A protest demo is being organised this week to demand that the sale, purchase and use of cannabis be decriminalised. The organisers and demonstrators have not a hope in hell of getting their demands met, and this for very sound reasons that have nothing to do with Malta being backward or church-ridden. Yet to hear them speak, you would think that cannabis is legal everywhere but here in Malta and that our situation is anomalous. It is true that some jurisdictions are moving towards relaxing the law where cannabis is concerned, but this only for possession for personal use. You are not going to be seeing a cannabis shop on Oxford Street any time soon.

This sudden fuss seems to have been prompted by the imprisonment for 11 years of one Daniel Holmes, who grew cannabis and sold it at his home in Malta. The term of imprisonment, his friends and supporters say, is horrendous. Perhaps, but the fact remains that Holmes is 34 years old and ran his business in full knowledge of the consequences should he be discovered. He must be very stupid or very reckless to imagine that he could carry on doing something like that in a place this size without ever being caught. It’s not as though you can go out into your garden to scythe down your cannabis plants and flush them quickly down the lavatory when the police turn up to raid your house.

Whether his prison term is justified or not in view of the crime is a separate argument all together. What Holmes’s supporters should be focusing on is whether Holmes knew the penalty for growing cannabis and selling it. If he didn’t bother to find out before embarking on his business, then he is a fool. And if he knew and still proceeded, then he is dangerously irresponsible and should have never brought a baby into the world.

Ah yes, the baby. That baby, lying in its cot oblivious (thank heavens), is being used as leverage. The man has a baby, we are told. How dare the state imprison him for 11 years? Holmes’s friends can’t see the situation for what it is, or that the argument should be that it is precisely because he has a baby, for whose care and happiness he is responsible, that he should have got out of the cannabis business because by staying in it, he prejudiced his child’s well-being. It is not the state which has deprived this child of a father, but the man himself who has been so incredibly irresponsible as to father a child when he was in no position to look after it, and while he was running a criminal business and stood to spend years in prison if caught and convicted. You would think that in his 30s, a man would have more sense.

Exactly what are Holmes’s friends saying here – that he should not have been prosecuted because he has a baby? That the court should not have applied the law because he has a child to care for? We are not speaking here of some sorry, desperate drug mule, some impoverished woman with a child to raise who has been promised a small sum of money to fly a bag of cocaine into Malta, whereupon she and her bags are seized and she spends the next decade in prison while the real traffickers go free. No, we are speaking of a grown man on the cusp of middle age, who, in full knowledge of how harsh Maltese law is, persists in growing cannabis and selling it, even after he becomes responsible for a child.

There is something else which confuses me about Daniel Holmes’s supporters. They think he should not have to spend 11 years in prison because he has a baby. So let’s say we can reach some sort of consensus on that. Next up for argument, in that case, is whether they think this baby should be raised by somebody who does that sort of thing for a living. Do they? I certainly don’t.

Even if Holmes were somehow to have escaped going to prison, I think it quite obvious that he would have lost his child anyway. Social services would have been on him before you can shout ‘care order’ and the child would have been spirited away to the crèche in St Ursula Street, Sliema, there to stay until Holmes was able to prove conclusively that he was out of the drugs business.

I have absolutely no intention of getting drawn yet again into the arguments for and against the decriminalisation of dealing in cannabis. Those arguments are tired and hackneyed and really very boring. But I do find it fascinating that there are people around who think it perfectly all right for a baby to be left in the care of a drug-dealer who is so criminally irresponsible that he is prepared to risk spending a decade in prison and depriving his child of a father. I assume that somewhere in this equation there is also a mother, though she hasn’t featured anywhere in the newspaper reports of the planned demonstration. Unless she has the intelligence quotient of an eight-year-old or is one of those women who is so besotted by her man that she is prepared to risk even her child’s care and happiness to support him and keep him happy, I can’t even begin to imagine why she thought it a jolly good idea to bring a child into the world with that sort of man for a father. Perhaps now that her mind has been focused, she will have more sense than to raise this child with the notion that its father is the victim of a merciless state rather than of his own lack of decency.

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