‘E ci si pulisca il culo!’

Sadly, I can no longer hear the words ‘White Paper’ without breaking into an automatic chuckle. And because we’ve been hearing those two words consistently now for the past few weeks, I have literally chuckled myself hoarse.

It’s all the fault of that great Italian comic actor, Toto. On hearing those two words – regardless of when, where or in what context – my mind is instantly transported to a single moment in a film I happened to watch in the company of my grandfather when I was around 10 years old.

It was called ‘I Due Colonelli’, and set during the Italian occupation of Greece in 1943. Toto plays one of the two ‘colonelli’ in question; the other is a German SS officer played by Gerard Herter.

Towards the end of the film, the Nazi officer constantly reminds his increasingly irritated Italian comrade-in-arms that he has ‘carta bianca’ – spoken with an outrageous German accent – and must therefore be obeyed in all things. He reminds Toto of this fact for the last time when the latter refuses to carry out an order to open fire on civilians.

Toto’s response remains, to my mind, the single most poetically beautiful one-liner in the entire history of cinema:

“E ci si pulisca il culo!”

I have tried my damnedest to come up with an English translation that captures the sheer elegance and force of that extraordinary rejoinder. But to no avail. “Wipe your arse with it, then” was the best I could come up with: and I’m sure you’ll agree it doesn’t even come within a million miles of the beauty of the original.

In any case: that scene was forever imprinted in my memory for two reasons. One, because it is a spectacularly memorable movie moment in its own right, which can now be appreciated in all its cathartic glory on YouTube.

On top of that single epic one-liner, Toto also delivers a thunderous tirade against the brutality of Nazism that quite simply eclipses even the most memorable lines from Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List. Watching it again all these years later, my reaction is exactly the same as it was 30 years ago. I feel an urge to dive into the screen and give the man a hug.

The second reason I remember it so clearly was down to my grandfather’s reaction… which was to literally burst into applause in his armchair. To this day, that memory alone is enough to put a smile on my face. (And it sort of helps that Toto actually reminds me of my grandfather in other ways, too.)  

But that’s the thing about having a good memory for movie scenes. It can land you in a lot of trouble. Every single time I hear the words ‘White Paper’… as in, “The government has launched a White Paper on Drug Law Reform”… the same response springs unbidden to mind. “E ci si pulisca il culo!”

Which of course can be awkward, as this tends to happen at such moments as news conferences addressed by ministers, or national debates organised by drug rehab agencies such as the OASI Foundation.

One of these days, I fear the temptation to just shout it out loud will prove too strong. And when that happens, I’d appreciate the occasional visit in my padded cell at Mt Carmel Hospital.

Meanwhile I trust you’ll allow me one last chuckle, if nothing else, because there is little else to laugh about when discussing this particular White Paper.

Not so much because of anything contained in the document itself… it actually represents a bold step in the right direction for the first time since this country started debating drug legislation around 30 years ago… but because the reactions to date have been so lamentably predictable and so tiresome. 

The latest to step into the debate was Archbishop Paul Cremona, who echoed Mgr Charles Scicluna’s earlier argument (and Beppe Fenech Adami’s later one) that cannabis should not be decriminalised because it “would send the wrong message”.

For a change I will not join the chorus protesting that the Archbishop had the temerity to even voice an opinion in the first place. I have time and again voiced my own opinion, on this and other issues, and I fail to see why Mgr Cremona should be treated any differently.

But then again, I usually get clobbered for expressing my opinions in public… as a cursory trawl through the comments section will reveal. This is how it should be, by the way. I don’t expect people to agree with me, nor to particularly like what I have to say. Again, however, I see no reason under the sun why the same should not also apply to the Archbishop… or for that matter everyone else who is repeating the same flawed arguments, in roughly the same order.

Arguments like: “We must keep in mind that drugs are not considered bad because they are illegal, but they are illegal because they are bad.”

Small problem with that observation, Your Excellency. A lot of other things are ‘bad’ – some of them much worse than even the hardest of illegal drugs – yet are also perfectly legal. Alcohol is the most obvious example, not just because it is responsible for infinitely more deaths each year than heroin… on top of all sorts of social problems… but also because it is a highly addictive drug in its own right.

And we can extend the same argument to cigarettes, junk food, motorised transport, and all sorts of other potentially fatal things.

But let’s stick to alcohol. The World Health Organisation defines this as a ‘psychoactive substance with dependence producing properties’ – which sure as heck sounds like a drug to me – and adds that it was responsible for 3.3 million net deaths, or 5.9% of global deaths, in 2012.

The corresponding statistic for ALL other illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, etc. (according to the United Nations’ World Drug report 2012) is 0.2 million per year. And unless you count purely accidental deaths such as people who fall off balconies while stoned, the corresponding mortality statistic for cannabis on its own is… zero.

So by the Archbishop’s reasoning, alcohol is very clearly ‘bad’ – much worse than even the most dangerous illegal drugs – and therefore should be ‘illegal because it is bad’. Yet to date I have not heard anyone – least of all the spiritual leader of a Church which also uses alcohol for liturgical purposes – call for the criminalisation of alcohol.

Why not, I wonder? Why do we apply one set of rules to one set of harmful substances, and another set of rules to another? More to the point: why do we treat people who smoke weed as criminals, when the category of ‘people who drink whisky’ also includes the occasional magistrate throwing a Christmas party in a courtroom? 

I have yet to hear a single logical and rational answer to any of these questions. Perhaps Archbishop Paul Cremona would be gracious enough to provide one.

This brings me to that other spectacularly utterly flawed argument currently being bandied about. This is how Beppe Fenech Adami expressed it earlier this week: “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.”

Taken together, these two observations strike directly at the heart of everything that is positive about the White Paper. Its two most fundamental points concern precisely the need for a classification system which distinguishes between different drugs on the basis of how harmful they actually are... and the proposed partial decriminalisation of cannabis, which in turn represents the same principle (i.e., treating drugs on the basis of their harmfulness) enacted in practice.

Incredibly, Maltese legislation still lacks any form of classification system that distinguishes between cannabis, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, LSD and whatnot… even if the distinction is sometimes (but not always) made by individual judges and magistrates in court.

In many cases, the discretion allowed to the judiciary only emphasises the urgent need for a proper legal framework that reflects the reality on the ground.

All too often we see different people treated to entirely different punishments for similar or identical offences, merely on the basis of what judge or magistrate they happen to appear before. And the prosecution reserves the right to simply pick and choose between lower and upper courts – where the sentence may vary from a maximum of 10 years to a maximum of life imprisonment – without providing any explanation for the choice.

This fact alone prompted the European Court of Human Rights to rule (Camilleri vs Malta, 2013) that “Maltese law was not sufficiently foreseeable in that it did not provide for any guidance on what would amount to a more serious offence or a less serious one.” It is partly to bring Maltese legislation in line with this ruling that the White Paper lays down very specific guidelines that distinguish between the seriousness of drug-related charges, based in part on the nature of the drug concerned.

From this perspective, it is just slightly upsetting to realise that both the Church and the Nationalist Party are dead set on retaining a system that has been slammed by the ECHR as a human rights violation. It is even more upsetting when you bear in mind that the latter institution is characterised by a marked preponderance of lawyers… yet seems to be entirely unaware of this judgment and its implications.

More upsetting still, however, is the clean absence of any semblance of logic in both arguments. There is staggering evidence that treating drug users as criminals only exacerbates the problem. I can cite countless cases to illustrate this point, but this single quote from a 2013 news report - about a 31-year-old woman jailed for heroin trafficking, under circumstances that plainly showed she was herself a heroin addict - should do the trick nicely:

“The court also noted the 23-page criminal record of the accused. Between 1993 and 2012 she had 13 drug-related convictions. In one case she was jailed for four years. In another case she was jailed for 10 months. But she seems not to have learned anything.”

Really? You don’t say. So a woman who had 13 drug-related convictions failed to learn anything from serving multiple prison sentences… and what does the court do? Why, it hands her yet another prison sentence. After all, you never know: it may be a case of 14th time lucky…

Meanwhile, the White Paper that has been met with such resistance marks a very belated recognition that Malta’s present drug legislation is simply not working. It has succeeded only in criminalising people for no particular reason, and – more importantly – has failed abjectly in its most basic objective: reducing the incidence of problem drug use in Malta.

In fact it has demonstrably resulted in much higher problem drug use than countries which have pursued decriminalisation policies of their own, such as Portugal. This emerges very clearly from the most recent report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

And what do you know? Finally we get a long-overdue legal initiative that might align our country’s legislation with some degree of sanity and levelheadedness for a change… and just look who’s arguing in favour of a failed and hopelessly illogical approach instead. 

This, of course, is where I am sorely tempted to shout out that immortal Toto line: not in response to the ‘carta bianca’ on drug law reform, but to all its critics. Nonetheless, I shall resist the temptation for now. Quite frankly, I don’t think I’m the one who needs a padded cell in this argument…