Alcohol is the biggest problem in Malta, it’s official. Speaking at a seminar entitled “European Year for Poverty and Social Exclusion”, Dr George Grech, the clinical director of the government agency sedqa said, “The support and treatment systems had to be adapted to deal with this situation.”

This line of thinking is on a par with the UK crucial study dealing with health relating to what people resort to most in abusing their bodies, released in the Lancet in early November.

The study, by the breakaway Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs led by Professor David Nutt, told us that the serious health issue of alcohol abuse is not being given its due attention.

“If drugs were classified on the basis of the harm they do, alcohol would be class A, alongside heroin and crack cocaine,” claimed the UK study.

“What this study and new classification shows is that successive governments have mistakenly focused attention on illicit drugs, whereas the pervading harms from alcohol should have given a far higher priority.

“Drug misusers are still ten times more likely to receive support for their addiction than alcohol misusers, costing the taxpayer billions in repeat hospital admissions and alcohol related crime,” Alcohol Concern chief executive, Don Shenker, told The Guardian last month.

While in Malta sedqa is calling for more random breathalyser tests, claiming that just under half of road traffic accidents were partly due to excessive alcohol intake, Dr Grech also said that drug misusers in this country are still not getting the right support and called for urgent discussion on the decriminalisation of drug use.

This will probably get a backlash from people, who know little if anything on the subject, and prepared for that he explained that he was not referring to drug traffickers and he was not calling for the legalisation of drugs.

What he was saying was “it’s no secret there are drugs in prison”, experience has shown that incarceration does not work for people who are purely drug addicts.

Adding that addicts could be treated without sending them to prison. “Our prison is already full enough.”

It was also not helpful that we do not even have a drug classification system here. The way things stand cannabis is on a level pegging to heroin use.

Dr Grech opined that we could follow the Portuguese system where the decriminalisation of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine, had worked and there had been a decrease in drug use.

People caught with drugs are sent for treatment and repeat offenders are sentenced to do community work. We could easily do it as most of the framework is already there, he said.

There is, however, another problem linked to drug abuse. People tend to steal, which is also a criminal offence, to pay for their habit.

When I spoke to Dr Grech, he told me that there have been cases, as highlighted by Caritas, where a drug addict would have been rehabilitated and was fully integrated back into the community including holding down a job, yet his case going back years, would not have yet come up in court.

If he eventually got a prison sentence, when it did, it would completely undermine the work done by Caritas in the meantime.

“We are not saying that these people should not pay for their crimes, but that prison is not the right place for them,” Dr Grech told me.

A few years ago the National Drug Commission had recommended that a specialised court should be set up to deal with all cases involving all addictions.

This has not yet materialised. But there is no doubt that prison is not helping neither the drug addict nor society, since eventually the addicts will be released back into the community.

Besides this being the European Year for Poverty and Social Exclusion, we also had the United Nations Anti-Corruption Day last week.

Corruption is another global problem and exists in any corridor of power. It was ranked as the second most important topic behind poverty in a BBC poll, published to coincide with Anti-Corruption Day.

The opinion poll, that sampled 13,000 people in 26 nations, suggests that corruption is the world’s most talked about problem.

About one in five of those polled by the BBC said they had discussed issues relating to corruption with others in the last month, making it the most talked about concern ahead of climate change, poverty, unemployment and rising food and energy costs.

Although the Global Corruption Transparency International (TI) regional classifications used in the 2010 Barometer missed us this year, we certainly have no grounds for complacency.

The lobby group interviewed 90,000 people in 86 countries to compile its corruption barometer.

The message from the Berlin-based watchdog is that corruption is insidious. The poll deduced that the world is considered a more corrupt place now than it was three years ago.

Pessimism is most widespread in Europe and North America, where 73 per cent and 67 per cent of people respectively think corruption has increased.

But we are being led to believe that here in Malta we inhabit a unique bubble of purity.

Despite that our Prime Minister and some in his Cabinet keep professing that our establishment is whiter than white, there is no doubt that talk on the street is pessimistic.

The TI’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) last year showed that Malta slipped nine places among 180 countries when it came to perception of corruption. Malta was ranked in the 45th place, down from 36th in 2008 and 33rd in 2007.

In July 2008, Justice and Home Affairs Minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici said the Permanent Commission Against Corruption had found three proven cases of corruption out of 378 cases it had been asked to investigate.

“In 2007 the number of prosecutions increased dramatically to 453 but this was an extraordinary occurrence due to two major and wide ranging police investigations concerning the grant of certificates by the Malta Maritime Authority and the issue of licences by the Malta Transport Authority.

“In 2008 the number went down to normal, to 15 prosecutions,” then Attorney General and head of the Maltese Delegation at GRECO (Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption) now Chief Justice Silvio Camilleri, told a meeting at the Law Courts in February.

Yet, Malta had gone further down from its 33rd ranking in 2007 to 36th in 2008 in the TI’s CPI.

“Whenever corruption is detected and there is supporting evidence, then prosecution does take place irrespective of how highly placed the person may be. The relatively recent prosecutions of two prominent members of the judiciary is a clear illustration of this,” he said.

“Malta’s tools to deal with corruption are neither blunt nor unused,” he told the fourth plenary session of the NSTF Mini European Assembly XXI, which had focused on corruption and bribery, in February.

This year’s TI survey found that although bribe taking was least common in EU countries and North America (both five per cent) these were the two regions seeing the biggest increase in concern about corruption.

In Europe, Italians were the most concerned about bribe taking.

The Prime Minister’s response to last year’s TI, CPI report, which downgraded Malta to 45th place, down from 36th in 2008, was “accusations of corruption are treated with the utmost importance”.

However, it seems that people are not convinced that corruption is dealt with sharply and effectively.

A breakdown of this year’s TI figures showed that trust in political parties had markedly declined over the past few years in countries such as Britain and the United States, the two countries seen to be at the heart of the Anglo-Saxon capitalist model.

The banking crisis was part of the problem, but political parties have long been regarded as the most corrupt institutions − they topped the list in Transparency’s 2004 barometer with 71 per cent.

In this year’s report, 80 per cent regarded them as corrupt and 50 per cent believed their government was ineffective at tackling the problem.

All that was needed to further increase our own politicians’ popularity was the recent backdated increase to their parliamentary honoraria in a year where people have seen hikes in their utility bills and are struggling to make ends meet.

Members of Parliament will be receiving a €7,600 annual increase, backdated to March 2008, and will see their salary shoot up from €19,112 to €26,771.

The Labour MPs, including Joseph Muscat, who refused the increase said they were doing so out of solidarity with hard pressed families, who only received a weekly wage increase of €1.16 for next year.

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