The drug limits indicated in a recently published white paper on the revision of the drug laws should be revised downwards, the Sedqa agency said on Thursday.

The white paper proposed to change the limits set in two already-existing laws which offer guidelines on how people caught in possession of drugs are treated.  The guidelines are intended to help courts decide how harshly the accused is to be treated. One consideration would be the amount of drugs that a person was caught carrying, setting out separate limits for different types of drugs.

The Nationalist Party was among critics of the white paper who warned that the new proposals could lead to a situation where traffickers were treated as if they were victims. 

Sedqa is the government's own agency which deals with dependency issues.

It said in a statement it was consulted about the white paper at an early stage before its publication and had submitted its preliminary views. While it agreed with most of what was suggested, it was now formally submitting its own views.

On the controversial issue of how those found in possession of drugs are to be treated, based on the amount of drugs they carried, Sedqa said the amounts indicated in the white paper should be reduced so as to strike a balance between judicial flexibility in genuine cases (where the person concerned is also a victim) and firm action against those who might otherwise try to go around the system with a pseudo drugs problem.

The agency said it agreed with the penalties for those convicted of drug trafficking who did not themselves have a drug problem. 

The Chamber of Advocates earlier this week objected to the possibility of life imprisonment for traffickers, saying this concept was draconian and had been removed by most democratic countries.