Please allow me to comment on the letter by Rosalie Vella Piscopo regarding The drug problem and Sedqa (TMID 7 July). While I have no doubt in the capabilities of Sedqa and its staff as well as other treatment centres, one just cannot assume that our drug problem has decreased. It has unfortunately increased and it seems that though there are many drug abusers and drug addicts ready to reform themselves, there are still many, many more who are not.
The argument that one can take the horse to the water, encourage it to drink but one can never make it drink does not hold water. We have come to a state where, if need be, the horse should be given tranquillisers and when in a sleeping coma should be forced to open his mouth by able hands to make him drink. This is done to save his life.
When I suggested that drug addicts and drug abusers who use drugs should be forced against their will into a centre I was not writing about the invasion of human rights but prevention of human lives from certain death.
What is a drug addict and a drug abuser if not commenting a slow suicide and sometimes a fast one? Are we ready to admit that like a Mount Carmel patient, they are a menace to themselves and others because of their ‘illness’?
Sometimes these people, because of their ‘disease’, do not know what is right for them. To save their life we have, by hook or by crook, to get hold of them and, yes, I repeat, force them to get treatment.
During the graduation ceremony at San Blas, Mgr Victor Grech insisted that when a drug addict is caught using drugs for his/her own personal use, s/he should be called into a ‘rapid court system’ that would make sure that the addict would be put in a rehabilitation centre not on probation or in prison. Even here then the question arises. But what if the addict does not want to do the programme? That is indeed a good question but the answer is ‘We can only try’.
We can look at things from this angle only: are drug addicts on the increase or the decrease? If the answer is the former, as I know everyone would agree, than I am afraid we have no other choice.
A team of professionals ranging from medical personnel to psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers would be available and on the spot to deal with the averse drug-user who should be helped to start a new chapter. The bottom line is that we have reached the stage where we have to make ‘the horse’ drink because the alternative is death. All drugs are dangerous. People have died with just one ecstasy pill.
It is high time that the state started trespassing on the rights of the individual drug abuser and drug addict first to save his/her life, then to help his/her parents keep their sanity and to protect innocent people from crimes performed in order to have money to buy drugs and society in general. With or without their consent.
Valerie Borg
MLP councillor
VALLETTA