Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/176463
21 Opinion maltatoday, SUNDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER 2013 ur mouth is Both junior Justice Minister Owen Bonnici (left) and Minister for Home Affairs Manuel Mallia (right) have suggested that rampant arrests are not the solution to the drug problem task more impossible with each passing week. So a man found himself hauled before the courts – the same courts that are already bursting at the seams with 14,000 pending criminal cases, remember? – for 'possession' of cannabis, even though no cannabis was actually ever found in his possession. And this because he admitted under interrogation to having once smoked the stuff in the past. Naturally it didn't occur to the police that this person might have been deluded, or even simply mistaken in his claims to have smoked cannabis. We've all heard urban legends in which 'friends of acquaintances of ours' were hoodwinked into taking a puff of, say, oregano under the impression that they were actually smoking pot. So would these people be charged in court for thinking they had committed a crime? Applied to other scenarios, the same prospect starts looking decidedly scary. Consider, for instance, that for practically every unsolved murder there will always be at least one hoax 'confession', usually by someone suffering from mental problems (this is certainly true in countries with much larger populations… and it occasionally happens here too). So what would happen if the police were to proceed with a murder charge only on the basis of a verbal confession… and it afterwards transpires that the 'victim' of this 'murder' was actually still alive? This is unlikely to happen with murder, because there is a legal principle (habeas corpus) with commits the prosecution to supply proof that a crime has been committed... and verbal confessions, on their own, don't cut the mustard. The same principle ought to apply to drug cases, but does not. And this in itself speaks volumes about our national attitude towards this nebulous reality we call (with a shudder) DROGI. The sad fact of the matter is that when it to comes to drugs – real or imaginary drugs, it doesn't seem to make a difference – the entire country suddenly loses all sense of perspective and proportion. This allows the police to dispense with all logic, snug in the knowledge that popular ignorance on the subject is so widespread that they can always get away with any number of bogus arraignments, because… well, it's 'DROGI'. No justification required… And why would the police prefer to retain this patently flawed modus operandi, you might be asking? Simple, really. Because it makes their job easier. Not exactly very difficult to regularly bust teenage foreign language students for smoking a spliff at St George's Bay at 4am, and then parade them before the courts as if you've just arrested Pablo Escobar. Much easier than… um… really arresting Pablo Escobar (or his equivalent today): an operation which would entail intelligencegathering, confronting organised crime networks and exposing one's own life to risk. And if, on top of this, you can also get away with arresting even those people who don't have any drugs on them all… why, suddenly the police's 'war on drugs' starts looking suspiciously like a war on harmless little teenagers, while seriously dangerous crooks are free to run amok. Small wonder, then, that the police would so vehemently oppose a policy which would force them to actually do some hard work for a change. And of course they keep getting away with this absurd state of affairs. Recently Dr Joseph Giglio, a well-known criminal lawyer, claimed that around half – half! 50 frigging per cent, for crying out loud – of ALL drug possession cases filed by the police in court are actually based only this variety of patently fabricated 'verbal confession' nonsense. I need hardly add that all such cases would be unceremoniously thrown out of court in any serious jurisdiction. Otherwise, people like Bill Clinton and David Cameron would also have to be arrested in their own countries... whether they ever inhaled or not. Besides: if the same Malta police were to apply their 'zero tolerance' policy indiscriminately across the board, they would have to issue a request for the extradition of Snoop Doggy Dogg, to be tried in Malta for importation/trafficking of cannabis sativa. Or did the police somehow overlook that Vanity Fair interview on the terrace of the Excelsior Hotel in Floriana… to which Snoop Dogg turned up smoking a spliff, and in which he candidly admitted to the entire world that he had imported weed to Malta directly from the USA (an offence which carries a mandatory prison sentence of up to 25 years, at least for ordinary mortals)? Coming back to the police's ongoing 'war on harmless teenagers': don't for a second think that it makes even a jot of difference that Malta's drug situation continues to escalate alarmingly despite all these endless arrests. For this we have the word of Sedqa's clinical director George Grech, who in 2011 raised the alarm about an explosion in problem cocaine use, while pointing towards the example of Portugal (which decriminalised cannabis specifically so that the police could concentrate on hard drugs instead) as the model to follow. But no! The police responded to Sedqa's call in the same way as it now responds to Owen Bonnici's stated beliefs. They upped the ante against small-time drug users, and exponentially increased the resources they invest in prosecuting cases which would be considered too minor and petty to even justify the paperwork in most other countries. But let's not waste time asking pointless questions such as: why do even have a drug dependency agency called Sedqa, if all we ever do is ignore its advice? And just for now – but only for now: I shall return to this point at a future date – let us also overlook the teenie, weenie detail that world scientific opinion has now swung very firmly behind the view that cannabis is (at worst) a mostly harmless substance, whose detrimental effects simply pale into insignificance compared to perfectly legal alcohol… and at best it is actually rather good for you: that it has been legalised for medical purposes in several parts of the world, and decriminalised for social reasons in others: with results that suggest that decriminalisation actually lessens the level of problem drug use. The real issue we are looking at here has less to do with drugs, than with a concerted effort to drag Malta kicking and screaming back to the 1980s and 1990s, when the police wielded far more power than was good for anyone. This, I fear, is the dynamic that now propels what can only be described as a fullscale police rebellion against the government's declared policy If the police can't tell the difference between marijuana and marjoram, quite frankly they shouldn't be in the business of arresting anyone at all direction. And I don't use the word 'rebellion' lightly. Owen Bonnici is himself on record stating that cannabis users should not be subject to criminal proceedings. Elsewhere, Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia – directly responsible for the police – recently made the pointed declaration that: "the fight against drugs is not won by the number of arraignments". Well, in most countries, when the police take deliberate and concerted action which they know is in open defiance of the government's declared policy direction, it is generally regarded as a credibility problem for the government in question… and especially for the individual ministers concerned. This is because the police are actually entitled to strike out in a different direction from the government, if that's what they want to do. It's called the separation of powers, and unless we really do want to go back to the 1980s, we must concede that the police are actually independent of all other branches of government. But the laws they exist to enforce are decided upon by government, not by the police… and as long as the present government proves reluctant to change these laws so that the police can no longer hamstring the judicial process with an infinite number of absurd, vexatious criminal prosecutions… well, this means that it is the government's own reluctance that translates directly into the same situation that its own justice minister now describes as 'unacceptable'. So my next question for Owen Bonnici – and Manuel Mallia while I'm at it… is this: what are you going to do about the fact that the police have now very visibly flipped their middle finger at your government's entire policy direction… making in the process a veritable laughing stock of your own public statements on the subject of both drugs and justice reform? Are you going to carry on doggedly ignoring your own experts' advice, as well as the shared conclusions of the international scientific community, just so that the Malta Police Force can continue getting away with creating more problems for the country than it actually solves? And if so: why? Personally I think this is a question Owen Bonnici should have considered answering before publicly complaining about the situation at the Law Courts. It is, after all, completely pointless to complain, when the power to actually change things languishes unused in your own hands. CHECK OUT RAPHAEL VASSALLO'S LATEST COLUMNS ON http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/en/blogs