The arraignment of a 16-year-old boy on charges of trafficking in heroin should be the push that Parliament needs to stop discussing the drug laws and amend them once and for all. Had Parliament hurried up and made those amendments, instead of just talking about them, this boy would not be in such deep trouble now. Under the law as it stands, if you pass a marijuana joint to a friend and get caught in the act, you are not sharing, you are trafficking. If you are a heroin user and you give your friend some of yours, you are trafficking. If you show your friend where to buy drugs, even if you go along and buy some too, you are trafficking. Sixteen-year-olds boys – or for that matter, girls, but they are far more averse to risk than boys are – do not know this. Even when it is explained to them, they cannot believe it to be true, for the simple reason that they correctly perceive a great gulf of difference between the people who sell them drugs for money, and any sharing that may take place between friends and acquaintances. Of course, the only time you are going to get caught sharing drugs is when something goes badly wrong and your friend is hospitalised. Then the police are called in, you’re charged with trafficking, and face a minimum of five years in prison, even if you are a drug user yourself and were only sharing. If your friend dies, there’s worse in store, because you are charged with involuntary homicide, as well as trafficking. You have a drug problem, your friend is dead, and you are up in dock facing a long sentence. If your friend dies because of drugs that you bought for the two of you, then the law barely makes a distinction between your behaviour and that of the criminal who sold the drugs that killed.

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It is beyond dispute that a teenager who gets into drug trouble with a friend can in no way be compared to the amoral adults who, as cold and as hard as nails, feed vast quantities of heroin into the market to enrich themselves, destroying young lives while not touching the stuff themselves. Yet the law of Malta views them both as “drug traffickers”. This 16-year-old boy has been charged with trafficking in heroin because, according to the statement he made to the police, he showed his friend, also 16, where they could buy the drug. Both boys injected themselves with a separate syringe. One boy died, the other survived and has been dragged before the courts. And do you know what I think of this? That it is little more than pointless cruelty, because a 16-year-old boy who is experimenting with heroin, and who has just lost his friend to it in such terrible circumstances, needs to be taken in hand with kindness if his life is not to be destroyed. This trial, and any resulting prison sentence, will not teach him a lesson and save his future. Instead, it will push him further into hell, and two young lives will have been lost instead of the one.

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The police, of course, have their hands tied because they are bound to act in accordance with the law. It is the law that is a complete ass. You can tell that it was written by somebody with very little experience of 16-year-old boys in contemporary Malta, or for that matter, older people with a drug habit. Whoever wrote that piece of legislation failed to draw a moral distinction between the act of selling drugs as a business, and the act of passing drugs to a friend when you use them yourself (or even if you don’t). I was blind with rage when I read the reports of that boy’s arraignment. All I could think of were these two boys, one of them stone-cold dead and the other facing a prison term, all because they injected themselves with heroin when they should not have done, while those who put the heroin on the market, and the others who financed the deal, are admiring the bottom line on their balance sheet and planning how to spend their dirty money. Where is the justice in this? Meanwhile, the former judges who stand accused of taking a bribe to reduce the sentence of a trafficker in hard drugs shamelessly roam the social circuit. It’s always the little, powerless ones who get squashed by the system, in this case, a vulnerable kid who doesn’t even know what he’s doing (they don’t, at that age).

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Quite apart from the crucial point that sharing drugs with a friend is not the same as trafficking, except in our stupid Thai-style laws, there is also the age factor to be taken into account. Boys of 16 get into terrible trouble all the time. In boys, there is a self-destruct button that goes on at 16 and off at 18, and in between, all kinds of crazy things happen that drive parents to distraction. I don’t mean the usual problems of answering back, being rude, and staying out till all hours. That’s taken as read. What I am talking about is the taking of absurd risks that imperil their life, their health and their future, the sort that make irate parents yell: “What in hell’s name were you thinking, or weren’t you thinking at all?” More parents than can be imagined, from every social background, have had a phone call from the police at some point, to go down to the station to pick up their son. At 16, male risk-taking psychology spirals right out of control, because the boy has not yet properly left childhood and at the same time has none of the maturity of manhood. I am not at all surprised that two 16-year-old boys would have got into so much dreadful trouble, because it is exactly the sort of thing that is very likely to happen: serious car accidents in which they or their friends die, provocation that leads to brawls and injury or arrest, falls from a great height, risks with soft or hard drugs. It’s a nightmare. Parents of 16-year-old girls worry about answer back, overtly sexual behaviour and small, clingy clothes. Parents of 16-year-old boys worry about drugs, death and the police, and this even when they come from stable homes and have had a proper upbringing. The vast majority of boys survive unscathed, of course, but a few, like these poor kids, don’t make it.

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This 16-year-old boy has got the terrible fright he needs to shock him into his senses, and there is nothing to be gained, for anyone, by putting him through the mill. Where is our sense of humanity? Why have we allowed ourselves to be reduced to the level of Midnight Express? There is nothing to be gained from persecuting troubled boys who need help, and calling them drug traffickers, while the real traffickers sit smugly on their yachts, counting their money, safe in the assurance that they will never see the inside of a prison, and probably never see the inside of hell either.

I find it very odd that the Minister for Home Affairs is devoting far more time and energy to his abortion law campaign, when there is no pressure to make changes to the abortion law, while this very serious matter goes unattended. May I remind the Minister for Home Affairs that, unlike the still-to-be-conceived foetuses of his imagination, this 16-year-old boy and others like him are very much alive and very much in trouble. And this is thanks to his failure and that of his colleagues to change the law on drug trafficking before more kids with problems got caught in its net. Still they sit there and do nothing.

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You think you’ve heard it all, and then information comes your way to make you catch your breath in disgust and disbelief. This time it’s a five-year-old girl who is infected with a sexually transmitted disease. She was born to a single mother, with the father registered as unknown, and placed by her mother in the care of nuns. The mother’s family had free access to the child and would take her out or to their homes. Three years ago, when she was five, the girl told the nun who looked after her that she had been fiddled with. She said the same to her social worker. She was placed immediately under a care order, which means that she was now in the nuns’ care by order of the State, rather than of her mother’s volition, and medical tests were carried out. The doctors found her to be infected with venereal disease, which tells us exactly what kind of fiddling went on: sexual intercourse, and with a five-year-old girl. Now her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother are agitating to have the care order lifted, and have gone to court, and lost their case on a matter of procedure: they had filed a constitutional case, when what they should have done is file a civil suit. You have to wonder why this child had been dumped with the nuns in the first place, given that there are three generations of women who could have looked after her between them. Now here they are, fighting for their rights, when they didn’t seem to care a fig for her rights. Unbelievably, there are people out there who think they can have children, maintaining their rights over them, while somebody else does all the caring and the paying. What a mentality!

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And again, I have to ask, why is the Minister for Home Affairs campaigning about foetuses that don’t even exist yet, when so many real, live children are suffering? How about a campaign to increase the penalty for those who have sex with five-year-old girls instead, with another 10 years slapped on for infecting them with VD? Well, as long as we put Christ on our euro coins and entrench the ban on abortion in the Constitution, we can boast that we are the most Christian people in Europe, even if some of us are having sex with kindergarten-age children, while the wheels of justice grind over the lives of troubled 16-year-old boys, leaving many of the hardened adult criminals unscathed.