As reported, 33-year-old Carmel Vassallo has been busted with four cannabis plants in his possession and rewarded for his horticultural pains with a six-month jail term. According to my trusty Matsec-issue calculator, that works out to 1.5 months' jail-time for every plant confiscated. Is that the going rate? We are told the plants were 35 centimetres high. Furious scribbling on a piece of paper and further mathematical calculations unveil an estimate of 1.286 days in jail for every centimetre of reefer herbal matter. Data on leaf density and stem diameter is sadly missing, which means I could not factor it into my arithmetic.

In any case, it is quite an interesting statistic and it becomes even more interesting when you contrast it with the grand total of the zero days in jail awarded to those who embezzled hundreds of thousands of euros in the VAT fraud. One cannot but be impressed with the Maltese justice system's discretion in handing out sentences. So impressed, in fact, that I offer to bequeath my calculator to the law courts in furtherance of this balanced expression of justice.