Common sense? It’s overrated, anyway…

OK, I admit it. I used to have a ‘pen-pal’. But hey, it wasn’t my fault. It was all the fault of The Big Blue Marble. Remember? “Your pal is waiting somewhere maybe far, maybe near, maybe in the town of Cleveland, or in Kasbah in Tangiers…”

Yikes! Thirty years later and counting, I still haven’t managed to get that irritating song out of my system. Probably never will. But then again, I never kept up correspondence with that pen pal of mine either – who, believe it or not, really was from Cleveland, Ohio.

In any case, I sort of miss having a pen pal all these years later. I miss that feeling of knowing that the reams of stuff you write will be read by complete strangers, and… um… actually, never mind that last part. Let’s just say that writing letters to people you don’t know has a certain therapeutic value of its own. If nothing else, it helps get things off your chest.

And I have a lot of things to get off my chest at the moment – including, at this precise instant, my cat. So I’ve decided it may be worth rediscovering that old habit of mine. Sadly, The Big Blue Marble no longer runs its pen pal service, so I can’t just send a letter to ‘ ‘, like the good old days. Tell you what, though: I’ll just pick a stranger at random instead.

How about… Beppe Fenech Adami, deputy leader of the Nationalist Party? Yes, yes, I am aware that it makes no sense whatsoever to single out him, of all people. But didn’t he just say that ‘common sense’ is not what he expects from national legislation? Perhaps he doesn’t expect it from anywhere else, either.

So here goes: my first pen pal letter in over 30 years. And I may as well start if off like I started all the others:

Dear PN-pal… Hi, how are you? I hope you are well. Just wanted to let you know I was really impressed by your contribution to the ongoing debate about drug law debate. Yeah, that’s right, the proposal to change all the laws enacted by your own father around 20 years ago, and which have been such an outstanding success ever since.

I was particularly struck by your two main lines of argument: one, that “The white paper should be guided by the common good rather than common sense”; and two, that “classifying between hard and soft drugs would be unwise as it would invariably justify or encourage the consumption of the other so-called inferior drug.”

Well said on both counts. Like you, I simply cannot understand why the present government is so hell-bent on basing its laws on ‘common sense’, when we all know that functional laws should really be based on ignorance, irrationality, hysteria and sheer bloody-mindedness instead. After all, since when has any good come out of laws based on common sense? And how many politicians’ pockets have been lined with ‘common sense’, anyway?

Besides: as we all know, the purpose of drug laws is to make sure that as many people as possible take drugs, so we can then pretend to do something about the problem by ‘rehabilitating’ these drug users in prison at the taxpayers’ expense.

Obviously this doesn’t apply to internationally-wanted drug traffickers, who are naturally allowed to continue making gazillions of euros off the backs of vulnerable drug addicts (it’s called ‘doing business’). It applies only to the vulnerable drug addicts themselves, who as we all know cannot afford to line any politicians’ pockets, and are therefore clearly of no use whatsoever to anyone.

That’s why I admire the legislation passed by your father so much. It was designed in such a way as to make sure that honest, hard-working drug traffickers who contribute so much to the economy would never spend a day in jail… while all the low-life scum whom these traffickers prey upon would get to sample the full weight of the most draconian anti-drug legislation in Europe. In brief, just what a good legal system should be: strong with the weak, and weak with the strong.

So while hapless drug users constantly land behind bars in this country – the most recent case being just this week, when a man was sentenced to SIX AND A HALF YEARS for possession of 1.67 grammes of heroin WHILE ALREADY IN PRISON - your daddy’s government granted a Presidential pardon to one Francisco Assis de Queiroz, who had been so unfairly convicted for importing huge quantities of the same drug to Malta.

Clearly, it is unacceptable that multi-gazillionaire drug traffickers should be imprisoned, while their innocent and (worse still) penniless victims are allowed to wander the streets free and unchained. So your daddy rightly legislated in such a way that the only people actually imprisoned for drug importation under the new laws were Swiss teenagers who forgot they had half an unsmoked joint in their handbag when they boarded the plane to Malta.

From this perspective, Eddie Fenech Adami’s contribution made Malta’s drug legislation the most spectacularly successful in world history. European statistics released earlier this year (I refer to the EMCDDA report… have you read it, by the way?) have clearly indicated that the incidence of problem drug use in Malta – notably heroin, but also cocaine which has ‘exploded’ (in the words of Sedqa’s clinical director Dr George Grech) – is higher now than ever before.

Not just out in the street, but even in prison... as both the abovementioned case and the better known Josette Bickle affair so amply illustrated. And this, of course, is perfectly logical: if you’re going to send drug users to prison, drugs will sooner or later have to find a way in there as well. Otherwise you’ll end up with a bunch of convicts going cold turkey in their cells.

And, oh, look: so many people have been sent to prison over drug use that we even had to build an extension to the Corradino Crack-Party Facility in Paola. Its population has swelled from a few hundred in 1992, to over 6,000 today. Meanwhile there is an inexhaustible queue of criminal cases regarding drug possession – all with the potential of ending in prison sentences - still waiting to be heard.

For the success of your father’s policy was so total that it even succeeded in paralysing the law-courts, which now struggle to cope with an unquantifiable number of prosecutions over issues that would not even be worth a verbal warning in any other European country.

So I can fully understand your frustration when young little whippersnappers like Justice Minister Owen Bonnici come forward with plans to overhaul drug laws for what seem to be the clean opposite reasons, and all based on (shudder) ‘common sense’. Unlike your father, Bonnici’s idea of a drug policy is one that keeps the number of victims sent to prison to a bare minimum… so that the law enforcement officers might actually have the time and resources to go after big fish like Queiroz, whom your father so wisely and humanely pardoned.

Can you believe it? He actually wants to build a policy based on the idea of criminalising drug traffickers, while treating their victims as… well… victims. Seriously, if he increases the amount of common sense in that policy by even 0.01mg, I might just overdose…

And it gets worse. He also wants the law to distinguish between different substances on the basis of their harmfulness to health and to society in general. I mean, of all the alarmingly sensible things I have ever heard, this must be the goddamn sanest of the lot.

With the new legislation in place, drug traffickers will have less incentive to get their clients hooked on hard drugs. They would no longer (as they do under the laws your father drew up) face the same penalties for selling heroin or cocaine as cannabis.

And because there is obviously a tonne more money to be made from selling hugely addictive drugs such as cocaine and heroin, most traffickers would no longer be tempted to start their victims out with a little hash, before suddenly turning around and saying… ‘hey, sorry dude, all out of weed. But try this. It’s Grade A coke, just like Wolf on Wall Street…’”

And if the penalties for being caught in possession are the same for cocaine as for cannabis… well, wouldn’t that discourage potential users from sticking to the less harmful of the two substances?

The law itself doesn’t distinguish between heroin, cocaine and cannabis… so why the heck should the user? Faced with a choice between cannabis and cocaine, and knowing full well that the consequences will be the same whatever you choose… can anyone be surprised if a growing number of people eventually opt for the harder stuff?

That’s what your father’s legislation practically encourages them to do anyway. Very successfully, I might add. In fact it might explain why – according to the EMCDDA survey - we still have the highest incidence of problem heroin use in Europe, and cocaine use has increased exponentially in the past 10 years.

Yes indeed. From a legal system that at every step of the way benefitted the trafficker at the expense of society, we may now have the same situation in reverse. And who’s objecting to that? Why, the deputy leader of the Nationalist Party, of course… whose daddy made all those nonsensical laws in the first place.

So keep up the good work, Beppe. We rely on people like you to ensure that Malta’s laws remain the most nonsensical, absurd and laughably self-defeating in the civilised world. Otherwise, who knows? We might start using ‘common sense’ as the basis for all our laws, not just the law on drugs. And where will all that lead to, aye?

Right, that’s it from me for now. Fond regards, and please convey my respects to the rest of the dynasty…