Cocaine and gonorrhoea – but please, no divorce
An EU-wide survey has ranked Maltese young people as those who most think that cocaine is easily available – more easily available even than marijuana. They’ve also ranked tops for thinking that cocaine does relatively little harm, even less than – yes, that one again – marijuana. So this has prompted the latest hue and cry. The head of the national drug education authority has raised the alarm, saying that people are most likely to downplay the negative effects of the drug they are using or have used. This means that if they are pooh-poohing the problems caused by cocaine then they are likely to be using it themselves. Some other drug abuse expert said that perhaps the opposite is true, and that those surveyed think that cocaine is easy to get hold of because they have never tried getting hold of some. Meanwhile, they say that marijuana is difficult to obtain because they have actually tried buying it and experienced the complications involved.
Oh, I don’t know. Hard and soft drugs have been easy to get hold of ever since I remember. The instant you signal interest, somebody is there to sell you some, or to help you get the contact to buy some. All you need then is the money. That’s the strongest argument against liberalisation: demand is high even with reduced accessibility and the high cost that comes from buying on the illegal market, and with the police buzzing all around. A liberal market in drugs will only mean that more people start using them.
We forget that because Malta is a state and yet so small it is effectively an urban centre, with many of the problems that brings. One of these problems – or benefits, depending on which side of the fence you’re standing – is that the drug market is compact. There’s always somebody who knows somebody and you don’t have to travel far to get what you want. The intermediaries between buyer and seller are usually what the buyer would consider to be ‘people like us’, so the need to deal with some backstreet roughneck has gone, and with it all feeling that the transaction is sleazy and degrading. Let’s face it – if young teenagers are buying marijuana, and they are, then it’s not through somebody standing in a dark doorway but through their friends and acquaintances, just like with ecstasy pills.
None of this is new anyway. More people died through heroin use in my generation than in the current generation of people in their teens and 20s, even though drug use must be much more widespread today because there is more money, more going out and generally more accessibility. I was just talking to a friend a couple of hours before writing this, and telling her how the girls in my class at school who were from the outlying towns and villages seemed to be from an entirely different world, not just another village in the same tiny island. They never went out, not even on the weekend, and they were completely absent from the Sliema/St Julian’s/Paceville scene which was then very much ‘local’ and mainly busy with the people who actually lived around there.
The real problem, I suspect, is boredom. Some people use drugs because they’re unhappy or insecure, but most people – especially when they have gone beyond teenage angst – use them because they’re mind-numbingly bored. What we’re talking about here is social ennui, and that’s why drug use is highest where there is a fatal combination of urban access to drugs and suburban monotony. The enmeshing of a deadening small-town routine with big-city drug availability is dangerous, but that’s what we’ve got in Malta.
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From the small-town mentality to the minuscule: there’s a dialect demo in Gozo, should you be interested in this sort of minutiae of introspection. People from different villages in Gozo will be speaking in their highly localised dialects for the delectation of what will, with luck, be masses and not just a gathering of a few dialect-fetishists. This dialect-fest will take place in Munxar on 7 September, and is organised by the Munxar Local Council, which seems to have little else to do.
That the villages of Gozo have their own special dialects gives some indication of just how isolated the people who lived there were. Not only were they isolated from the main island, but also from the other villages on the same island. Individual dialects and accents develop only in isolation or relative isolation. The people in the hamlet where I live have a highly distinctive accent, and that’s because they were cut off for centuries by a lack of good roads, even to neighbouring Mosta, where the natives speak with a different accent.
If I say any more about this, I will be jumped on by the Gozo-fanatics, who see factual discussion as patronising insult. I am curious, though, as to just how different the dialect of one village can possibly be from the dialect of another. Or maybe they’re just using the word ‘dialect’ when they should be speaking of a slight variation in accent and vocabulary. Village X has one word for carrots and village Y has another. Village Z uses a flatter ‘a’ sound than village W. That isn’t a different dialect.
Too much of this, and I can’t help but think that some people find their navel fascinating to the point of perversity.
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Some people are well-meaning, but they don’t seem to realise how out of touch with reality they really are. What kind of world do they live in? Take the Holy Joes and Pious Patties. They have been inflamed into writing to the newspapers by this frightening talk of divorce entering a Malta where a third of school-children live with only one parent, unprotected sex among teenagers is spreading disease, and cocaine is dismissed as easy to get and not particularly harmful. In their minds, Malta is still a sort of golden bubble, a kind of living, breathing Janet-and-John book-meets-Enid-Blyton’s-Famous-Five.
I am torn between being touched by their quite obvious naivety and being rendered livid with annoyance at their near-eccentric refusal to accept that life has moved on. Worst of all is their preaching to others about what makes for happy families and strong marriages. They imagine that they have the recipe, and if only all the others would adhere to it, then they too would begin to live happily ever after. What foolishness this is. Some people were very cross at me when I wrote some months ago that one thing and one thing only can make people stay together: the desire to stay together. There is no secret recipe. There is only the wish to be married rather than unmarried, to live with that person rather than without him or her, to keep the home intact. When only one of the two spouses wants that, there’s trouble. When both want it, there isn’t. And that’s the end of the story – no magical solutions, no wizard potions, no secret recipes and no korsijiet ta’ Kana. That’s why you have incidences of two unpleasant, irreligious and selfish individuals who stay married for 60 years and, conversely, of two good, decent, ever-so-nice and religious people blowing a gasket and breaking up after 10 years of rather too much patience and understanding.
Yet look at the kind of thinking betrayed by this published letter from Malta’s most Pious Pattie of all (she shall be nameless): “I am sure everyone wants the best for his/her family. Well then, the children from an early age must be disciplined. Characters must be trained to practice unselfishness, self-control and to make sacrifices for another member of the family.If children are allowed to do what they want when they are young, they will want someone else’s toy. But when they grow up, it will be someone else’s wife/husband. Then they will cry out for divorce as soon as they do not get what they want. It is important for married persons to try to improve their relationships as the years go by. Above all, the family that prays together stays together. The family rosary has kept families united, otherwise why does Our Lady give it so much importance every time she appears in different places?”
Our Lady appearing in different places, children with toys who grow up to pull somebody else’s husband out of the toy-box, the desire for divorce equated to the spoilt whining of a five-year-old deprived of a lollipop, hectoring other grown-ups about the need to ‘work on their relationships’ (really, you don’t say!), using the rosary to keep families together (how – by linking several of them together and using the resulting rope to tie them up?). It’s too much. It really is too much. This sort of silly rhetoric belongs only on the pages of the newsletters published by parish churches. It has no place in a national debate in a national newspaper. It is outdated, archaic and very, very sad. There are too many people about who need forced immersion in the real world – except that this, of course, would be an infringement of their rights.
This article is published in The Malta Independent today.
64 Comments Comment
Reply to Kev Click here to cancel reply
If drugs are liberalized, many people will die – very true. However, the fact that people die is by their own lack of foresight and responsibility. If drugs are legalized, there will be a sharp increase in drug related deaths and illnesses. However, as time goes by people will start to realize that they should not take drugs. The situation will stabilize, as it has stabilized with alcohol and other mild-drugs such as tobacco. They’ll start saying: “If I take drugs, I would not be able to go to work tomorrow. Thus, I will not be able to earn a money. I will not be able to buy necessities. I will not be able to raise a family. Thus, I will not be able to live decently.” The people themselves will come to this conclusion. Yes, people still die from tobacco and alcohol. However, they’re realizing that tobacco and alcohol are bad for your health (socially and physically). The problem is solved by natural means. Let the people decide what they want.
Of course, if anyone wants to dope himself/herself with drugs he/she can do so. That is the right of the individual.
If you want to do stunts, do them. If you want to climb Everest do so. But you’re doing it at your own risk and at your own expense. It is not the government’s fault if you end up at St. Peter’s Gate (or Lucifer’s Playboy mansion).
[Daphne – To say that the situation will stabilise is idealistic. If it doesn’t stabilise when hard drugs are illegal, why should it stabilise when they’re legal? And what for create a situation in which MORE people are using hard drugs than at present. I’m sorry, but I can’t agree with your argument that if they want to harm themselves, it’s their look-out. It’s not their look-out, because other people have to pick up the pieces and the bill for treatment, plus the costs of the social fall-out in terms of abandoned or neglected children, homelessness, and so on. The price you pay for living in society is giving up some of your freedoms, including the freedom to make yourself a burden that others must carry. Nobody has any problems with somebody who lives the life of a hermit in a cave and harms himself. That really is his look-out. The responsibility – or irresponsibility – with hard drugs is even greater, because the market, like the market for cigarettes, is those who are under 18. I have yet to meet anyone who began smoking as an adult, either now or among my sons’ generation. You have to get them young or you just don’t get them at all. You’re certainly not going to get them when they’re grown-up and (1) have more sense and (2) are not so insecure that they need chemical props.]
I just cannot understand how people who are happy in their relationships should dictate how people, who might not be happy, how to live their life.
Divorce isn’t for the happily married, it’s for those unfortunate enough not to be. Why do these do-gooders fail to understand this?!
The so-called ‘drug problem’ is in fact a prohibition problem. By the late 1960s, most genuine criminologists/sociologists (and economists) had recognised the fact that these are false crimes. Today, criminologists are a bunch of self-serving bureaucrats who are more into crime administration (police powers and tactics), than the actual study of the causes of crime. Genuine criminologists are today civil libertarians fighting against mass ignorance and state tyranny.
Because these are false crimes, the so-called ‘war on drugs’ has failed successively. And drug takers are generally aware of this falsity so their respect for the law is anything but high. Drug taking is criminologically known as a victimless crime, and it is also a consensual crime. It is victimless in that the taker does not engage in harming others, and consensual because both the buyer and the seller consent to the trade. It is a false crime also because the state cannot tell you what to injest and what not, especially by way of violent punishment (seizing people from their loved ones – and sometimes their assets – and locking them up in cages is a very violent act).
The 20th century ‘war on drugs’ is not a new phenomenon, but it is unique in its focus, targeting and resourcefulness (and therefore its consequences). It was in the early years of the century that the West, led by the US, criminalised opium/heroin and cocaine; marihuana followed in 1937 (that’s an interesting story deserving a whole volume – suffice to say that the [alcohol] Prohibition chief of the 20s, Harry Aislinger, was a key figure in demonizing and criminalizing the plant, thereby ensuring that his institution’s power was not lost after Prohibition was lifted in 1929, and the booming hemp industry could not further compete with the ailing cotton industry).
The consequences of drug prohibition are multifold. When a commodity is prohibited its demand is not reduced, rather to the contrary. Meanwhile, prices go up and so do profit margins. The more effort and money are poured into enforcing prohibition, the higher is the profit margin – and the more ruthless and powerful are the criminals who enter the lucrative field. Police corruption escalates, disdain for enforcers increases, miserable people are forced into more miserable lives. Meanwhile, theft rises to sustain inflated prices and the unregulated market yields a variety of safe and unsafe products, just as bootleg alcohol had at times killed people. The list of woes is endless. Injecting heroin, for example, is a direct consequence of prohibition, because had the market not been distorted by drug laws there would have been no need to inject the drug for optimum effects from the least amounts.
Meanwhile, the Western standard of stopping and searching only those suspected of crimes fell out as the general population became suspect, especially younger persons from poorer bakgrounds (same with the ‘war on terror’, that other fallacy).
Not long ago I found myself debating these points on X.com.mt (a rarity in itself for me). There were two doctors who were enraged at my arguments on the basis of ‘we know what heroin does, so we know it should be illegal’. This is ridiculous. They could not understand, let alone answer one very simple question: has drug prohibition solved the problem or did it exacerbate it?
The evidence against prohibition is huge and forever mounting. This is such an old theme! Little did I imagine in the late 90s, when I had a stint at trying to create public awareness, that in 2008 I would be writing this on Daphne’s blog. How sad! And all due to the ignorance of those who think they’re experts.
But of course we all know that most experts do not solve anything but the problem of how to further empower themselves and their institutions. Drug laws in Malta were imported. Had we lived in a bubble they would have not existed for it is not within the Maltese character to prohibit people from injesting whatever they prefer to injest. It is an American/Anglo-Saxon characteristic. There are many more Americanisms that we’re suffering from. And do you want to know why drugs have not been decriminalized?
Three main reasons: 1. drug laws allow more power to the police over the population in general; 2. Drug trafficking is a major, but MAJOR, source of revenue for those who traffick it, including the CIA and many other obscure black agencies with which the Western world has been inundated; 3. ‘drug experts’ (mostly police-affiliated) will never say that their source of power and revenue is a fallacy.
How do we disentangle ourselves from this fallacy after so many years of false conditioning? Well, it is not easy, just as it was not easy for Russia to decriminalize private enterprise and dissenting speech after 70 years of sovietism. But the one sure thing we should NOT do is dig a deeper hole by perpetuating this fallacy.
That’s some of it in a nutshell. I have little patience for these types of arguments these days, but cobwebbed minds need to be cleared – and for anyone who believes that upon decriminalization most will go on heroin, please, spare us your ignorance and do some pharmacological research.
Bottom line: We do not have a drug problem, but a prohibition problem. Get that and it’s the beginning to a saner more discerning world.
[Daphne – Kevin, you are COMPLETELY wrong. I don’t work in medicine, so I won’t use the arguments that your doctors made. But I do work in marketing and communications, and sometimes I make the mistake of assuming that what I take for granted others like you take for granted as well. Clearly, you are unaware that heroin, in marketing terms, is just like any other product that’s offered for sale. If its supply is restricted because it is a banned item, then so is demand – because it the ban means that it cannot be openly sold, marketed or promoted, and because illegality and restriction push up the price, making it less attractive. If the restriction is lifted – by ending the ban or what you call prohibition – the market is flooded with easily accessible heroin, the price drops and demand soars – because of the widespread easy accessibility and lower price, plus the removal of the stigma of illegality. So what you will get, by decriminalising the sale of heroin is a huge surge in demand, and consequently, a considerable increase in the number of addicted persons. Heroin addicts may, in unusual circumstances, be able to hold down a job. More usually, they can’t. The only way they can fund their habit without a legal income is through an illegal income. When they become very ill, the state has to care for them. In many big cities, they are not cared for, but simply left to fend for themselves. Somehow, I can’t see that happening here, nor would I want it to. Like I said, heroin is a product like any other. Sell it openly and you build demand. Indeed, those who are selling will seek to build demand like all those who are selling everything else.]
Pious Patties also warrant the adjective ‘perverse’ … I find their way of thinking twisted, selfish and destructive … I wish they would mind their own business and not try to inflict their delusional obsessiveness on the rest of us
“There are too many people about who need forced immersion in the real world” – you can say that again, Daphne, but this time stand before a mirror.
[Daphne – I live in the real world, Kevin. Unlike you, I go out to work every day and it’s not the kind of work that involves sitting in an office. I did not segue from life as a police officer into life as a househusband, looking after two kids, a chincilla and a gerbil.]
Let me guess – It can only be a Maureen or a Jacuqeline, but more likely the latter.
“the children from an early age must be disciplined. Characters must be trained to practice unselfishness, self-control and to make sacrifices for another member of the family.”
How about teaching children the difference between right and wrong, manners as opposed to rudeness, and self-respect and respect for others instead of preaching “discipline” (as if they are some kind of little obejcts / animals that have to “obey” and “do as they are told, or else”)?
With people like that around, it’s no wonder that there are so many ill-mannered people (including young children), so many people with little or no respect for others or for other people’s property … and so many sub-servient women around.
If children are thought the difference between right and wrong, are thought manners and respect (and, most importantly are TREATED with respect), then everything else should come naturally, though admittedly that is not always the case. As for wanting a divorce when they are older … If needs be, then why not?
The writer of that letter must have had a very repressed childhood – and now wants to foist her “teachings” onto all and sundry.
I am sick of seeing so many people my age (in their 40s) going haywire now. It can only be a reaction to severe discipline and too much repression when they were younger.
Maybe it would be better if the writer of that letter were to read “Children Learn What They Live”, by Dorothy Law Nolte, which may be viewed here:
http://www.empowermentresources.com/info2/childrenlearn-long_version.html
@ John Meilak – you mention “Lucifer’s Playboy mansion”. That’s one good reason to go to hell! I’d rather be in hell with a bunch of Hugh Heffner’s girls, rather than in heaven with Dun Gorg Preca’s old nuns full of moffa daqs kemm ilhom ma jifthu saqajhom.. Wouldn’t you?
Hang on Vanessa,
Do-gooders do not impose their morals (or lack of them) on the majority (or even on the minority)
I PERSONALLY think divorce (or rather re-marrying whilst your spouse is still alive) is wrong for me, and it would be a sin for ME to do it.
If someone does not share my view well, good luck to them, it is certainly not up to me OR the state to tell them how to act – obviously as long as no laws are broken , nobody hurt yada yada yada.
Personally I believe there is more value in marriages that survive and thrive despite the availability of divorce then those that ‘last’ on paper simply because the law prohibits them from divorcing!
re: Lucifer’s playboy mansion.
It’s a screensaver…. (I heard this joke a while back)
@ John Meilak
Carefull you might get the clap at “Lucifer’s playboy Mansion”.
Yes, Daphne, prices fall and everyone would go on heroin… and you are sooo COMPLETELY right, yeah? You, the know-it-all agony aunt who calls herself a communicator. Your arguments are worn out like Roman coins. It’s as if the law is keeping heroin from being sold to everyone, when in fact it is the law that has instigated its widespread use.
In truth you build more demand by criminalizing a product, mostly by advertising the forbidden fruit as they (used to?) do in schools, and by having a totally unregulated market which operates underground, while sages like you pontificate that drug prohibition is here to stay – forever (indeed, thanks to counterproductive drug laws California’s prison budget will exceed that for education in the next five years – well done Cali! We will follow your lead).
Your arguments come close to what I used to get from the soviets – gems like: ‘if you introduce a free market you would get capitalists oppressing the people’, or ‘free speech causes total anarchy and crime, how would we survive?’. And although your mind tells you this is no comparison, that’s because, just like the Soviets, you’re speaking from a tiny closed box.
But success will be elusive for as long as these ‘wars’ go on. They cannot even contain the problem within four prison walls, let alone across countries.
What was life like when opium and heroin were legal? Was everyone on opium? Or are you also lacking in history apart from reality? Does everyone drink alcohol and smoke tobacco? Let the people grow up and learn through collective experiential awareness (as John Meilak rightly explained), and not through the pontifications of an idiotic nanny state, helped by a cane wielding Big Bro.
Also, are you aware of various (serious) pharmacological studies that categorize drugs into three distinct categories, where alcohol and heroin are the most dangerous, cocaine and tobacco come second, and marihuana and other hallucinogens (shrooms, cactus, LSD) come last. Would you call for a total prohibition – er, ‘ban’ – on alcohol and tobacco if you were somehow convinced that this were true?
The box, Daphne, get out of it now. Otherwise, you are no wiser than the Pious Joes you so much love to crucify. You might as well believe that ‘Our Lady gives much importance to the rosary every time she appears in different places’.
[Daphne – Kevin, there’s value in thinking rationally instead of emotionally. The removal of any barrier to sales increases sales. Banning a product is one of the most effective barriers to sales. You can look at the situation with consumer goods under Mintoff’s import substitution policy. To take just one example, Italian pasta and colour televisions were available only on the black market and at the premium imposed by illegal trading. There was demand, but it was nowhere near as high as the demand created when import substitution policy barriers were removed. You can also look at the current situation with the legal drugs – alcohol and cigarettes. You can hypothesise that more of both would be sold if the government were to ban them, but this is clearly a ridiculous hypothesis. The reason why so much alcohol and so many cigarettes are sold is because demand is stimulated by availability. Teach me what you like about the conspiracy theories surrounding the collapse of Tower 7, but please don’t try to teach me about consumer behaviour or how the market works. Removing the heroin ban will mean that more is sold for a lower price and the net result is more heroin addicts. Only somebody who knows nothing about the market would claim that a ban increases sales, or confuse demand with actual sales.
…and for the record, Daphne, it’s three kids, a dog, but no gerbil.
[Daphne – Well, looks like I beat you there: three kids, two dogs, five terrapins and a career.]
… and, to put your mind to rest, I work in the European Parliament, so I cannot be called a househusband. Sharing in the upbringing of the kids is nothing to be ashamed of, even though you try to belittle people who do so.
Kevin Ellul Bonici: The argument you make may apply to the branding of luxury goods (selling scarcity vs mass production), but it doesn’t apply to mass consumption. Trade liberalisation doesn’t wipe out mass consumption. It increases it by tapping into latent demand.
The fall out of ending drug prohibition might be that drug cartels are weakened or destroyed, but I don’t think we’d be seeing any reduction in consumption.
If you drew a frivolous comparison with what happened in the case of the airline industry, you’ll see what I mean. Introducing lower fares led to more frequent travel, not less.
Depends how you define “dangerous”, Doktor Kev. If dangerous means getting high, destroying your brain cells, but getting laid, then I’d rather take heroin than mineral water. Depression is as bad for your health as drugs n’ alcohol. People don’t take drugs because it’s a “forbidden fruit”, Kev. Just look at alcohol. They do it because they need it. Hell, even Sherlock Holmes took cocaine. Damn, this is one messed up subject.
@Kev
“even though you try to belittle people who do so.”
Daphne doesn’t need to belittle you, you do such a magnificent job of it by yourself!
@Amanda,
“It can only be a Maureen or a Jacuqeline, but more likely the latter.”
I agree with you, she is a nauseating woman, and most people I know who are “staunch Catholics”, are turned off by her ignorant attitude.
{Daphne – It was Jacqueline, she who spent the 1980s and 1990s crusading against tat-topless.]]
Kev – It might interest you to know that Super One is currently screening the Lilliput cartoon …
Kev – don’t worry you shall be reincarnated as a gerbil in your next life. I would say you already have a head-start.
Ms. Calleja is pathetic, jahasra. God bless her immaculate soul. Amen.
[Daphne – Busuttil, actually.]
I subscribe to Daphne’s line of thinking on the fundamental glue that keeps people together in a relationship: simply the desire to do so. But I can’t help thinking that there must be something to be said for the folks who truly believe that Big Invisible Brother will get them through the hard times. Apart from, of course, the cases where physical/psychological violence is involved. Then it’s just plain madness to stick in there for Big Invisible Brother’s sake.
@Daphne and Disciples:
First, there are NO effective barriers to sales of heroin – this is something you are imagining. Indeed, heroin is never scarce (unlike cannabis, which is bulky to import and yields less profit – which means that only the prohibition of other more lucrative drugs ensures this irregular scarcity).
The law ONLY serves as an irrelevant deterrent to both sellers and buyers. I repeat: a deterrent, not a physical barrier (This is very important but you’d need to know how deterrence really works).
As it is, this unregulated and banned market is freer not more constrained. It is as free as it could ever be in a free market where prices can be raised at will (limited only by competition); where they are free to sell to anyone, irrespective of age or circumstance, and nearly ANYWHERE; where they need no licence, pay no taxes, and are not required to invest in an outlet. Moreover, they can mix heroin with other powders for there are no manufacturing standards (heroin kills only in times of prohibition – but I am not going to write volumes).
All this means that dealers at different levels are much more abundant and pervasive. Indeed, the high-powered, well-connected cartels welcome drug prohibition, for it ensures high profitability, flexibility and the existence of monopolised structures. Remember, globally, the drugs market is second only to the weapons market.
All these factors ensure that heroin is more widespread than honey, even though honey is not banned (and is cheaper). It is all about supply and demand, and the demand is higher because prohibition demands it. Prohibition sets the drug market free to operate. It is wholly free! Remember, control is a sham that catches small and negigible fry – in scale and in the numbers actually charged in court. It is miniscule. Irrelevant, even, were it not for the misery it causes to the wretched.
So the basic difference here is that whereas today the first-time user is lured by friends to try it out at whichever safe location, in a decriminalised scenario they could take them to a licenced heroin den (just like the opium dens in Victorian England). Today, young cannabis smokers are often lured into heroin use by dealers (usually their friends) during cannabis shortages – it has long been known that new heroin users emerge during cannabis shortages.
That’s for the imagined “barriers to sales”.
Then we come to the price. Heroin could be 10 times the current rates and still the addict would procure the required amounts – through theft if needs be.
Clearly, in the heroin market high prices hardly deter at all. But would ‘low’ prices then invite? This applies mostly to first-time users, for as we said, the addict always procures the money no matter.
With a regulated market they would have to go to some heroin den to start with, or still buy it from the streets at higher prices (dens kill out street dealers, just as has happened in Holland with coffeeshops and Cannabis). It is not the amount of money they possess that determines this decision, but education, upbringing, wisdom, friends… but at least they would not have to inject and there would be no overdoses. As I wrote in an earlier comment, the needle comes with prohibition. Also note that sniffing or smoking heroin is much less harmful. The stigma would be on the same lines afforded to alcoholics (and don’t forget that just as not everyone is able to become an alcoholic even if one downs a bottle of vodka a day, the same applies to heroin addiction.)
For the very vast majority, heroin would not be the drug of choice. Today’s number of addicts adds up to nearly the FULL potential of addictable persons (we are not talking about reduced airfares here, Corinne). So just as beer consumption – in relation to Cannabis – increased in Holland after the decriminalisation of Cannabis, you will be surprised when heroin is one day decriminalised.
In Switzerland and Norway, where heroin is available free of charge (to addicts), handed out from roaming vans in parks, heroin addiction rates have fallen dramatically and so did related theft. So here, anyone who wants to become a heroin addict can simply start off by buying from street dealers (they’re running out of business, though), inject a few needles and enroll with the free-heroin vans. But this doesn’t happen, as evidenced by the success in these countries.
So Daphne, just like the doctors who concluded that the prohibition of heroin has led to their attending to less heroin addicts, you are concluding that removing barriers to sales works because the opposite, marketing, sells.
Call it quits Daphne – though it’s a good thing you never came out on an anti-drugs crusade, like Gowi ‘dil-bicca-tax-xoghol’ Mifsud did in the 90s.
Also:
YOU HAVE TO BE A DAPHNE to boast of your marketing and communications qualifications with respect to this subject, while dismissing my qualifications as an ex-police officer. Like you, I hate letters following my name, but criminology and criminal justice happen to be the only two academic fields I managed to last out. …not that this matters, for some of the most obtuse people I’ve met were academics.
@ Baxter:
By ‘dangerous’ they mean the extent of harm caused to health. A quick search yielded the famous INSERM conclusions of 1998 (they list cocaine in the first category here):
“The French National Institute of Health, INSERM, consulted with experts from other countries and rated drugs by their danger in 1998 at government request. They established 3 groups:
[a] “most dangerous” – heroin, alcohol, and cocaine
[b] “next most dangerous” – tobacco, amphetamines, and others
[c] “least dangerous” – cannabis [marijuana], since it has “low toxicity, little addictive power and poses only a minor threat to social behavior,” and others
— from “Alcohol as bad as heroin and worse than pot,” Reuters, 6-16-98″
http://www.dpft.org/sciencenotes.htm
[Daphne – You’re trying my patience now. Slapping a ban on something and making sale, use and possession a criminal offence with a severe punishment IS a barrier to sales and an obstruction to the normal market forces of demand and supply. Criminology does not teach you how the market works. That’s why you don’t know what you’re talking about. Something else: it comes as no surprise that it is mainly police officers – in the case of the UK, senior ones – who call for the decriminalisation of the sale and possession of certain drugs. Why? They think it will give them less to do. They actually say it: we can’t cope, make it legal.]
Along with senior police officers, it also comes as no surprise that most economists believe in decriminalisation. But you know better, because you know how the market works.
As for trying your patience, you don’t have to reply, Daphne. Let your disciples do that while others may judge.
Daphne your lack of faith amazes me! In your article you poke fun at the statement that ‘The family rosary has kept families united’.
If socks can re-attach retinas, why can’t rosaries keep families united might i ask?
[Daphne – No, no, it wasn’t a sock. It was a shoelace.]
Apologies Daphne!:)
Sad thing is that something like 9 out of 10 people in this country beleive it’s true … and here we are trying to put some sense into the divorce debate. Me thinks highly unlikely!
How many of the contributors here have attended a Parental Skills coarse?
[Daphne – Why on earth would anybody need or want to go to a parental skills course unless their own parents were such rubbish at the job that they couldn’t learn from them, or learn from what they did wrong? Elsewhere, parental skills courses were devised for women – not even men – from under-privileged backgrounds. What do they teach you at these parental skills courses? Don’t let your children smoke dope? Teach them basic cooking? Really, I don’t know….parental skills, marriage courses, whatever next – how to get out bed without falling over?]
Liberalisation of hard drugs is not very clever, but there are alternatives. A pilot scheme in the UK where addicts inject themselves under supervision in a clinic seems to have reduced drug use and crime.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7101085.stm
Daphne, correcting your generalisations and assumptions is not easy, but it needs to be done. You wrote:
“Slapping a ban on something and making sale, use and possession a criminal offence with a severe punishment IS a barrier to sales and an obstruction to the normal market forces of demand and supply.”
It is NOT an EFFECTIVE barrier, no. It obstructs the few only for the market to be supplanted by others. The market thrives notwithstanding that some are incarcerated (usually small fry and negligible numbers when compared to reality). These casualties are insignificant as far as the market network is concerned since it is undergorund and prevalent (not limitedly located and regulated). As I said, this unregulated market is free as a market entity, with assured profits prevailing for as long as the ‘war’ continues.
Meanwhile the incarceration deterrent is by far weaker than the health deterrence. Just because you “know how the market works” does not make you an expert on the so-called drug problem.
And finally, may I suggest you start calling yourself a conservative, not a liberal. You are a liberal only as far as your Lilliputian mentality allows.
[Daphne – Firstly, Kevin, my generalisations are there because this is not a treatise or a thesis but a comment below another comment. Secondly, if you think that the criminalisation of heroin is not a barrier to sales, what do you think will happen if it is decriminalised – a drop in sales? The maintenance of the same level of sales? A barrier to sales does not mean the complete obstruction of sales. It means partial obstruction to any degree. Thirdly, Liberals are not people who want the market in hard drugs completely liberalised. Those, I would suggest, are anarchists.]
@ Kev
I don’t know how old your children are but, from your very lengthy comments, I take it that you wouldn’t mind them becoming heroin addicts as long as they took the drug in a licensed den in a decriminalised situation.
Do you realise what you’re saying? You don’t think drugs are a problem; it’s the law forbidding them that is.
For the sake of your kids, I hope that, at home, you do not practice what you preach.
[Daphne – What an amazing coincidence, Antoine. I was just about to say the same myself. Kevin is only speaking that way now because his children are very young. When they hit their teens, and especially if they do so in Malta, he’s going to change his tune fast.]
@Daphne – Busuttil? Could it be then, that there are two Most Venerable Jacquelines of Malta? I had Jacqueline Calleja in mind – googling her name does indeed return me her favourite topics.
[Daphne – There are two annoying Jacquelines, Busuttil and Calleja. Maybe that other one was Calleja. I always got them confused.]
Has any real studies been done on the actual religiosity in this country? In Sweden, where the large majority still is a church member, the actual people who believes in god sums up to less than a third according to Eurobarameter polls.
I’m simply asking out of curiosity. Somehow I get the feeling that the actual belief is much lower than people think. A large people I speak to about their beliefs pretty much state that they are what would be called cultural catholics.
@Ronnie
“Sad thing is that something like 9 out of 10 people in this country beleive it’s true … and here we are trying to put some sense into the divorce debate.”
I happen to believe in intercession myself, so do many people I know who are all for the introduction of divorce in Malta for those who want it (myself included)!
Is the Catholic bashing necessary?
[Daphne – You don’t have to be a Catholic to believe in magic, and you don’t have to believe in magic to be a Catholic. So expressing a disbelief in magic isn’t Catholic-bashing.]
Daphne, I answerd your question in my comments. It’s up to you to grasp it now. There would not be a drop in sales at the beginning, but there would eventually be. If you cannot grasp that it’s because “you know how the market works”.
If you’re frustrated at the mentality of those who do not grasp your pontifications on why Malta needs to introduce divorce, you might just have an idea of how I feel at you lot not grasping a very simple concept: that prohibition is the problem.
As they say, views change not because people are converted but because they die.
@ Antoine, don’t be silly, go and do your thing – this is way beyond your comprehension.
[Daphne – You really are naive, Kevin. I remember once somebody telling me that Alfred Sant’s greatest failing – his wife was the same, as were many of their friends and associates, and apparently they still are – was his inability to distinguish between real life and the theories he read about in books. He believed, and still does, that life can be made to conform to theory. Hence partnership, CET and all his other foibles. Your belief that decriminalising the sale of hard drugs would ‘eventually’ lead to a drop in use is touching. because it shows a faith in human nature and the proviso ‘all things being equal’ (they never are). You mentioned the Prohibition Era in the US – but are people drinking more alcohol now than they were then? Yes, they are – very much more, because you can buy it on every street corner if you can show ID to prove you’re not underage. Cigarettes – are there more people smoking because they’re available everywhere, or fewer? More, of course. If cigarettes had been criminalised, you wouldn’t have had so many ordinary people hooked and unable to stop. Housewives, for example, would have drawn the line at buying them from a backstreet dealer, but then they wouldn’t have started smoking in the first place.]
@ Kev
Could it be that your views are heavily influenced by the fact that [apparently] you’re an ex-cop? i.e. your work “contacts” were not “average” citizens? I think you should consider this option, because what you say does not “agree” with the broader picture.
I agree with the concept that heroin is “just another commodity”. I also remember, when I was young, how difficult it was to lay your hands on a bar of decent chocolate. This is not to say that we didn’t have twix (e.g.), because it still managed to trickle in, but a) you couldn’t guarantee yourself a twix everyday b) not everyone had access to the “occasional” twix bar. When Twix became freely available you could just walk into the shop buy a bar or five and eat theminfront of anybody without having to answer awkward questions as to the provenance of the chocolate :)
I was reading, just the other day, that despite the liberalisation of pot in Amsterdam, there is still a “healthy” black market for pot. And the results of liberalising it were not what everyone was expecting. It was a series of “unknown unkowns”, to borrow a phrase from Rumsfeld. The thill of smoking was dulled, for some people, because it was no longer illegal, so they wanted something else.
You quoted some statistics that place alcohol up there with heroin and cocaine. They are classified as “most dangerous”. How, exactly, is “most dangerous” in this particular report? impairment of liver function? bioaccumulation? toxicity? “Most dangerous” is an eye-catching category, but, unluckily, it doesn’t say much.
In spite of all this, I think I can see where you’re coming from. “Normal” people would be amazed at how drugs manage to find their way into prison, for example, considering that even delivery vans are stip searched. But for the “criminal” mind, part of the fun is trying to beat the system. Your old job as a police man must have brought you into close contact with such ways of thinking. even just talking shop, telling “work stories” to each other will invariably revolve around criminality.
…as to you being a Liberal (capital L), yes you could pass as one, given the fact that today’s European Liberals are a mix of champaigne socialists and christian democrats. In fact they are known as neo-liberals, so far from their original notion of liberalism they’ve moved. But you are still not a liberal.
As for anarchists, I think you meant ‘libertarians’. ‘Anarchist’ is what they used to call anyone who was labelled ‘enemy of the state’ – today they call them ‘terr’rsts’. True Anarchist, on the other hand, want much more than decriminalisation…
@Daphne
Ronnie implied that those who believe in intercession are against introducing divorce legislation – and I begged to differ.
Also (and I hope this is not going to turn into a ‘miracle’ debate) magic has nothing to do with it. One of the fundamental rules of “miracles” is that God uses natural means to achieve supernatural ends.
Taking the ‘retina case’ as an example, as a Catholic I believe that there is indeed a scientific explanation for it, that science admittedly hasn’t discovered yet. That doesn’t make it less of a ‘miracle’, or means that there wasn’t any intercession.
That is were faith comes in I suppose, and for those who believe in intercession it’s a “miracle”, to those who don’t it’s not, there is no need to make fun of anyone!
[Daphne – Nobody’s poking fun, David, just pointing out that when you’re standing on the outside, you can see it for what it is – belief in magic. I feel roughly the same way about all this as I do when considering those people who hold seances in an attempt at speaking to souls ‘on the other side’. If you’re in it, you believe in it; if you’re not in it, it’s just magical thinking. This is hard for Catholics in Malta to understand because Maltese society was for centuries homogenously Catholic and ‘being’ was ‘being Catholic’. So the devout believer cannot grasp the fact that others, like me, consider them in roughly the same way as Buddhists or Muslims, as people who are content in a belief which they don’t share. That’s all.]
the ‘Jacquelines’ in my life have always been antipatici while the ‘Josettes’ have always been beautiful and great company. A light note in a very serious discussion. Personally I hate drugs having seen their effect at close range. All this bull about decriminalisation is another brick on the way to the utter destruction of the West while the Asians, Russians and the rest gleefully rub their hands.
[Daphne – Well, I don’t know about that. But Kevin should read up on a little history, and see the social destruction wrought in China in the 18th and 19th centuries, when British merchants paid for tea with opium. Opium was freely available and the result was chaotic, including a hideously addicted Last Emperor.]
I think of anarchists as people who drive around carelessly, running children down and … without a valid insurance cover.
@ Kev
Given your irresponsible and dangerous attitude, I’m relieved you’re no longer a policeman. Thank God for no2eu.
(Malta’s gain has been the European Parliament’s loss apparently.)
Interestingly the building blocks of magic have a solid scientific foundations, e.g. the de Broglie wave equation and the wave-particle duality of light, Einstein’s E = mc2
They deal with the “interchangeability” of energy and matter. Tapping the energy – or even harnessing it – is, for now, beyond us.
Assuming that God exists and that he made the laws of nature what they are, David Buttigieg’s point that “God uses natural means to achieve supernatural ends” follows smoothly, because it is safe to assume that since he laid down the laws he knows every nook and cranny well.
While on the subject of magic, religion and science, the distinguishing feature of science is that it has to make falsifiable statements. None of any religion’s statements are falsifiable in a scientific sense, so that places religion outside the scope of science (so the perceived dichotomy is a figment of people’s imagination). Astrology and “magic”, on the other hand, make statements that are easily falisifiable (or verifiable). So if after a series of predictions and/or experiments we keep getting no results or results that can easily be explained in a scientific manner we can safely discount “magic” (as the word is understood today) as bunkum.
The scientific method, therefore, can be employed to differentiate between magic and religion. If the scientific method can be applied and yield results, then we are definitely not talking about religion (or metaphysics etc etc).
[Daphne – Very interesting comment, but I would distinguish between religion and its ancillary accountrements, like belief in the power of prayer (magical thinking), belief in the power of votive candles (to which I, strangely, fall pray), belief in the power of St Anthony to find lost keys (ditto), and so on.]
@Daphne
Well I’m sure Catholics are viewed as Muslims and Buddhists or any other religion for that matter.
Unfortunately many Catholics themselves do not know what intercession is and yes, to an ‘outsider’, these Catholics’ belief can be very well compared to a belief in magic.
Again I stress that the ‘miracles’ are in fact invariably SCIENTIFICALLY EXPLAINABLE (whether we know the explanation or not) and I see it as a great wrong that they aren’t studied for more information to alleviate other sufferers.
For example I see the shoelace part as silly to say the least, and again this is not a personal opinion but one my faith fully backs up.
I personally believe in intercession, in the retina case for example, but also believe that it was not the first time that a retina “re-attached” itself in the past, even though probably un-reported or whatever, and will happen in the future even to atheists without any prayers for intercession etc.
To you this means the ‘Dun Gorg’ case is not a miracle, to me it still is!
If you consider a miracle as defined by the Church to be something scientifically impossible then yes, I agree with you that it’s belief in magic.
I believe that it is a perfectly natural though rare occurrence that happened just as people were praying for it. Coincidence? Like I said that’s were faith comes in.
[Daphne – You’ve lost me here, David. Isn’t the definition of a miraculous cure one that is not scientifically explainable? That was a point that was drummed home repeatedly in the magic shoelace case, and the point I made, on the other hand, was exactly the same as yours: that it is irresponsible to curtail investigation into why it happened, when the results could help others, purely to maintain the notion that this was indeed a miracle.]
Insomma,
Lets agree to disagree and get back to divorce!!
Let me just close the argument over so-called “barriers to sales”.
During the US Prohibition era people drank more not less, notwithstanding the “barriers to sales”. And this well-documented fact is easily explained by the fact that alcohol trade boomed because of rising prices, which meant more people entered the fray in the production and ditribution of alcohol. Points of sale increased and more people started to consume alcohol pervasively.
The market stabilised after prohibition was lifted. Alcohol consumption did not increase following the removal of “barriers to sales”.
This is the point you’re not grasping. With prohibition, the drugs market is free – every junkie is a roaming point of sale, thus making distribution more pervasive, while law enforcement only dents the market, with individual casualties paying the price (and corrupt cops giving a helping hand to the market).
You are also not grasping, due to your “marketing and communications” viewpoint, that these are false crimes, and therefore they are transient (unlike theft and murder which will remain crimes for as long as civilisation lasts, because they’re real crimes, with a real identifiable victim.) The enforcement deterrence is next to zilch – the health deterrence is what causes people to refrain from taking heroin.
As to the comment concerning my sons – they are not that young anymore, at 16, 14 and 12, and I have no problems because they know what a junkie is and it’s terribly “unkewl” – for this generation only “noobs”, “artards” and “fucktards” become junkies. I also have a 24-year old daughter from my Moscow marriage who has had no drug problems.
[Daphne – Thank you for closing the argument. In the Prohibition era in the US, people may have drunk more than they did before but they certainly did not drink more than they do today, when the only remaining barrier to sales is an ID that proves you are over 21 if you try to buy. You are not comparing like with like. There was no stigma in drinking alcohol – it was legal before prohibition, remember? – so the effect of prohibition was pretty much the same as the effect of Mintoff banning Twix. When we could get our hands on any, we stuffed our faces. When they became cheap and easily available, we didn’t bother. And this raises another point: what you are talking about is X number of people drinking more/eating more Twix, not an exponential increase in the number of people drinking (though smaller quantities) or eating one Twix a week instead of one a day. I would keep an eye on that 16-year-old, especially if it’s a boy. Maybe only noobs become junkies, but that kind of thinking is no barrier to trying the rest. Or maybe he’s a lot safer in Brussels than he is in Malta.]
I read all about the Opium Wars, Daphne, and it’s not as simple as you put it. But I’ve had enough of this relapse – it’s a debate I abandoned over a decade ago.
[Daphne – Back to the Hoover, then.]
@ Zizzu – Maltese cops are not exactly pro-decriminalisation. I was quite a maverick in my time. Furthermore, my specialisation had nothing to do with drugs. I used to investigate fraud and money laundering (following a two-year stint at CID General). But I know what you mean – for a long period of time I approached every cheque in my personal life with great caution: “Does it bounce? Cos they all do.”
You cannot compare chocolate to heroin, of course, but I knew some households who consumed more foreign chocolate those days than hitherto or thereafter.
The Cannabis black market in Holland is of the bulk-buying type, which gets exported and distributed elsewhere.
Concerning “dangeroús drugs”, the danger includes all possible health ailments as a direct consequence of the particular drug used.
@ Zizzu – Further to the chocolate comparison, one cannot compare because chocolate addiction is not high enough for people to pay exhorbitant prices – so we did not have the pervasive importation and distribution as we have with heroin. But if more people had been willing to pay much more and had the profit margins been good enough, chocolate consumtion would have increased considerably – again, not withstanding the inconsequential efforts of law enforcers (many of whom are lured by lucrative market themselves). In fact, more law enforcement over chocolate inportation would have meant higher prices and more importers and distributors. But choco-junkies would never commit a robbery for the sake of buying expensive banned chocolate, so it does not take the same pattern.
[Daphne – Kevin, chocolate consumption couldn’t possibly ever be as high as it is now, in a situation where it is banned. If you don’t bellieve me, ask the importers whether they would prefer to have a ban imposed so that they can start operating illegally and selling more. Unbelievable.]
Daphne, so when you don’t compare like with like, treating drugs as if they were washing machines or chocolate, it’s okay, but my comparing alcohol with heroin that’s not like with like. I see you are clutching at straws.
But you are quite a hard-headed woman – I guess your fine memory has rutted you deep in 1980 and there you have remained.
As for your Hoover comment, I consider it to be a freudian slip that’s related to your hard-working husband, just like your comment on my 16-year old son. It is you who goes personal first, Daphne, but then we’re quite touchy to personal critique, aren’t we?
[Daphne – Oooh, touchy, aren’t we? Actually, neither of us uses the Hoover in our household because we’re both ‘hardworking’ (I work longer hours than he does, actually, because I also work on Saturdays and sometimes even Sundays to meet deadlines) which means that we have to pay somebody else to do most of the chores. As for your son, ALL 16-year-old boys have to be closely monitored unless they’re utter complete nerds or living in the Australian outback a hundred miles from the nearest hamlet. By the time they’re 18, the danger’s usually passed. Basically, all you have to do is keep them on the straight and narrow through those two years. You’re new to the game, that’s why you think otherwise. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that there’s no difference between boys and girls, so don’t compare your experience with your eldest daughter to your experience with your son. Boys are generally bigger risk-takers than girls. Lots of parents think as you do: “No need to monitor him; I have a fantastic relationship with him; he’s very sensible.” ‘Twas ever thus: when I was that age, and some other girls were getting into really serious trouble with drugs and sleeping around, their parents were utterly clueless and thought they were angels. It used to amaze me, because my own parents were like hawks and very aware of everything that was going on, perhaps because they were younger than the average parent. The same thing is happening today: hordes of mothers clapping and singing at prayer-groups while their teenage daughters rebel with nihilistic behaviour, rolling around drunk in the Paceville gutter and answering booty-calls. Then I have to listen to them talking about these girls as if they were perfect, and I wonder, should I tell them the truth as to what’s going on? Wouldn’t I want to know if it were my son/daughter? Yes, I would have wanted to know if it were me, but not everyone sees things the same way, and a certain kind of person prefers to shoot the messenger rather than face reality, and so I just keep quiet and stay out of it.]
The Hoover is symbolic, Daphne, don’t go bla-bla on me, you know what you meant. And I’m sure you work more than your husband, you didn’t have to spell it out, miskin, helu tant, tbissima perpetwa n all.
As to the Paceville debauchery, you are sounding just like Alfred Sant. You two should have been married. A fine couple you would have made – Daphne Sant, why not? And a stint at becoming First Lady too – as “is-sinjura tieghu” :)
[Daphne – No Batman comics to be getting on with, then? Or was it Superman? I forget. You’re manifesting all the classic symptoms of the bored housewife. Now that your children are growing up, surely you can get a job to provide some distraction.]
@Daphne,
Well, there will always be overzealous people and in Malta we seem to have more then our fair share! “My views” on ‘miracles’ are was taught to me in religion to be honest, by a priest might I add and not the Fr Montebello type either!
I hate to repeat but he insisted that God uses NATURAL means to achieve SUPERNATURAL ends (sorry no italics available).
Now I couldn’t care less what was drummed in the “retina” case but like I said, to me it was no less a result of intercession. To someone else it may be coincidence. Again, that’s were one’s personal faith comes in.
After all scientific explanations have been found for such “miracles” as the parting of the sea by Moses to the sun dancing at Fatima. Does that make them less “miraculous”? To some yes, to me no.
Personally I actually dislike using the word miracle, at the end of the day there it is no difference to using spell.
And yes, I consider it a SIN not to try and make full use of this gift from God by studying, learning and alleviating others’ suffering.
Now if the ‘Jacquelines’ of this world think differently, good luck to them, I do not feel any less Catholic then them, I think the way I do as a result of my Catholic faith after all.
P.S. You mentioned once you pray to St Anthony to retrieve lost things, now I’m sure you know he does not snap his fingers to make them appear :)
Talking about St Anthony, I owe him quite a sum …
[Daphne – Good, so we’re actually in agreement on several points, except that I don’t believe in intercession, except where St Anthony and my lost possessions are concerned, and that only in a very ironic sort of way. The way it works, in my case at least, is that the process of badgering St Anthony sharply concentrates my mind to the extent that I can actually remember, when I couldn’t before, where something is most likely to be – a sort of brainwave.]
I have a job, Daphne, and it pays well, thank you very much.
[Daphne – Jolly good thing your wife’s attempts at getting us to vote No in the referendum failed, then, even though she joined forces with those CNI heavy-hitters KMB and Sammy Meilaq. You’ve both profited considerably from the successful Yes-campaign efforts of others, including myself, so perhaps some thanks might be in order. If it weren’t for our efforts, you would still be a policeman in Malta, and your wife would be – what? I assume that if you would rather be in Malta, you would be here, so don’t come back at me with that argument. Another example of somebody who wants to have it both ways, and then has the nerve to criticise Joseph ‘the Ox’ (moooo!) Muscat for doing the same.]
“neither of us uses the Hoover in our household”
That should read vacuum cleaner :) Tsk tsk tsk
Just kidding I say hoover too, and geyser, and jablo …..
[Daphne – Actually, it’s a Hoover. But I would really like a Dyson, so if anybody knows whether they’re sold in Malta, please let me know. Incidentally, ‘to hoover’ has become a verb, as in ‘hoovering it all up’.]
@Daphne
“Good, so we’re actually in agreement on several points, except that I don’t believe in intercession,”
That’s fine, faith is a very personal thing, certainly no sense arguing over it, except with the Jacqueline types ofcourse – that’s way too much fun!!!
My faith does not make me better (or worse) then you or anyone!! “Vive le difference”
@ David Buttigieg : Daphne asks for Sant’Antnin’ help to find lost items, but she does not believe in his powers , she prayed for the lost boy at sea , but she believes in horoscopes .
I dedicated an Elvis song on her birthday (belatedly), but it seems the moderator took exception . “Devil in disguise ” fits her perfectly.
BTW : I threw away my Dyson , it had a burnt motor, and I was not impressed with the motor’s quality which costs a lot.
In my humble opinion its design is very innovative and good (no filters & compact) but the vacuum pump motor is underrated and of poor quality.
[Daphne – Please read my earlier comment about St Anthony and concentrating the mind. I did not pray for the boy lost at sea. On the contrary, I said that praying was a waste of time – and so it proved – and that any God with the power to have him found would have stopped him dying in those excruciating circumstances in the first place. I do not believe in horoscopes and never have done. This does not prevent me from knowing what my zodiac sign is. The two are not mutually exclusive. Your bellief that anyone who does not share your religious ideas is a ‘devil’ is pre-Enlightenment.]
Daphne, now you really have flown off on a tangent.
We campaigned for a No because we know that long-term the EU does no good to Malta. We still hold to our principles. Had there been a No victory we had our plans, don’t worry about that.
And I had left the police force before the vote – mid-December 2000 was the last day I worked as a police officer. We had our own marketing company then and I moved to Brussels in April 2003.
Would that be enough to quench your imaginations and stop you from writing nonsense about me and my family?
[Daphne – People who stick to their principles stick to their principles. There’s a word to describe people like you and your wife. It begins with ‘o’ and doesn’t end with x: opportunists.
Our friend Tancred sells Dyson.
[Daphne – Terrific, thanks.]
I’m sorry for having to butt in again, but apparently many of us do not understand what praying is … this may be due to the fact that the Maltese “talab” means “to ask for something” and “to pray”
When we pray to God (if we’re of that persuasion) we tend to ask for things “Please give me this” or “Please make me that” …
Prayer is our means of communing with a Supreme Being (again, given that we believe such a Being exists). We don’t ask for favours we should be asking for strength to accept whatever life throws at us. If we believe that Jesus is the son of God AND that the Gospels are true, Jesus himself told us that when we pray we should pray for the coming of God’s Kingdom and that His will be done. Asking Him to give us our daily bread comes later…
This comment could easily lead to a discussion on free will etc etc … Please let’s not go there. Great philosophers and theologians have failed to find a satisfactory answer, so I don’t think we can find it in the comments section of a blog post.
[Daphne – Just one minor point: ‘itlob’ and ‘pray’ have exactly the same meaning, and it’s not a dual meaning. To pray means to request: pray, pass me the salt. Pray, stop that. The noun ‘prayer’ comes from the verb to pray (obviously) and it is a request made of God. So yes, prayer is asking. Long before people thought in terms of communing with God, prayer was nothing more or less than an entreaty to a higher power or being to give them what they wanted. Asking things of a higher power is not uniquely Maltese, but uniquely human and universal.]
@ Daphne :So you took me seriously. That was only a bit of leg pulling to a 41 year old .That was the red button again.
” Deus ex machina” exists only in greek theater.
“Your bellief that anyone who does not share your religious ideas is a ‘devil’ is pre-Enlightenment.]”
Your unfounded name calling and pigeonholing of people has no limits.
Should I put LOL?
[Daphne – 44, actually.]
@ Daphne
It’s true that people have been asking a superior being to grant them their wishes. It is a behavioural “pattern” seen across a wide spectrum of species … BUT … such argument smacks too much of “manure must be good to eat because a zillion flies can’t be wrong”
Everybody used to thik the world was flat … but is it?
And, for the record, talab means to pray AND to ask for something (without implying prayer). “Pray, tell me the time” is so Jane Eyre, don’t you think?
[Daphne – I’ll just take a deep breath here. The verb ‘to pray’ means/meant ‘to ask’. Latterly, it has taken on the specific meaning of ‘to ask God’. Its essential meaning, however, remains rooted in entreaty. My point is that there is absolutely no difference in meaning between ‘talab’ and ‘he prayed’ – the latter is now archaic in terms of a request made of another person, as you pointed out, as its modern meaning is restricted almost solely to God. But I imagine that the word is no older than ‘talab’. It has merely developed a more specific meaning which the Maltese word has not, because the vocabulary of our language is considerably more limited than that of the English language and so there is no scope for such caprice.]
Yes Daphne, “People who stick to their principles stick to their principles” and that’s exactly what we did. For another thing you fail to grasp is that the European Parliament does not only belong to the IVA clan. In fact, had there been no EU-critical views in this parliament we could simply call it the Supreme European Soviet – the fact that critical voices exist (including from malta) makes it slightly different.
But you wouldn’t know about such nuances. You are too busy reliving the 1980s over and over again because that is the only world perspective you held on to.
History will not judge you dearly Daphne, sorry to say that.
[Daphne – Oooooooh, nasty!]
@ Dapjne : they say that a woman who does not lie about her age is dangerous.
@Kev,
Your wife (with you so obviously on her leash) tried desperately to screw up Malta’s future! You tried to deny my children the future they deserve. Are those your principles?
Once you did that and failed miserably (Thank God, yes I prayed for that too) you decided to earn your living off the very institution you tried to keep us out. If I recall well your wife had the sheer gall (biex ma nghidx wicc imcappas bil-h..a) to still try and keep us out by trying to butt in the Irish referendum on the Nice treaty to keep us out even though the Maltese voted overwhelmingly in favour of membership.
If you did have principles you would have bowed out of the game and accepted the people’s choice. What other reason would your wife have had for campaigning against the Nice treaty in Ireland?
And you say you have principles … Ha!
Can we discuss what is happening in Georgia ? I think we should be more interested about the goings on of the Soviets . Is the bear waking up from hibernation?
@ David Buttigieg – Talk about lop-sided views!
1. The European Parliament is an important institution: it seats the direct representatives of the peoples of the Union. They should represent the people’s views in every Member State.
2. Do you think, having lost the referendum (and accepting the result as the democratic choice of the people) we would leave Malta’s representation to be void of any critical representation? In other words, do you not think that those who are critical of the EU should be represented in the EP?
3. Being critical of the EU currently means being against a centralised EU – which has the necessary ingredients today, already, to develop into a modern hybrid of the Soviet Union and the today’s tyrannical USA. The people want the ‘four freedoms of movement’ – open internal borders – not a centralised state governed by unelected civil servants at the Commission and the Council (proxies?). Being critical also means being against the militarisation of the EU: the Lisbon Treaty (constitution) renders another lying “federation” that wastes taxpayers’ money to ‘police the world’ and destroy lives across the globe.
5. The Nice Treaty was not about enlargement, but about centralising more powers. The focus on enlargement was part of the media spin which you swallowed. The enlargement protocol annexed to the Nice Treaty was itself changed by the Accession Act. Those who fought against the Nice Treaty were not fighting against enlargement but against further infringements on democracy. The Nice Treaty referendum in Ireland was in 2000 (when the No won) and the replay was in 2001 when the Yes won.
6. I came to Brussels in April 2003, a year before Malta’s membership (just after the elections). We did not need membership to move to Brussels, but it entailed membership for us to carry on the fight against centralised EU power at the European Parliament instead of from the streets of Malta.
As to my wife, she had been offered a job in the EP since 1999, which she only took up in 2004, after membership.
The easiest route for us is to ride the bandwagon. But we didn’t, to our detriment. That is principle.
@Kev
You are riding the Eurosceptic bandwagon which, as you yourself boasted, “pays well”. You went to Brussels after the elections (AND the referendum) and after your efforts to keep us out of the EU had been so spectacularly unsuccessful.
It’s your right of course – nobody is going to keep you away from the honeypot. My only word of advice is to drive carefully. Remember, you’re no longer a police officer.