Very often I ask myself who are the real victims of drug abuse.

Who is the worst off because of this evil addiction? Is it the abusers themselves, those that are abused because of this scourge or the parents of the users themselves?

Experience has taught me that it is the latter. About 20 years ago, I heard Mons. Victor Grech deliver one of his famous sermons. I thought he was as mad as a march hare when he predicted that Malta would be drowning in drugs in 20 years’ time.

I remember distinctly as if it were yesterday how my friends and I called him a “nutty professor of doom”.

Today, I laugh no more and I am sure that my friends of long ago who have teenagers are intelligent enough to wipe the smirk off their faces and realise that Mons. Victor Grech was right. We were nuts, not him, though I guess we could be excused because of our youth and naivety.

The reason I keep writing about drugs is that nobody else does.

As yet, I have never opened a newspaper to read what our political writers have to say about this problem. They are at each other’s throats over taxes, the jobless, our deficit, our national debt but it is the silence of the lambs when it comes to a substance or substances that are terminating the lives of so many young.

Why, I ask myself constantly, do our politicians keep mum about this death plague? Are they gullible enough to believe that their kids are immune to drugs because their father/mother is a politician? Are they actually scared out of their wits that actually taking the bull by the horns and doing something about this addiction is vote-losing and people who are on drugs will refrain from voting for their favourite party because it means the end of his/her vice?

Are they actually afraid that catching the big time traffickers means another vote down the drain? Is it not scary for parents of drug-addicted children to know that nobody cares enough about their kids’ lives to really find a way of tackling this problem.

We all know that Malta being a member state of the EU means more drugs on our island.

For heaven’s sake even a fool ought to realise that there are now no restrictions on the ‘rubbish’ that comes into our country and I have been to enough drug seminars all over Europe to come to the conclusion that drugs are the trend, more so in member states than in other countries that are non-members.

One would think that at least our two political parties would come to a consensus over this battle against drugs and fight it together but mamma mia, even here it is status quo.

Even here, their stupid debates on television are how each one is going to score points off the other by their sarcasm and wit over something that is of no consequence compared to finding a solution to a situation where parents are losing their children to drugs.

Planet earth to Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi and Dr Alfred Sant and both your political warriors, when are you going to take the blindfold away from your eyes and actually see and do something about drug abuse? Please wake up in the year 2005.

Valerie Borg

VALLETTA