This Is How Much Weed The Police Confiscated In Malta Since 2005
For decades now, the police force of Malta has been upholding the laws of Malta by taking people’s weed from them through sting operations, random finds, and the much-loved roadblocks. And in all the efforts since 2005, Malta’s police have amassed enough weed to… well, maybe stock a single coffee shop in Amsterdam for a few months.
It turns out all those 1g busts take a while to add up, and apart from that massive 446kg bust in 2009 related to the British boxer Scott Dixon, it seems most big hauls are entering Malta without being detected.
As can be seen from the below numbers, obtained from the Police Headquarters in Floriana, there is quite the variation in the amount of cannabis confiscated by the police every year, depending on what they mostly happen to come across by chance during the year. While in 2009 they captured enough weed to equal to weight of a Grand Piano, in 2008 they captured just enough to equal the weight of three sheets of paper.
In the 10 years between 2005 and 2015, the police confiscated a grand total of 926kg, which works out to an average of just 84kg per year. But that number would drop to 48kg per year if you exclude the big bust of 2009.
If a weed smoker consumes on average 1g per day, the average annual confiscation of weed would deprive only 230 smokers of cannabis.
With the black market being successfully run by criminal elements, and the police force unable to successfully dent this criminal grip, it is very hard to tell just how large the Maltese black market is, and indeed, how much money is being made there.
Police sources admit themselves that seizures do not always paint a clear picture of the real situation, adding that luck plays a big part in drug finds.
“It could be that one year we seized a large amount at one go, and that raises figures, but it does not necessarily mean that more drugs were consumed that year than the year before or that the problem took a sudden turn for the worse,” a police source recently told the Malta Independent.
At the same time, according to the newspapers’s source, dealers were always one step ahead. There had been instances when the police spent days searching places they were sure dealers were operating from but still did not succeed in finding any drugs.
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