Mary Jane

There will be few readers who don't have a firm opinion about marijuana, so I won't dwell on the mafia hoping it will never be legalised, or the medical uses thereof and so on. We'll leave the American War on Drugs, cranked up by Richard Nixon and now quietly imploding as more and more states legalise the consumption of cannabis, for another time.
Here, they reckon that 7.3% of Spaniards aged between 15 and 64 smoke it at least once a month. That's 2.2 million people (2017 figures). Which, in turn, is a lot of product consumed.
Since the consumers can't buy it in the estanco (where the Ministry of Health could guarantee the quality), they must either grow their own (apparently, one is allowed a couple of plants, hidden from public view, for private use), or buy it from Dave (not his real name) down in Chinatown.
In short, it keeps a lot of people in business. Not however the sort of folk that the Authorities should approve of. But there you go. A few get caught, a few more more make out like, er bandits.
Almería Hoy has an interesting headline this week: it says that 244 'narcos' and three tons of weed were decommissioned across the province in 2019.
We wonder how much survived the police raids and made it down to Dave.