In the early 2000s, US president George Bush decided that sex education programmes should focus on promoting abstinence from premarital sex, rather than condom use.

‘’When our children face a choice between self-restraint and self-destruction, government should not be neutral,” he argued.

Twenty years on, even those who agree with Bush’s moral position acknowledge that it made for terrible policymaking.

There are parallels between the Bush-era approach to sex education and modern-day society’s ongoing battle to stem drug use.

Decades’ worth of evidence show that punishing people for drug use does little to reduce substance misuse rates. What’s more, drug prices are inelastic, meaning cracking down on drug supply has no impact on demand.

That is especially true of cannabis, the world’s most consumed illicit drug.

Cannabis is not a harmless substance. Its harmful effects are well-documented and very real. It can have negative long-term consequences on young developing minds and those of heavy users and there is evidence of it being dangerous for people with a pre-existing genetic or other vulnerability.

A government proposal to fully decriminalise the substance for personal recreational use is, therefore, extremely sensitive, given its potential repercussions on individuals’ well-being.

In its current form, the proposal would allow users to carry up to 7g of cannabis or grow four plants in a concealed area inside their home. Just as significantly, people convicted of crimes related to cannabis possession would have their criminal records wiped clean.

Reactions to the plan have poured in from all parts of society, with the notable exception of the Nationalist Party.

Many of the plan’s critics worry that decriminalising cannabis will normalise it.

But that horse has long bolted. Surveys suggest around 10 per cent of locals have smoked cannabis before, with that percentage rising to around 33 per cent among 16 to 34-year-olds. An EU drugs study found that Maltese teenagers are twice as likely to say that the drug is easy to obtain than their peers in other European countries.

Just as abstinence-only programmes did not stop people from having pre-marital sex, criminalising cannabis has not stopped people from using it.

Proponents have framed the proposal as a bold step forward for civil rights and implied that it will help rein in the black market for the drug.

They, too, appear to be overstating their case. In countries that have gone the whole hog and legalised cannabis, researchers have found little evidence that the change has eliminated the black market for the drug. Decriminalisation is even less likely to do so.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the government’s plan is that it is woefully thin on detail. The white paper brushes over the health impacts of cannabis in just three paragraphs and proposes legal changes without explaining the reasoning behind them. It also manages to turn what should be an exercise in cutting red tape into one that will add to it, by proposing yet another quango in the form of a “dedicated cannabis authority”.

The country has been marked by absurd injustices done in the name of its cannabis laws. People like Daniel Holmes had some of their best years taken from them; the young couple arrested for sharing a joint in a hotel room will long remember that humiliation.

If the country is to take the important step of ending such anomalies, then it should do so with a solid framework. A half-baked one does nobody any good.