Put your marijuana where your mouth is

Last Wednesday, junior Justice Minister Owen Bonnici came out with some very impressive sound bites on the subject of his government's commitment to reform and expedite the justice system in Malta.

Exaggerated delays in court procedures, he told us, are "completely unacceptable".

"The current administration will not tolerate such situations at a time when the country is making a big effort to be among the best in Europe," he said.

Sock it to them, Owen! Always nice to hear to some tough talk from a local justice minister. And quite rare, too. The last time I remember this happening was... ooh, let's see now... early 1990s, as I recall. The minister's name was Joe Fenech, and he very memorably gave the law courts around six months to "sort themselves out... OR ELSE".

Fast-forward six months, and - surprise, surprise - not only did the situation at the law-courts remain spectacularly unsorted-out, but it actually got considerably worse. I can't remember how long Fenech himself was kept on as justice minister after that, but... let's just say it wasn't forever, and move on.

But of course this won't happen to Owen Bonnici. Remember what we were all told before the last election? That Labour means business? That Labour always puts its money (actually, OUR money, but never mind) where its mouth is? That Labour is the real McCoy... the cat's whiskers... the dog's bollocks.... the bees' knees.... the best invention since disposable diapers, and all the rest of the modest epithets they have quietly appropriated over the years...?

In a nutshell: Labour is a serious administration that always delivers on its promises. So when Owen Bonnici tells us with such stately deliberation that court delays are simply unacceptable to his government... one assumes that his government will simply not accept them, end of story.

At which point a rather conspicuous contradiction suddenly swims into view. Excuse me, Owen, but... your government IS accepting and tolerating this selfsame 'unacceptable situation' even as we speak. And much more beside: it is also aiding and abetting the same situation through its own actions (or lack thereof).

Allow me to elaborate. For all your tough talk about ironing out the problems in the law-courts, the present government persists in obstinately and systematically failing to address the single most glaring root cause of these same delays... a cause which has time and again been identified (most recently by a Justice Reform Commission appointed by Owen Bonnici himself) as the ever-accumulating backlog of criminal cases, some stretching back 30 years or more into the past.

At present, there are around 14,000 cases pending before the criminal courts; and the number tends to increase at a far greater rate than older cases are actually concluded. At the speed with which the law-courts currently operate, it will take a minimum of eight years (by Owen's estimation) to reduce this backlog to zero even if no new cases were initiated in the meantime.

And herein lies the rub. Practically every single day there is a new and very often unnecessary case that gets added to this list. This week, the police made five arrests over a 'suspected cannabis find' - which by the way raises a separate question, this time for the police: what do you mean, 'suspected'? It's either cannabis or it isn't. And 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.

Yet arrest people they do, on a regular basis... this time over a substance that may or may not have been cannabis; and the time before over no such drug find (real or 'suspected') at all.

This latter case is perhaps worth revisiting, because it illustrates with graphic precision the ludicrous contradiction between the justice minister's commitment to reduce the existing case load, and the zeal with which the police force is making that selfsame 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 intelligence-gathering, 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 full-scale police rebellion against the government's declared policy 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.