Even as the government speaks about making cannabis use legal – which means that you cannot have an anomalous situation in which selling it is illegal - the police have reported what is being billed as “Malta’s largest ever haul of illegal drugs”: 550kg of cannabis. That’s rather a lot, but what astonishes me is how the amount seems to be considered in a vacuum. It’s not in a vacuum: it’s smuggled into Malta in response to demand, and that is just what has been caught on the way in, which means that demand is far higher.

Yet this is when cannabis is illegal and considered at law to be no different to cocaine and heroin. It’s the demand at a time when one man is serving 10 years in prison merely for growing cannabis plants at home, a sentence of frightening severity. What happens when things become legal? They are more widely and easily available, there is no penal deterrent, the price goes down and demand shoots up. Before the government talks about legalising cannabis, it has no choice but to consider the effects of the increased demand that is going to be the direct and immediate result of that.

I happen to disagree with making cannabis legal, and strongly too. Cannabis use is not just a personal choice, as it is being made out to be by those determined not to consider the bigger picture. It has a high social cost. But look at alcohol, look at cigarettes, people tell me, when I argue against the legalisation of cannabis. “Exactly,” I say. “Look at all the people dying of lung cancer, stroke and other smoking-related diseases. Look at the massive social cost, the cost in terms of healthcare. Look at all the drunks, who we are now meant to call alcoholics, and the people crippled by cirrhosis of the liver, who need constant medical care. Then tell me it’s a personal choice. Look at all the problems they have created for other people.”

And that’s coming from somebody who really is a liberal in the true meaning of the word: respect for the rights and freedoms of others, with minimal interference by the state. But this is one thing on which I will not be moved. The last thing the parents of schoolchildren in this country need is an even worse battle – which is bad enough already, let alone when cannabis gets the state’s blessing – to keep them off smoking it. The parental wars waged against cigarettes are difficult as it is, without also having to deal with schoolchildren and teenagers talking back and saying that there can’t be anything wrong with it because after all it’s legal. I am talking about sensible parents here; I know that many parents seem to think cigarette smoking is somehow normal and seem oblivious to the lifelong consequences of having them hooked on cigarettes at 15 and forever. But there you go. As a parent, I ranked cigarettes with heroin, because after all you can die of both. One just takes longer, that’s all.

There was a time when I could happily have taken a mallet to every cigarette-vending machine I saw: purveyors of poison, out to have children hooked and turned into lifelong dependents, despite the stickers prominently fixed to the front. Every 13-year-old who begins smoking is potentially a 50-year-old cancer patient. Oh, but cannabis is less dangerous, they say, and it doesn’t give you cancer or cause strokes when you’re older. Well, the jury is still out on that, but I do know that regular cannabis smokers of my generation, and the first lot of users who are several years older, have shredded minds. They are, literally and figuratively, dopey. So, what is it to be – a shredded liver, shredded mind or shredded lung?

I know I am at odds with many on this subject, but I’m sticking to my guns. Basic common sense tells me that you don’t make a rod for your own back. Why is it against the law to drive about without wearing a seat belt in a car or a crash helmet on a motorbike? Surely you should be free to kill yourself or give yourself brain damage, right? No, wrong.

The seat belt and crash helmet laws are, if you want to take on the personal-use argument, the height of invasion of privacy and a person’s freedom to do himself damage. They are, strictly speaking, illiberal. But we have those laws because living as part of society means acknowledging that if you do yourself harm, you become a burden to that society, a problem for others. And others don’t want to be dealing with your burden and your problem, because there are enough burdens and problems that are not self-inflicted, as it is. If you do not wear a seat belt and fly out through the windscreen, there is a cost to your healthcare and a cost to maintaining any widows and orphans you might leave behind. Other people are going to have to deal with that, and pay for it.

The same applies to drugs like cannabis, which when freely available will cause another raft of medical and social problems to add to those already caused by cigarettes and alcohol. Or perhaps you didn’t know just how many people end up needing care because of their drinking, and you know only about the problems caused by smoking. I agree with Caritas, who I consider the only people qualified to speak about this serious matter with anything akin to authority: it would be madness to legalise more harmful drugs. After all, Caritas has to deal with the problems caused by illegal drugs on a daily basis, as well as legal ones like alcohol. Making an illegal drug legal will not change those problems except by making them worse.