turn for the very interesting… even though few people outside the immediate sphere of narcotic forensics and social work seem to have actually noticed. Perhaps predictably, around the last people to have detected a change in the flavour and thrust of this ongoing debate are the ones making the most noise in it. This week we witnessed yet another dramatic high octane confrontation in parliament between rival politicians over the proposed White Paper for Drug Law Reform. Justice Minister Owen Bonnici took the (admittedly unusual) initiative to read out a letter by a reformed drug addict who still faces a prison sentence, despite successfully concluding a rehab programme. For some reason this seems to have gravely upset his opposite number, Jason Azzopardi, who promptly 'challenged' Bonnici to issue a Presidential pardon, or forever hold his peace. Believe it or not, these are actual quotes from Azzopardi's speech in parliament: "Are you ready to put your money where your mouth is? You have the power to recommend a presidential pardon. Will you use this power?"... "And if you are prepared to use this power, what is the cut-off point? What jail terms would justify a pardon? Will it apply to married persons or to parents? And how many children must one have?"… "Will you walk the talk? Will you bite the bullet?"... "If you do not believe that the case does not merit a pardon why did you raise the case, to confuse people?" I don't know. Either he has swallowed an entire dictionary of random movie clichés, or Azzopardi genuinely thinks this is a Chuck Norris flick. But if you ask me, the real issue is not so much the histrionics and the childish cries of "I dare you!", "I challenge you", etc. It is that the reform under discussion is of serious concern to thousands of people out here in the real world. Yet it is evident from their ongoing antics that the people who will ultimately take all the decisions are not even aware of how the debate is evolving on a national level. Even worse, they are still clearly motivated by all the wrong reasons, and seem interested only in… well… themselves. While the rest of the world debates drug policy reform as an antidote to a 'war on drugs' that has clearly been lost – and this is not me talking, by the way: the Global Drugs Commission came to the same conclusion, as did Malta's own drug agency Sedqa – members of the Maltese parliament play 'truth or dare' games instead… with nothing more in their sights than the prospect of embarrassing a rival politician or forcing the other party on the defensive. My drug policy is bigger than your drug policy, nya-nya-nya- nyah-nyah. As a result, it is safe to predict even from now that the policy reform being debated is almost certain to end in yet another disaster (of which we have seen altogether too many in recent years). For as Jason Azzopardi so ably illustrated with his guns blazing showdown this week, the people steering the debate don't actually have a clue what the problem even is, still less how to solve it. Whether or not Owen Bonnici should issue a presidential pardon – or for that matter, whether he should have made public such sensitive private correspondence - is hardly the bone of contention here. What the minister was clearly talking about is a systemic problem, not an individual one. It is not enough to resolve the individual injustice (if such it is) suffered by one person. You have to also address the root cause of a problem which also affects others: not just other addicts in the same predicament, but their families, children etc. Not according to Jason Azzopardi, however. The shadow justice minister seems to think the problem is that Maltese governments do not give enough amnesties or Presidential pardons to convicts. Perhaps he still yearns nostalgically for the good old days of Francisco Assis de Queiroz: you know, when individual 'problems' concerning individual convictions on drug trafficking charges could always be solved by simply issuing a Presidential pardon… and then spending the next 15 years avoiding answering any questions about it. I hate to say this, but it is for precisely this reason that the drug legislation framework with which we have been saddled is such a shambles in the first place. It fell to former MP Franco Debono to outline this point at a conference this week (more of which in a sec) – and if you look at the precise sequence of events concerning how these laws were formulated and amended, at the heart of every decision you will find the same mindless hysteria that characterises Jason Azzopardi's outburst in parliament this week. It was in response to the Queiroz fiasco that the Nationalist government felt pressured into 'harshening' drug laws, and mandated prison sentences for all types of importance, under any circumstance. No international drug traffickers ever bore the brunt of this entirely Third World approach, of course – certainly not anyone of the calibre of Queiroz – but we did succeed in imprisoning at least two harmless Swiss holiday makers (a 30-something year old man named Marcel Wintzch, whose baby daughter died while he was in prison in Malta; and a 17-year-old girl named Gisela Feuz, who attracted considerable bad press). In both cases they were imprisoned for minuscule amounts of cannabis resin, in circumstances that suggested that even they may have been unaware of its existence. Former justice minister Tonio Borg eventually had to intervene to prevent a third, almost identical case – this time a German couple whose names escape me – from suffering the same fate. But while mandatory prison for importation (regardless of substance, amount, etc.) was removed from the law, similar draconian and quite frankly nonsensical provisos remain in place to this day. There are reasons for this, too. As Franco Debono reminded us last Thursday, Malta's idea of formulating drug laws was to simply cherry-pick from the legislation of other countries; so while to all outward appearances we built our laws on the British model, we somehow omitted to include some vital articles of legislation… without which the entire system simply doesn't make any sense. Among the omissions was a classification system to distinguish between different substances on the basis of their harmfulness to the individual and society as a whole. Again, it was only after a plethora of equally nonsensical court decisions that the law was eventually amended, and now gives magistrates at least a modicum of discretion when it came to making that judgment for themselves. At every point the pattern was the same. Politicians draw up laws based on their own exigencies – in this case, the need to appear tough on drug trafficking, for purely political reasons – and in the absence of any coherent strategy. As a result, innocent people are Raphael Vassallo Reforming drug laws is not a game

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