Day 72 - "Gone to Pot"

Spanish Practices

Could legally growing marijuana save Spains Economy? Today the whole podcast is going to pot, after all it is time we started to chill and relax, before the onslaught of tourists arrive here in Spain. This is the daily diary of a British couple in Phase 1 Lockdown in Spain.

Find out more here: https://www.thesecretspain.com

Day 72 gone to pot

It is Tuesday, and today we celebrate 1,918 lives not taken by the virus, the Health Ministry mis-calculated the figures which represent a 7% drop in the number of deaths.

You can endlessly criticise the statistics and method used to collect the data, as Mark Twain once said, “There are lies, damn lies and statistics.” But this is still good news.

Less good news is that the Health Ministry is only testing about half the suspected cases of Covid19, which makes an even bigger mockery of the un-lockdown phases that Spain has imposed on the country, with some parts still in zero and a bit, some in Phase 1 like our province and some in Phase 2.

I looked at the IKEA site yesterday and some stores are open to the public, some are not, the Malaga store has a click and collect service operated outside in the car park.

The local large shopping centre has managed in Phase 1 to half open some of its bigger stores with the shops that have access from outside and cutting down the floor space of each store.

It is turning into a right old mess.

It also looks like social distancing measures will be enforced by fines, so on beaches during the summer holidays, distances of 4 metres have to be kept and only a certain number of people may share a sun parasol.

Our local main town will be patrolling the beach with a drone, so if you think you might be getting away to a relaxing holiday abroad, think again. Although things seem to change by the day here, rather like they are doing in the UK.

Yesterday instead of driving hundreds of miles to test my eyes and accidentally ending up at my parents’ house, - now that would be a long drive from here! I got MY eyes tested at an Opticians.

I think Governments all over the world are struggling to give good governance, Spain and Britain have both had some challenges, to say the least.

I wonder if we should just all chill out and concentrate on what we can do to relax.

I remember when we first came to Spain and the little flat in the village, we were quite amazed by how quiet it was on a hot Saturday afternoon, so decided it would be pleasant to take a stroll around the place.

Leaving the flat which was on the edge of the village we walked into the small streets and lanes that lead to the main drag through the place.

There was an overwhelming smell of pot, not just from one house but from the whole village. An elderly lady was attempting to water her, rightly named, ‘pot’ plants, she was clearly stoned out of her head.

Some old men were wobbling, far more than usual, down the road toward their meeting place by a local sports bar.

From every house the smell was strong enough to make you feel slightly high too. There is a myth that marijuana is legalised in Spain. It is not and the organised crime mobs that control the mass growing of it regularly play a game of cat and mouse with the authorities.

Out in the campo and with either stolen electricity or solar, sophisticated air conditioning – I can believe that there is a lot of money at stake in the growing of weed.

With a shortage of money and jobs following the covid19 virus I wonder if more enterprising Spanish souls will indulge in “indoor farming” as it is euphemistically called.

There are arguments on both sides as to whether Marijuana should be legalised, I would think it would certainly end the criminal gang activity associated with growing weed, rather like the end of the bathtub gin mafia operations during American Prohibition.

The danger I guess is that would lead to more criminal activity with higher classes of drugs. I don’t know what the answer is, I am just a simple Podcast Producer.

There does seem to be a fair share of drug busts here though, further up the coast class A drugs find their way across from north Africa and southern Spain seems to be a landing point for these drugs that then get spirited away north to other European countries.

I will leave you with a quote from our local newspaper “The Seaside Gazette”. Martin Myall writes:

“A man driving a Peugeot 406 overtook a Guardia Civil patrol car on a B-road in the Alpujarra Granadina and was dismayed to see its lights activate. He was dismayed because the 66-year-old man happened to have nearly 60 kilos of marihuana onboard.

So how the hell did the Guardia know that he was carrying wonky weed? The answer was because they got a strong whiff of it as the man sailed past them. Quite apart from that, it’s never a good idea to overtake a police car anywhere in the world.”

His trial is pending, but the amount of Marijuana the man was carrying could be turned into a street value of 75,000 Euros, now for somebody who has waited months for their ERTE – Furlough payments, that is a tempting amount of money to make.

I have wondered if they actually legalised weed, to grow commercially – there wouldn’t be a single tomato to buy in Tesco ever again as all those seas of Plastic greenhouses would all be going to pot.