Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/306555
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 4 MAY 2014 Opinion 16 I don't know how familiar everyone here will be with the old 'this is your brain on drugs' ad. It was after all a long time ago, and as far as I know it was never shown on local TV. But it remains the most archetypal public battle cries of the 'war on drugs' motif: at least, from the early 1990s when the same 'war' was at full tilt. You'll probably find the original on YouTube, but if you can't be bothered here is a brief synthesis from memory: "This is your brain" (picture of egg). "This is your brain on drugs" (egg is cracked open, and its contents emptied into a sizzling frying pan). The intention may have been to underscore the psychological damage caused by certain mind- altering substances; but personally speaking the immediate effect was always to make me hungry. A sort of psychological correlative for the munchies, I suppose. The sight of an egg frying away in a pan automatically calls to mind other sights, sounds and smells. Sausages. Crispy bacon. Baked beans. Toast. It makes you reach for the coffee pot in your mind's eye... and if one isn't readily available, it will make you meander to the kitchen and put on the kettle. Which is kind of ironic, seeing as a supposedly anti-drug ad was also partly responsible for at least one person's lifelong addiction to caffeine… About the last thing you'd think about watching that ad, I would say, was a heroin overdose. Or enforced prostitution due to extreme addiction. Or petty theft to finance a drug habit. Organised crime. International drug trafficking networks. All the traditional – and, it must be said, very real – dangers associated with that scary word, 'drugs'. I remember thinking back then that if the architects of the 'war on drugs' could get such a simple message so completely wrong, defeat was more or less guaranteed. And oh look: 20 years later, the rest of the world – and now Malta, too – has come round to acknowledging that the war on drugs has in fact been lost. The Global Drugs Commission said as much in these precise words: "The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world." The governments of Portugal, Uruguay, several US States, Switzerland, Belgium and elsewhere have all come to the same conclusion, and modified their legislation accordingly. Even here in Malta, government's drug agency Sedqa has urged for a rethink on national policy, for much the same reasons. Technically, however, none of these entities are accurate. The war on drugs was not so much 'lost' as never even fought. What we actually fought was a war on drug users, and that is not the same thing at all. Malta in particular has taken this war to extremes. We have progressed, I concede, from the days (not that long ago) when camouf laged AFM soldiers would stop you in a roadblock – but only if you were driving a battered Ford Escort – and search you and your vehicle wielding f lashlights and machine- guns. And we have made some minor modifications since the days when 17-year-old Swiss tourists were automatically imprisoned for possession of less than 2g of cannabis. But law enforcement policy is still very much concerned with apprehending small-time users, still over-reliant on archaic legislation (which, among other snags, fails to distinguish between different drugs, or between 'cultivation' and 'trafficking')… still, in a word, attached to the failed systems of yesteryear. It was against this backdrop that the prime minister recently announced that the 'decriminalisation of certain drugs' will be the next issue on the agenda. About bloody time, I would have thought. And so would all the people who have variously called for similar reforms in the recent past: not least, the Justice Reform Commission under retired European Court judge Giovanni Bonello… on whose advice Muscat is presumably acting. But of course, being an ultimately political issue, people have to invariably crawl out of the woodwork to discredit the proposal. The latest to take to the lists was retired judge Joe Galea Debono – who handed down his fair share of prison sentences for drug-related crimes in his day – who now claims that the Maltese justice system is among the meekest and mildest of the world when it comes to the D-word. "Drug users aren't sent to prison, this is a misnomer. They are given a slap on the wrist, perhaps a conditional discharge and a fine but certainly not prison… I don't understand what all this hullaballoo is about," he told a journalist this week. To me, the three most significant words in those two sentences are: "I don't understand." In fact, that was all he really needed to say. The rest merely illustrated the sheer extent to which a man who presided over so many drug cases in Malta simply failed to understand the very issue he was passing judgment over. It is mere f luff. But let's take things one step at a time. First off, Galea Debono is wrong. Malta's justice system does sentence drug users to prison: even first-time offenders. In the same Raphael Vassallo This is your justice sy stem on drugs We have even sent users to prison for possession of drugs that were not actually illegal at the time they were apprehended