Gozo shadow minister Frank Anthony Tabone has renewed his call for a dedicated police unit to tackle drug-trafficking in Gozo, telling The Malta Independent that cocaine use is spreading "across all strata of society" on the island, at a time when national data shows cocaine has overtaken opioids as the leading reason people in Malta seek drug treatment.
Tabone, a former police superintendent who left the Force in 2022, said the proposal for a Gozo-specific unit stemmed from consultations he held with residents and stakeholders after entering politics, describing security, alongside connectivity, infrastructure and health, as one of the concerns raised with him most consistently. He said he had submitted a parliamentary question to Home Affairs Minister Glenn Bedingfield asking whether a dedicated anti-drug squad would be reinstated in Gozo, after one previously operated on the island. He said the minister's reply was that a squad already exists for the whole of Malta and extends its operations to Gozo when required, but that, in his view, this arrangement is inadequate given how significantly Gozo's population has grown and how much more exposed the island now is to drug activity than it was roughly a decade and a half ago.
The proposal is not new to Nationalist Party policy. Opposition leader Alex Borg included a commitment to re-establish a dedicated anti-drug and trafficking unit for Gozo, alongside a strengthened police presence in Gozitan communities, when he set out the party's priorities for the island earlier this year, alongside pledges on a new Gozo hospital, investment in the Gozo Channel fleet and a new breakwater and car park for Marsalforn.
Government budgetary data, analysed in a 2025 investigation by Amphora Media, shows the national police force employed 2,405 people as of November 2024, an increase of just 32 officers since 2017 despite Malta's population growing by more than 100,000 over the same period of time. The same analysis found the number of district officers based in Gozo had fallen by 51 over the previous 10 years, with the island now served by only 12 community police officers in total. Tabone argued that as Gozo's resident population has grown and the island has become more diverse, drawing a wider mix of residents, workers and tourists, a stronger and more visible police presence is needed specifically on the island rather than relying on units based in Malta to respond when required.
Asked whether he could point to data backing his description of cocaine-use-spreading through Gozitan society, Tabone said his assessment was informed largely by his own operational experience in the police force, including years spent working in Gozo, but he also linked the trend to what he described as increasingly easy access to the drug, which he called an alarming development in itself, and to concern that younger residents are being drawn into use at an earlier age than before.
National figures lend some support to the broader picture Tabone described, even if Gozo-specific breakdowns are not routinely published. Malta's 2024 National Drug Report found that the proportion of people seeking treatment for cocaine-related problems rose exponentially in the last years, with 938 people having sought treatment for cocaine addiction in 2023 and more than 2,000 estimated to be "high-risk" cocaine users nationally.
Separately, the European Union Drugs Agency's 2025 European Drug Report found cocaine accounted for 42.5% of all drug treatment entrants in Malta, narrowly overtaking opioids at 41.8%, while a Caritas report cited in local coverage recorded a 56% increase in cocaine-related emergencies between 2022 and 2023. Cannabis remained the drug most frequently seized by Maltese authorities, at just over 4,300 kilograms, followed by roughly 2,250 kilograms of cocaine. Thirteen drug-induced deaths were recorded in Malta in 2024, the large majority involving cocaine.
The figures have themselves become a point of political contention in recent months. Home Affairs Minister Glenn Bedingfield faced criticism over the summer after citing a study suggesting only around 554 people in Malta use cocaine, a figure that fact-checkers noted was drawn from a 2023 EU Drugs Agency survey measuring self-reported use rather than treatment or enforcement data, and which critics argued understated the scale of the problem given more recent reporting of open cocaine use in bars and clubs. Tabone did not comment directly on the minister's figures, but said his concern was less about criticising individual police officers, whom he said continue to do their job with limited resources, and more about ensuring the Force has the manpower and specialised units needed to respond to a changing drug landscape in Gozo.
Beyond drug enforcement, Tabone said he wanted to see the Nationalist Party propose greater investment in education as a complement to policing, though he stopped short of detailing specific programmes, saying only that enforcement alone would not be enough to address the trend he was describing among younger residents. He also raised concerns about lower-level security issues affecting Gozo's tourism reputation, citing petty theft and rubbish left out on the wrong collection day in villages popular with weekend visitors from Malta, which he said creates a poor first impression for tourists even though the underlying offences are minor. He said he wanted residents and visitors alike to feel more secure in Gozo, describing this as a question of "seriousness" as much as of crime statistics, and said he would continue to press the government on both the drug squad proposal and on general policing resources for the island during his first year in Parliament.
Asked to rank his priorities for his first year in Parliament, Tabone named connectivity first, followed by infrastructure, security, tourism and planning policy tailored specifically to Gozo, alongside continued pressure on health investment. He said he wanted planning rules to reflect that Gozo is "an island of villages", each with its own character, rather than applying policies designed for Malta. "I don't want Gozo to end up as a smaller Malta, concrete wherever you go," he said.
That sense of Gozo needing its own rules, he said, also shaped his own route into politics. A former police superintendent, Tabone left the Force in 2022 to practise as a lawyer focused largely on criminal procedure, before being elected to Parliament last May.
He said he saw less of a divide between police work and legislative work than many might assume, but acknowledged that adapting to the pace of change had been the steepest part of the learning curve: police work often demands immediate decisions affecting people's lives, whereas legislative reform takes considerably longer to translate into tangible improvements for the public.
The decision to leave a stable legal career for politics, he said, was not straightforward. He described feeling a sense of personal fulfilment in helping clients as a lawyer, but said an underlying pull towards public service eventually convinced him to stand, even though he acknowledged the change has come at a personal cost, saying his quality of family life has diminished since taking up the role, a trade-off he said he still views as worthwhile.
The first part of the interview was carried last Sunday