I miss old Malta. Not the romanticized version tourists imagine, but the real one - when 24-hour shops didn't exist and finding cigarettes after midnight was a genuine problem.

Life was harder in practical ways but infinitely simpler. Paceville was actually fun. Locals went there. Now? It's a ghost town for anyone who actually lives here. But the biggest change isn't about convenience or nightlife - it's about what's normalized.

Smoking dropped from 33% to 20%, but vaping filled the gap immediately. Cannabis use tripled while social disapproval collapsed from 55% to 34%. Malta didn't get healthier; it just switched addictions. This is the story nobody's telling about how Malta transformed in two decades.

I Miss Old Malta: When Finding Cigarettes Was Hard But Life Was Simple

There's a specific type of nostalgia that hits different when you've actually lived through the before and after. I miss old Malta. Really miss it. Not in that generic "things were better back then" way that every generation complains about. I mean the actual, specific Malta that existed before everything changed.

We didn't have 24-hour shops. If you ran out of cigarettes at 11 PM on a Sunday, you were screwed. You'd have to knock on your neighbor's door or wait until Monday morning. Finding basic things required actual planning, actual human interaction.

And you know what? Life was easier.

Not logistically easier - obviously having a Circle K open at 3 AM is more convenient. But existentially easier. Simpler. More direct. You knew where people stood. Social dynamics were straightforward. When you went out on a Friday night, you went to places where locals actually went. Paceville wasn't a tourist theme park yet - it was where Maltese people spent their weekends.

Today? Locals don't go to Paceville anymore.

Ask anyone under 35 who's actually from Malta when they last spent a proper night out in Paceville. They'll either laugh or look uncomfortable. The place has become a caricature of itself - overpriced drinks, aggressive promoters, the same house music in every venue, and crowds of teangers.

The soul left. What replaced it was optimization for quick revenue extraction. Every bar calculated the maximum number of bodies they could pack, the minimum drink quality they could get away with, the exact volume level that keeps people drinking without being able to think.

Paceville became a business model instead of a place.

The Drug Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

But here's what really bothers me, what actually keeps me up at night: drugs are everywhere now.

Not in the moral panic way the government talks about it. Not in the "just say no" after-school special sense. I mean literally everywhere, normalized, casual, integrated into daily life in a way that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

I'm not naive. Drugs existed in old Malta too. But there was a line. A social boundary. You knew where the line was and crossing it meant something.

Today, there is no line.

Cannabis at beach clubs. Cocaine in office bathrooms. Vaping devices that look like USB drives being used openly in restaurants. Pills at every party. Edibles passed around like appetizers.

The question isn't "do you know people who use drugs?" anymore. It's "do you know anyone who doesn't?"

And the wildest part? Nobody seems bothered by it.

When I bring this up in conversation, people look at me like I'm the weird one. "It's just weed, relax." "Everyone does a bit of coke on weekends." "Vaping is way healthier than smoking."

Is it though? Or did we just get really good at rebranding addiction?

The Illusion of Progress: We Didn't Get Healthier, We Just Got Better Marketing

Here's where it gets interesting. Malta prides itself on being more "progressive" now. More educated. More European. More sophisticated. The data tells a different story.

Traditional smoking dropped from 33% of the population in 2001 to 20% in 2023. On paper, that looks like a massive public health victory. Politicians love citing this stat. "We reduced smoking by 40%!"

But here's what they don't mention: vaping captured 4.3% of the market immediately.

This isn't cessation. This is substitution. We didn't quit nicotine - we just found a socially acceptable way to consume it. Vaping doesn't smell bad. It comes in mango and vanilla flavors. You can do it indoors without anyone complaining.

It's the same addiction with better branding.

The tobacco industry spent 50 years convincing people cigarettes were sophisticated, then spent the next 50 years being demonized. Now they've repackaged the same dependency as "harm reduction" and we're buying it - literally.

We congratulate ourselves for abandoning cigarettes while sucking on USB sticks filled with chemicals we can't even pronounce.

Cannabis: From Taboo to Tuesday

If tobacco's story is substitution, cannabis's story is complete cultural takeover.

Lifetime cannabis use in Malta tripled from 3.5% in 2001 to 11.7% in 2023. But the numbers don't capture the real shift - it's the attitude change that matters.

In 2001, 55.2% of Maltese people strongly disapproved of cannabis use. It was a moral issue. A line you didn't cross. Something associated with degeneracy, failure, dropping out.

By 2023, that disapproval dropped to 34.6%.

Think about what that means. In two decades, we went from majority condemnation to minority disapproval. Cannabis became normal. Not just tolerated - celebrated.

Scroll through any Maltese Instagram feed and count how many people are openly posting about their "420 lifestyle." How many beach clubs advertise their "chill vibes" with obvious wink-wink imagery. How many people discuss strains and edibles like they're discussing wine.

The "moral wall" didn't just crack - it completely collapsed.

The Education Paradox: Smarter People, Worse Decisions?

Here's the part that really messes with my head:

This normalization is being driven by the most educated generation in Maltese history.

The demographic that's quadruple as likely to have tertiary education compared to 20 years ago is the same demographic leading the cannabis normalization wave.

We're not talking about dropouts and burnouts. We're talking about university graduates, professionals, people with careers and mortgages who casually discuss their weekend drug use like it's a hobby.

This breaks the traditional narrative. We're supposed to believe education leads to better decision-making. More information equals healthier choices.

But what if education just makes you better at justifying the choices you were going to make anyway?

"Cannabis is basically medicine." "Studies show it's less harmful than alcohol." "It helps with my anxiety." "It's natural, it grows from the ground."

Every justification is technically true and completely missing the point.

The point isn't whether cannabis is "safer" than other substances. The point is: when did we decide that being high became a normal state of existence?

The Blurring of Lines: When Everything Becomes Medicine

Malta Insider calls this phenomenon the "Blurring of Lines" - the erosion of distinction between recreational, medical, and legal substances.

And it's brilliant framing because that's exactly what happened.

Nobody admits they're using drugs recreationally anymore. Everyone has a medical justification:

"I need it for sleep."

"It helps with my back pain."

"My doctor said it's fine for anxiety."

"I have a prescription." (Sure you do.)

The language changed, so we don't have to admit what we're actually doing.

Vaping isn't smoking - it's "harm reduction."

Cannabis isn't drugs - it's "medicine."

Microdosing isn't getting high - it's "optimization."

Cocaine isn't addiction - it's "performance enhancement."

We've created an entire vocabulary designed to help us feel sophisticated about our dependencies.

And maybe that's the real difference between old Malta and new Malta. Back then, if you had a drug problem, everyone knew it - including you. There was honesty in the struggle.

Now we've optimized away the guilt. We've data-driven ourselves into justifying everything.

What We Actually Lost: The Price of Sophistication

Here's what nobody wants to admit:

Old Malta was inconvenient, yes. Limited, yes. Sometimes frustratingly simple, yes.

But there was clarity. Social contracts were legible. You knew where you stood. Community had meaning because boundaries had meaning.

New Malta is sophisticated, educated, European, progressive - and completely untethered.

Everything is relative now. Every boundary is negotiable. Every norm is up for debate. We've become so open-minded that we can't commit to believing anything is actually wrong.

"Who are we to judge?"

"Everyone's on their own journey."

"As long as you're not hurting anyone..."

These sound like enlightened positions until you realize they're just sophisticated ways of saying "I don't want to be responsible for caring about what happens to my community."

The Uncomfortable Truth

I don't have a solution. I'm not writing this to moralize or pretend I have answers.

I'm writing this because someone needs to say out loud that we traded something real for something hollow.

We traded cigarettes for vaping.

We traded social disapproval for social media validation.

We traded community standards for individual optimization.

We traded Paceville as a local hangout for Paceville as a tourist extraction machine.

And we call it progress.

Maybe it is. Maybe I'm just getting old and romanticizing a past that was never as good as I remember.

Or maybe - just maybe - we've optimized ourselves into a corner where we're more educated, more connected, more "healthy" by every official metric...

...and somehow more lost than ever.

Read the full analysis with data and insights on how Malta transformed in 20 years at maltainsider.com.