I have a funny feeling it might be Carnival this weekend. Either that, or our capital city has been overrun by an unlikely army of giant, troll-like... um... things: each vying against the other for the dubious prize of “sorriest excuse for a papier-mâche monstrosity ever created in the name of festive foolery”... and all of them decorated in unmistakably Mediterranean nature colours. Electric pink. Atomic orange. Stabilo-highlighter yellow... and a particularly puke-inducing shade of pale, phosphorescent green.
Right: I’ve been around long enough to know that these garish aberrations are spawned somewhere in the bowels of East Street, close to Victoria Gate, Valletta... and that they only surface once a year for the annual daytime procession that takes places on the last weekend before the beginning of Lent.
Conclusion? It must be Carnival this weekend, Q.E.D.
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If that evidence weren’t enough, there was another tell-tale sign this week, taking the form of a small article in The Times. “Police fire warning shot in drug suspect’s arrest”, ran the headline... immediately conjuring up visions of car-chases straight out of The Streets of San Francisco.
Ooh, I found myself thinking. Exciting stuff. And in truth, reading further into the story, this impression was compounded by numerous details... among them, the following observation: “...in order to stop the accused from leaving the scene, the officers had to fire a warning shot, as well as a shot at the tyre of the accused’s vehicle. In the meantime, another police car arrived on the scene and blocked the escape route of the accused...”
Wow. Who ever said that life in Gozo was dull? Here you have a scene that could have come straight out of Starsky and Hutch (although I somehow suspect that Dukes of Hazard would be nearer the mark): a suspect fleeing the scene of the crime... the police downing his tyre with a well-aimed pistol-shot... a quick call for back-up on the walkie-talkie... honestly, all you’d need to complete the picture is a slow motion shot of the suspect’s vehicle hurtling across a narrow ditch, only to land with a tremendous splash in a bottomless, peaty swamp. I must say: Boss Hog would have been proud.
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Or would he? Reading the rest of the article, I am suddenly assailed by doubt. For what, you might be asking, was the momentous misdemeanour that warranted all this hullaballoo in the first place? More to the point: what, at the end of it all, did these officers have to show for all their gun-slinging, wheel-spinning, testosterone-touting heroics?
According to the charges brought against the suspect... as well as the same news report in The Times... the grand total result of this entire operation was the discovery of “a brown paper bag containing a substance suspected to be cannabis”.
The story also pointed out that the suspect (who, let’s face it, must have been just a tiny bit intimidated, considering that: A, it took two police cars to arrest him, and; B, he was shot at... twice) “led them (the police) to a field where he had planted the cannabis plant”.
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Please note the use of the singular in that sentence. One (1) plant of the genus cannabis sativa.
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Before proceeding any further, I’d like to congratulate those members of our Police Force for so brilliantly putting us all into the spirit of Carnival ahead of the big weekend itself. Nice of them to stage their little performance just outside the village of Nadur, too... which, as we all know, is the scene of the one of the few truly spontaneous Carnival celebrations that the Maltese Islands have to offer.
For what is Carnival, anyway? Apart from a celebration of excess, superfluity and spontaneous, reckless abandon... all three epithets being equally applicable to the above-mentioned arrest... isn’t it also a time for make-believe?
Well, I imagine these officers will now attempt to make us all believe that their actions have somehow made Gozo a safer place to live (stray bullets notwithstanding). I also suspect the Police Force will use this event to propagate the old myth that operations of this nature are instrumental in fighting the “war” on drugs... in which strategy, I am sorry to have to add, they will doubtless be aided by the tacit complicity of an entire generation of “journalists” employed by the political parties (and, sadly, PBS too).
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However, it remains to be seen whether any of these journalists will try to put the incident into some kind of perspective once and for all. For instance: will any attempt be made to ascertain exactly what effect arrests of this kind actually have on the laws of supply and demand? Or whether the costs of this operation were warranted, considering the apparent triviality of the case?
Above all: will any of these journalists ask themselves whether the retrieval of a single bagful of grass can justify the act of placing a human life in manifest jeopardy, as seems to have happened in Dahlet Qorrot last Wednesday?
And while I’m at it... will the common pig, or sus scrofa as it is scientifically known, one day evolve a pair of wings, and fly?
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As things stand, we already have one judge inquiring whether “excessive force” was used in the Safi incident on 13 December... another occasion in which a bunch of grown men in fancy dress were observed acting out their childhood Rambo fantasies, this time on a small group of pacific demonstrators.
Now it seems our Police Force, too, have been watching a few too many episodes of Cops on Reality TV. And like the soldiers before them, they clearly expect to be congratulated on their antics.
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Well, here’s another reality that some of our boys in blue (or green, or whatever) might want to finally digest once and for all. Last May – quite possibly while our Police Force were too busy hunting for individual cannabis plants to realise – Malta was finally admitted, after years of negotiation and controversy, into this great big thing called “the European Union”... the implications of which clearly haven’t dawned on all of us in like fashion.
For you see, while our negotiators were trying to keep the status quo as unchanged as possible as a result of our accession (which makes one wonder why we even bothered joining: personally, I thought the reason was precisely because we needed to change our entire modus operandi, not to retain it in full...) very few people seem to have asked themselves whether our attitudes towards most aspects of society, drugs included, are really European in outlook.
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Quite frankly, they are not. In most European countries, a case such as the above would most likely be laughed out of court... if it even made it to court in the first place. For most of these countries moved away from this kind of behaviour years ago... and in nearly every instance, the initial movement had been orchestrated by none other than the police themselves.
In the UK, for instance, it was a spokesperson for the Police Force who recommended a far-reaching reform of the country’s drug laws... a reform which would, if taken on board in its totality, have effectively decriminalised possession of cannabis altogether.
As it happens, the resulting reform stopped short of actual decriminalisation, but the police did not complain too much. The important thing as far as they were concerned was not that people could legally smoke pot... but that the law adequately reflected the realities of Britain’s drug phenomenon, thereby equipping both themselves and the Law Courts with the tools necessary to take effective (as opposed to evasive) action against the real problems of drugs.
As a result, cultivation of up to two cannabis plants is not considered a punishable offence in Britain. Possession of up to 10 grammes, while remaining against the law, is likewise tolerated. Similar scenarios, with some variations, are to be found in many European countries, including Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Germany, France and elsewhere.
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Coming back to Malta, you will find that the situation is very much the other way around. In today’s Malta, magistrates have long come round to realising that our national obsession with prosecuting every single drug possession offence – in most instances, regardless of quantity – has only succeeded in bogging the Magistrates’ Court under a veritable tsunami of pointless legal wrangles. Individual magistrates (I am told) have confided their exasperation with this state of affairs to the Minister concerned... who, for his part, has publicly conceded that some kind of reform of our Dangerous Drugs Ordinance Act is now necessary: a sentiment which enjoys the full support not only of all the drug agencies concerned, but also of the Opposition.
The only difference, then, is that unlike anywhere else in Europe, it is the Malta Police Force itself which has doggedly and consistently opposed any notion of a national drug law reform. Why, you might be asking? I don’t know. Maybe for the same reason that our EU negotiators fought so hard to keep Malta as unchanged as possible. Maybe because they’ve had it so good all these years, playing at cops and robbers while our amateur media slavishly report on their consistent “successes” in the fight against drug abuse. (I didn’t watch the news on the evening of this week’s incident... which is probably just as well, as I was spared the “success strepituz iehor ghall-pulizija fil-glieda taghhom kontra d-droga” style of misreporting we have come to expect from all our substandard television stations these days.)
And besides... which do you think is easier? To bring out the big guns (literally, in this case) and arrest a Gozitan farmer for growing a single, solitary cannabis plant? Or to utilise our slender resources to the full in the pursuit of the real villains of the piece... i.e., members of criminal organisations with overseas connections; people who import not paperbags full of grass, but large quantities of dangerous drugs... and who might conceivably return fire if shot at?
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Answers to be directed to the Home Affairs Ministry. (And remember: first three correct entries win a free overnight stay at the five-star Hal Safi Bed & Beatings Holiday resort...)