The Sunday Times (London): Malta has second highest rate of heroin use in the EU
The Sunday Times (London) carries, in its magazine today, a report on heroin use in Britain and how heroin trafficking is used to fund Islamic terror groups.
Britain has the highest rate of heroin use in the European Union, the report says, with 8.2 users per 1,000 of the population. Malta has the second highest, it reports, with 7.5 users per 1,000 of the population.
Malta’s incredibly high rate of heroin use shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who read the tedious ephemera of questions-and-answers in parliament.
Just this summer, health secretary Chris Fearne gave the official figures for the distribution of free syringes to heroin addicts by government health centres. The policy of no-questions-asked free distribution began in the early 1990s, as a successful measure to cut down on needle-sharing and the transmission of diseases like HIV and hepatitis.
Hold your breath. The health centres now give out just under a thousand syringes to heroin addicts every day. Over the course of a year, they handed out almost 343,000. A third of these were distributed from the Paola Health Centre.
The situation is not getting better. In 2009, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction reported that Malta had 5.9 heroin addicts per 1,000 of the population. And this was, at the time, the highest figure recorded in Europe – we even beat the home of Trainspotting.
Five years later, Britain has pipped us to the post, but that’s only because the heroin addiction rate has increased in both countries, so it’s no consolation at all.
There will always be people who believe, of course, that the problem lies with the two-penny dealers who are picked up by the police and thrown into prison for eight years.
Because it suits them to be in denial, they dig their heads into the sand and determinedly refuse to make the link between all the money they see being splashed around, the cash with no obvious source, and the fact that real businesses are not money-taps or money-trees and that those who run them do not have an ‘easy come, easy go, flash-trash’ attitude towards their earnings.
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http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/article1469923.ece
This goes to explain the roaring trade in frozen meat.
This is no laughing matter, and it does not explain the trade in frozen meat, but the SUVs and BMWs, the boom in real estate, the 6% unemployment and the snapping up of government stocks.
We’ve been told this is all “gid”. So shut up and don’t complain, and let them import as much heroin as they wish. Or withdraw it from the law courts, where I am told it is kept (snigger) under lock and key. Yeah, right.
Malta is rotten to the core, and no mistake. They’re all in it.
HPB
The situation is similar to pockets in Sicily and the south of Italy. Although, don’t delude yourself – the UK and many other countries round Europe are no different. See how many villas in the affluent South and South East England are used for weed growing!
Did the PN really think that they got round the global financial crisis because they were exceptional?
I wonder whether the trade in the countries mentioned has a common source.
As you said, government stocks are always invariably oversubscribed. the banks obviously take a large chunk, the retail investors piddling amounts, ergo the rest…
There are so many warning signs if only “Professor” Scicluna would understand them.
Like the amount of cash not held by banks. Someone tells me they found half a million in cash that someone kept at home. Just like that.
Or the way IOUs have taken over the antiques trade.
Or the worrying expenditure-to-declared-income ratio. Of all the “changes” that Malta needed, a crackdown on tax evasion would have been the best. But no one wants that, do they?
We’re getting all our financial information either from government ministers (then it’s propaganda) or from professionals in financial services (then it’s marketing bullshit).
Try the civil servants at the Tax Department. The honest ones.
One thing I’ll tel you: when Al Capone was finally convicted, it wasn’t over murder, or violent crime, or trafficking in illegal alcohol. It was over tax evasion.
You may find this report about Examining the Link between organised crime.
The report says that there is no research work in Malta about organised crime. I wonder why.
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/doc_centre/crime/docs/study_on_links_between_organised_crime_and_corruption_en.pdf
And yet we perpetuate the myth that Malta is a virtually crime-free environment.
Heroin and other drugs in Malta are brought in by the few sanctioned importers that grease the palms of politicians and the police. They have been at their business for a very long time and are protected from very high up.
Anyone else that does not have the blessings to be the official importer is eradicated by the police.
Trust me on this, the right to import these drugs are no different than the official importer of you favorite Japanese car brand or your choice Italian espresso coffee maker to Malta.
And then the majority of my fellow Maltese turn against me the moment I mention that Malta is becoming one of the most dangerous countries in Europe.
I’d like to repeat myself senseless on this point:
this is already causing Malta to have an extremely bad image in the places where it counts abroad and will rebound terribly for Maltese business and economy.
Gonzi staved off a lot and this will be entirely of Labour’s undoing.
It’s not a question of when it is going to hit us, just how long it takes to trickle down.
For those engaged in criminal activity and those with madmen in the family, yes, Malta has become dangerous. For everyone else, it is certainly more dangerous than even a few years ago. Is it one of the most dangerous countries in Europe. By far not.
Those engaged in criminal activity as well as those with mad men in the family make part of the Maltese society, to start with, tinnat – if you keep your eyes open and take a good look around you, you might realise that there are many more of them than you think.
The fact that Malta has second highest rate of heroin use in the EU speaks for itself.
Why all the fuss ? I am willing to wager a bet that once Labour takes cognizance of these figures, it will legalise heroin for personal use.
The present is a mirror of the future, with the exception that the product in the present circumstances is slightly different from the product of the future. But then come to think of it, both are drugs. This is Labour logic.