Does anybody know what it is like living with a drug addict? Someone you are not able to kick out because he is your own flesh and blood? Has anybody gone through the trauma of dreading to answer the telephone in case it’s someone from hospital urging you to be quick to come over because your son/daughter is in critical condition through an overdose?
Have any parents had sleepless nights dreading the day a policeman might turn up at their door telling them their offspring has been found dead following a drug overdose? I bet a massive amount of parents know what I am writing about. Unfortunately these days we don’t associate youngsters with discos, trends of fashion etc but with drugs. In today’s world drugs and the young go together like ham and cheese.
As yet, we have not come to terms with this problem. Drug use is something other young ones do, not our own, and if our children come home with glazed eyes, looking like robots with a slur in their speech, it means the dear darlings have drunk a little too much.
Have we all gone blind to what is happening around us? Why is the drug problem not even mentioned in Parliament? Why are our politicians evading this subject when they themselves know that drugs are available as freely as bread and water? How many times have we opened a newspaper to read of a drug-related death?
It happens quite frequently for anyone not to notice. So how come we are not able to fight this plague?
Some time ago a shelter was opened to help victims of drug abuse who have been kicked out of their homes. Caritas, with the help of Charles Miceli, opened this shelter with the aid of a small subsidy from the government.
Young men with no roof over their heads, no job and no money, whose parents have given up on them, have found a ray of sunshine through Charles Miceli’s venture. Not for one minute do I have the courage to criticise the parent’s for kicking their kids out.
Sometimes, just sometimes, enough is enough even from your children. Sometimes you reach a point in your life when you’d rather not see the sight of them with needles stuck in their arms, with a series of thefts behind them added to the violence and disruption they cause in your life.
Who am I to judge? My cause or concern is that the shelter is open to men only, not to women, as if this problem applies to one sex and not the other. If the government has given money towards this shelter for the male sex, why have the women been discriminated? Young girls are being kicked out of their homes just as often as young men, so why protect the latter and not the former too?
I have written what I am about to write now not once but various times. It is obvious that San Blas, Oasi, Sedqa, St Anne, even the prison itself is not enough to keep an addict free from drugs because nobody can be forced to go to a drug rehabilitation unit.
What we need to have is a large house for addicts who are “thrown” in there whether they like it or not. We need to protect them, their families and the people they maim and injure for money to buy drugs. We need a lot of courage to get this thing going but do it we must. Better a house for unwilling drug addicts than a graveyard full of drug victims.
To legalise drugs is not the solution. True, the traffickers might do a vanishing act but the abuse of drugs will be greater. These people are sick, sick, sick. They need to go to a “hospital” to be treated for their malady and if part of their illness is that they won’t admit that they have an “illness”, then all the better to lock them up with councillors, nurses, psychiatrics, doctors all pulling their weight to help those who do not want to help themselves.
This drug problem is our problem, it’s not just your neighbour’s daughter, your cousin or your friend, it might be your own daughter’s problem. What would you rather have, a dead daughter or a daughter forced into a “hospital” to be treated by methadone and counselling. I know what my choice would be. What would yours be? I rest my case.
Valerie Borg
MLP Councillor
VALLETTA