Reefer madness: Malta unchains itself from the cannabis ‘gateway drug’ myth

There has been a sea-change in Malta’s attitude to drugs. Today the island is sounding out the country’s stakeholders on a relaxation of prohibition rules on recreational cannabis, to allow people to home-grow cannabis for personal use at home.

After its first steps to remove punitive or mandatory prison terms for cannabis users, the Labour government in 2017 proposed a national debate on recreational cannabis in its electoral programme. It was a subject that enabled it, in part, to portray a fresh outlook on society amongst its younger electorate at a time when it came under fire over corruption allegations.

Since then, a technical committee appointed to study the local and international context has found that the judgements from the Maltese law courts in the last two years had shown the need for “progressive amendments” on cannabis rules. Chief among them was the Marieclaire Camilleri case, in which the courts found that cultivation of the cannabis plant even in excess of the current legal limit of one plant, could be for the person’s exclusive use.

Indeed, this landmark case led to important legislative amendments almost immediately, which gave the Court discretion on effective imprisonment, if it was satisfied that the cultivation in question was for the exclusive use of that person.

In the Fabio Ignazzitto case, the accused was found in possession of 118 grams of cannabis, which he claimed was for his own personal use. The Court determined that the law gave no direction on what could be used to determine the use of the substance, and therefore, it could apply its personal discretion. Indeed, the Court considered that from the circumstances of the case, one could indeed determine that the possession of the substantial amount of cannabis was for the accused’s personal use.

Missing from the official government narrative on cannabis is the tragic story of Daniel Holmes, who in 2011 was convicted to 10 years in jail after cultivating cannabis. Holmes was 28 when he was arrested in 2006 at his Gozo flat, where he was growing cannabis plants that he insisted were for his personal use. The police said he was found with just over a kilogram of dried cannabis and 0.24 grams of cannabis resin, with a total value of some €13,000. But Holmes disputed the way the authorities calculated the amount and value of cannabis he was charged with trafficking. Holmes explained that when his plants were first tested, the buds were found to have a relatively normal THC content, in the range of 15%. The samples the police had presented in court were found to be a lot weaker – suggesting that the THC content had been diluted by other parts of the plant that do not contain any THC.

“It [the sample presented in court] was something like 4% THC, you can tell they just chucked in the stalks and everything,” he had said resignedly. He stressed that the weight, and therefore the drugs’ value, would have been much less had only the valuable part of the plant been weighed.

Moral panic of the 1990s

Yet 30 years ago, the island was caught up in a moral scare on the ravages of drug use, in part compounded by problem heroin users checking into Malta’s drug rehabilitation centre and the far reaches of addiction in middle-class households. As told to this newspaper earlier this year, the former coordinator of Caritas’s Drug Rehabilitation Programme, psychotherapist Mariella Dimech, says drugs’ popularity have always been influenced by price and availability. “Cocaine in the 1980s was a rich man’s drug,” whose high price meant it was always in short supply then. Problem drug users then would have graduated from cannabis, perhaps to psychedelics, but finally heroin. Today the highly addictive drug has one of the lowest usages among the adult population in Malta, and users of the drug are the majority of cases admitted for detox programmes. Of the 1,943 people who sought treatment for their addiction in 2020, 1,126 were heroin users. But these users are an ‘ageing’ population: 41% entering rehab are younger than 35 in 2019, which is down from 45.5% in 2018. Today Malta has an average 1,049 daily opiate users, down from 1,161 in 2018 – again a sign of the downward trend in the drug’s usage.

The ravages of heroin in the 1980s turned the 1990s into a time of anti-drug hysteria. National campaigns against drug use of any kind turned Sedqa into a household name. Even political slogans weaponising the moral panic on drugs (Michael Frendo, then as sports minister, was keen on using ‘sport u droga ma jimxux id f’id in the 1996 campaign). The Nationalist government at the time was clear that decriminalisation would never be on the table. It was a stand that resulted in numerous convictions for negligible amounts of cannabis – the most embarrassing case in the 1990s being that of 16-year-old Swiss national Gisela Feuz, jailed for less than 8 grammes of hash; ironic given that a seasoned drug trafficker such as the Brazilian runner Francisco Assis de Queiroz, who had imported over 3kg of cocaine, benefited from a pardon to return home after contracting hepatitis in prison.

Against the ‘gateway drug’ myth

Today that hysteria is being directly challenged by the Labour administration, as evidenced in its White Paper’s commentary on decriminalisation and the repudiation of the gateway myth propagated by the Reagan administration of the 1980s. “In the 1980s, US President Reagan’s administration popularised the theory that cannabis use is the bridge – or gate – leading to the use of harder drugs. The demonisation of cannabis as the ‘gateway drug’ led to the widespread, severe criminalisation of the possession and personal use of cannabis.

“Over the years, various scientific journals debunked this theory. This research showed cannabis, as the most widely used illicit substance, is of course more likely to be used by persons who also make consume hard drugs. Such correlation, however, cannot be correctly defined as causation, and therefore, cannabis use is not related to a higher probability of other drugs,” the government states in its White Paper.

While many voices today are questioning Malta’s decision to forge ahead with decriminalising cannabis, little is often said about the reasons why cannabis was made illegal in the first place. Malta’s drug laws, like other states, are historically conditioned by the United Nations conventions which shaped the global drug control regime: the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961 (SCND); the Convention on Psychotropic Substances, 1971; and the Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, 1988. These treaties made it mandatory for states to criminalise the production, sale, and possession of cannabis for non-medicinal or scientific purposes.

But in 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) expert committee on drug dependence took on a critical review of cannabis and called for its removal from Schedule IV of the SCND, given the discrepancy in harm between cannabis and other drugs in the same schedule, such as heroin.

The recommendations were studied by the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, and in December 2020, the commission voted to remove cannabis and cannabis resin from Schedule IV of the SCND.

But how did we get here in the first place?

Refugees from Mexico at a camp on the desert in Fort Bliss, Texas during the Mexican Revolution, 1910. Despite its medical usefulness, many Americans’ attitudes towards cannabis shifted at the turn of the century, partly because of Mexican immigration to the US

Fear of Mexicans

It is important to go back to what was happening in the United States in the early 1900’s just after the Mexican Revolution, when an influx of immigration from Mexico into states like Texas and Louisiana was taking place. With the Mexicans, came their language and traditions... cannabis, or as they called it ‘marihuana’, one of these customs.

“Americans were actually familiar with ‘cannabis’ because it was present in almost all tinctures and medicines available at the time,” write Dr Malik Burnett and Amanda Reiman of the US Drug Policy Alliance. “But the word ‘marihuana’ was a foreign term. So, when the media began to play on the fears that the public had about these new citizens by falsely spreading claims about the ‘disruptive Mexicans’ with their dangerous native behaviours including marihuana use, the rest of the nation did not know that this ‘marihuana’ was a plant they already had in their medicine cabinets.”

The demonisation of cannabis was an extension of the demonisation of the Mexican immigrants. Just as San Francisco had outlawed opium decades earlier in an effort to control Chinese immigrants, cannabis became the excuse to search, detain and deport Mexican immigrants.

“The prejudices and fears that greeted these peasant immigrants also extended to their traditional means of intoxication: smoking marijuana,” Eric Schlosser, author of Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, wrote for The Atlantic in 1994. “Police officers in Texas claimed that marijuana incited violent crimes, aroused a ‘lust for blood,’ and gave its users ‘superhuman strength.’ Rumors spread that Mexicans were distributing this ‘killer weed’ to unsuspecting American schoolchildren.”

Additionally, the fear of Mexican immigration was tied in with the fears of miscegenation, and therefore claims of marijuana’s ability to force white women to fall for men of colour through the solicitation of sex. That imagery became the backdrop for the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively banned its use and sales. When that law ruled unconstitutional years later, it was replaced with the Controlled Substances Act in the 1970s and cannabis was placed in the highest schedule of dangerous drugs. Although the Schafer Commission disagreed that cannabis should be Schedule I, US President Richard Nixon discounted the recommendations.

In 1996, California became the first state to approve the use of marijuana for medical purposes, ending its 59 year reign as an illicit substance with no medical value. “Prior to 1937, cannabis had enjoyed a 5,000-year-history as a therapeutic agent across many cultures. In this context, its blip as an illicit and dangerous drug was dwarfed by its role as a medicine,” say Burnett and Reiman. Today 23 American states, plus Washington, DC, have passed medical marijuana laws, and rightfully the public is questioning the utility of keeping cannabis under lock and key.

A changed Malta

Now Malta has over 1,400 people registering for medical cannabis. Yet, the voices who once also advocated for some form of discussion on decriminalisation, are scared by the pace of overdue change in Malta. Former Caritas campaigner Dr George Grech recently expressed caution on decriminalisation, complaining that too many patients who say they are suffering of anxiety, were turning easily to medical cannabis, and in turn, even doctors themselves are prescribing cannabis too easily.

But in 2011, Grech had argued that a discussion on decriminalisation of drugs – then resisted by everyone, include Dr Grech himself – had become “urgent”. At the time he pointed towards Malta’s burgeoning prison population, as well as the now undeniable fact that drugs were just as easily obtainable inside prison than out. “Prison is not giving results,” he said. “It’s no secret there are drugs in prison, and we have come to learn that incarceration does not work (with) people who are purely drug addicts.”

At the same seminar, he had also complained that Malta’s drug system – unlike other European states – made no effort to distinguish between different drugs, such as more dangerous drugs like heroin, and cannabis.

By the late 2000s, ‘typical’ drug users were changing as well. In an interview with MaltaToday, psychotherapist Anna Grech, who specialises in drug addiction therapy, had called such drug users in 2010 as ‘ACCE’ – Alcohol, Cocaine, Cannabis and Ecstasy – pointing out that people requesting therapy were ‘poly-drug users’. Even the type of person seeking treatment had changed – no longer limited to the stereotype of young, unemployed and overwhelmingly male, or mostly from underprivileged or severely dysfunctional family backgrounds. There were more female users, and a mix of people from the very poor to the very well off.

It is arguable that recreational ACCE users today have become even more adept at treating controlled substances with a restrained or knowledgeable use, for their prevalence in Malta has never been any more common than they are today.

The critics of decriminalisation seek yet more justification for having to allow unfettered use of a relatively harmless drug like cannabis, now even prescribed as a medicinal. Yet few understand why the drug itself was made illegal, and on what the international consensus of illegality is based on.