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A country of confusion

Last week, President George Vella presided over the ceremony in which 12 people “graduated” after completing a residential therapeutic programme to overcome drug addiction. The programme was run by Caritas.

It is an event that is held once a year, and the State, through the presence of the President, expressed it’s satisfaction that people who were addicted to drugs sought help to find a remedy, and that this help was given to them.

These 12 people, said the President during his address, should be proud of this achievement. This is the beginning of another phase in your life, Vella told them, since they will now be stronger thanks to the programme that they followed.

If you slip back into addiction, Vella said, you will find people ready to welcome you with open arms, so as to help you out of the problem again.

This is the same President who last year signed a law which made it legal to grow cannabis plants at home, and for people to carry up to seven grams with them for personal use. The law itself was pushed forward by the Labour government, one of it’s many liberal ideas that have come to fruition in the past years.

The law opened the way for more cannabis users, as well as for more exposure of young people, including children, to the drug, as Caritas chief Anthony Gatt said in a recent interview carried out with The Malta Independent on Sunday. Children as young as nine are being exposed to the drug, he had said at the time, but in spite of efforts to have this explained, and perhaps even countered, by the new authority that oversees what the government describes as “responsible” use of cannabis, this media house has never obtained a reply.

But the question is: if we are so happy when people manage to overcome drug addiction, if we hold ceremonies to praise them for this, and if we tell them that any relapse would find society ready to help them again, why have we made it easier for drugs themselves to be consumed?

To be clearer, we do not know what kind of drugs these 12 people who graduated used to take. It could be that the drugs that they were addicted to were harder than cannabis. It could also be that there was a mixture of substances involved.

Whatever the circumstances were, however, it is common knowledge that people who end up taking hard drugs, usually start with something like cannabis. So it is equally easy to draw a conclusion that some of the people who graduated from the Caritas programme last week, had at least started their road to drugs via cannabis use.

This is why it is so confusing. We highlight and award people who rid themselves from drug addiction, and yet we enact laws that make it legal for them to consume, as well as cultivate, the very drug that could start them on the way to harder drugs.

By making cannabis use acceptable and legal, we are only encouraging people to make use of drugs; and this is especially so for the younger generations. The are growing up in a society where they are able to see adults using cannabis legally, and thus they are bound to believe that cannabis use is, in itself, normal.

Confusing, indeed.

World

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2022-06-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-06-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://maltaindependent.pressreader.com/article/281651078793415

Malta Independent