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Matthew Vella
It has taken little less than four years for the green light to amend Malta’s drug laws on how the courts should proceed with offenders found guilty of “sharing” drugs with fellow users.
Parliament’s social affairs committee has finally proposed that the minimum six-month prison sentence for those found guilty of drug trafficking no longer remains mandatory in the case of “drug sharing”, and to give magistrates “limited discretion” in deciding whether offenders should be sent to prison or not in such cases.
But the committee is also arguing against redefining “trafficking” and introducing the concept of “sharing” in the law, because of disagreement between the police force and drug support agencies over the concept of sharing.
There is currently no distinction between “sharing” and the “trafficking” of drugs.
Five support agencies, amongst them national agency Sedqa and Caritas, told the committee that distinguishing between sharing and trafficking would save lives by making it easier for users to accompany overdosing friends to hospital. Social workers claim drug users fear they will be implicated as traffickers for having shared drugs with victims.
The parliamentary committee, headed by Nationalist MP Clyde Puli, claims the distinction risks opening loopholes for real traffickers, and that the law should serve as a deterrent against drug abuse.
The police told the committee it was sceptic about introducing the term because it was not sure it would decrease deaths by accidental overdose.
But Sedqa, Caritas, Fondazzjoni Oasi, the Substance Abuse Therapy Unit (SATU), and the Probation Services have all stressed the need to introduce a legal distinction between trafficking and “sharing”.
Caritas told the parliamentary committee that the present law makes it difficult for those sharing drugs to take a victim of an accidental overdose to hospital for fear of incrimination. “Caritas is convinced distinguishing between sharing and trafficking will decrease deaths by accidental overdose,” the agency told the committee.
The support groups also stressed that minors can be better rehabilitated at earlier stages of their addiction through probation, rather than imprisonment, which may open up more roads into criminality for offenders.
The parliamentary committee report is another step in a long process that saw drug support agencies and the police force convene in the so-called Drug Forum headed by President Guido de Marco. The forum set out to discuss a review of the drug laws in 2002.
Between January and February 2004, five drug overdose deaths reopened the debate over drug laws which were making it harder to get overdosing victims to hospital without fear of incrimination for users accompanying the victim. The debate intensified following the death of a 20-year-old woman who was dumped out of a car in the early hours of the morning outside hospital on 3 February 2004.
In November 2004, Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera called for amendments to the drug laws in cases concerning minors, after expressing regret at being unable to place an offending minor under probation, after the accused was found sharing drugs with friends.
The social affairs committee acknowledged that the court was “bound to apply a sentence it was against, where it felt the mandatory prison sentence was more detrimental to the individual.”
The debate on the issue started as early as 1998, after Swiss tourist Gisele Feuz was imprisoned for six months for bringing into the island a Lm10 piece of cannabis which she said had been for her personal use to share with her partner.
mvella@mediatoday.com.mt
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