They shouldn’t be there in the first place. They are not the destroyers of other human lives but their own. What started as an experience in the very first throngs of youth ended up making them heroin’s victims.

Drug addicts should not be placed in prison because of their addiction, which makes them behave irrationally.

The problem is that after having successfully attended a drug rehabilitation programme, certain offenders face criminal charges for crimes, such as theft, which had been committed prior to their entry in the programme. As a result they could have to serve a prison sentence after having emerged from the programme “clean”.

If drugs can be found into prison even though meticulous security is in place, isn’t it cruel to literally shove drugs under the redeemed drug addict’s nose? Is this called justice, the way a drug addict reforms himself in a drug programme, only to find himself thrown into the “drug den” again?

Are we actually helping them by throwing them into prison, which is no place of rehabilitation, or are we actually producing more drug addicts coming out of prison integrating in a society where the number of drug addicts is on the increase?

Why are prison wardens and the prison director himself so kind to drug users, genuinely understanding that their reason for being there is because of a “malady” they inflicted on themselves; yet we have a system which does not “spare” them prison instead of placing them under the competent and able people who can help them get over their “disease” and lead them on the right track of life?

When is Justice Minister Tonio Borg and the magistrates themselves going to recognise that drug addiction is an illness and being subjected to a dark cold cell is not the proper cure for them?