Cocaine island
I read this story and wondered whether our dependence on addictive substances is the cause of our quite palpable ennui/dwejjaq, or a symptom of it.
It does seem to contrast with everything we say about moral values and happiness: we have no divorce, we send our children to duttrina, and then we take cocaine at village feasts.
I can’t imagine what good people think can come of it, or where they’re getting the money to spend on it, however ‘affordable’ it has become.
Now I know that Kevin Ellul Bonici is going to enter the debate to say that legalising cocaine will help solve the problem, instead of making it worse. That’s a road down which I don’t feel like going, as the matter has been discussed to death.
I just wonder about the many people in Malta who are looking for something to knock them out or give them a thrill, whether it’s cocaine or an illicit fling or a stint as Che Guevara on a demo with the FAA. It happens everywhere, but there seem to be rather too many people like that here for a town of 400,000, and they’re all over the place and right in your face.
Put simply, people are bored, bored, bored to tears. And it shows. They’re fed up with themselves and they’re projecting it onto everything else: their life, their marriage, politicians, the government, their jobs.
The Times, Friday, 26th June 2009
Cocaine ‘being used in weddings and village feasts‘
Juan Ameen
The perception that cocaine is a recreational drug used only by the rich no longer holds as experts say it is even being consumed at village feasts, weddings and inside band clubs.
Cocaine was being used by people from all walks of life, the CEO of the Foundation for Social Welfare Services, Sina Bugeja said yesterday when launching a campaign targeting the drug.
Last year, Sedqa treated 39 new cases of cocaine abuse, up from the 26 new cases seen in 2007.
“The number of people seeking treatment for cocaine abuse is increasing – next year there will be more,” said George Grech, Sedqa’s clinical director.
It was no longer a drug taken by the rich for recreational purposes, he said. It was infiltrating all strata of society in different places of entertainment, including weddings, village feasts and band clubs, he pointed out.
The reasons for this surge in cocaine use were cheaper prices and more availability, the experts say.
The trend is also reflected in the recent European drug survey carried out in schools where it emerged that Malta has the highest rate of 15-year-olds who take cocaine when compared to their European peers. Caritas recently saw an increase in the number of cocaine addicts making use of its services, up from 3.2 per cent in 2004 to 24.3 per cent in 2008. At the same time, people seeking help for heroin abuse declined from 80 per cent in 2004 to 63.8 per cent in 2008.
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Bored yes. We are bored to bits with the same old stuff happening all over again. Either society is sick, or we have become too demanding. What’s worrying is the recent glut of cocaine on the market. I think that in times of financial stress more people turn to drugs, and more people have the ready cash to finance its purchase and distribution because they can’t invest in anything else.Thus the price goes down and it becomes more affordable, and usage goes up.
Simplistic, you may think. Maybe, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
I don’t know what sort of cookies you’re eating, Mario, but if people are financially stressed, where are they getting the cash to pay for their cocaine?
Muscat nuts are a cheaper choice of drugs:
http://thenorwaymail.blogspot.com/2008/09/muscat-nuts-are-latest-drug-of-choice.html
But then…!
Muscat nuts = noce muscata= nutmeg? Can anyone illuminate.
I use it for the bechamel sauce.
[Daphne – Yes, the English name is nutmeg.]
I, like all self-respecting Italians, use noce moscata in meat dishes. Maybe that’s why people enjoy Italain food so much then.
Finally, they woke up…
Yeah and I bet you most of them can’t even afford to feed their own children let alone support a future habit of 1000 Euros a month.
Interesting, when you consider that cocaine abuse can cause delusions of grandeur! A bored megalomaniac sounds scary to me.
I believe there is a huge sense of entitlement without responsibility here in Malta. Life has to be perfect and fabulous all the time. It’s never our own fault that it’s not – it’s always the government’s or someone else’s responsibility.
This sense of entitlement is compounded with the problem of small communities: everybody knows everybody or someone who does. So we all feel terribly important, like the goldfish that swims from one side of the aquarium to the other and thinks it’s a whale that has crossed the ocean.
It warps our mind. You see it everywhere – we have to have at least two rival organisations or more doing the same thing so that everyone can feel they’re notable. Pompous pretentious twits heading all kinds of could-be-useful organisations. The most ludicrous of arguments that pass as public debate in Malta usually targeted at a person, and not at an action or idea, or criticising minutiae.
When we eventually realize that life cannot be as fabulous as we expect it to be and that we’re not as eminent as we pretend to be, then we have to take our kicks otherwise…
The government should make (or help) every Maltese spend at least three months in a big anonymous capital somewhere. Then, for a few weeks, visit moribunds at hospital. Then we can get some perspective on life.
http://euobserver.com/?aid=19587
this was a while back.
Sorry, but that is ridiculously naive.
Fully agree with the comment that there is “a huge sense of entitlement without responsibility.” This trait is all the more evident amongst certain expats who adopt a colonial attitude to tell us what is right or wrong. For example, a certain Lesley Gail Kreupl from Gharb wants to teach us what ODZ means. In today’s Independent she states; “In supporting such cases, it is about time that the Government realises that it is ruling a country which is a member of the European Union, i.e. a westernised, ostensibly civilised, country and not a 3rd world dictatorship!” What this patronising git fails to tell us is that in many parts of the EU, development in the countryside is rampant.
I have serious doubts about the veracity of surveys of 15-year-olds. If for example the survey is written in a classroom rest assured that they are going to fill up shocking data. In their lunch break they’ll tell each other what they wrote and how shocking the survey will be. People who are on drugs would never bother to fill up a survey.
I am not denying that there are 15-year-olds who may have a cocaine habit. What is the head count of these underage drug-users? Elsewhere one person is 0.0001% and in Malta the same increase would be reflected as 0.01% or more.