Rap artist Wiz Khalifa made headlines a few days ago after telling his 11 million Instagram followers that he had smoked a joint at the Blue Lagoon.

Tourism Minister Edward Zammit Lewis played down the incident, saying "these artists have their own style" while saying everyone had to respect local laws.

But that didn't seem to faze the rapper, who showed up at a press conference the following day smoking what appeared to be a joint. 

And when police announced that they had arrested 11 people for marijuana-related offences during yesterday's Isle of MTV concert, Maltese social media users soon began to highlight the disparity of treatment. 

 

 

Even Opposition MP Clyde Puli got involved. 

 

 

This isn't the first time the yearly Isle of MTV concert has left local authorities in an uncomfortable position. Rapper Snoop Dogg, who has modeled his public persona on promoting marijuana, had no compulsions about sharing his love of weed with the Floriana crowd that watched him perform back in 2011. 

Khalifa has also made marijuana a key component of his act, and recently announced plans to launch a line of marijuana products. 

Though Khalifa's predilection for the odd joint appears to have left local authorities nonplussed, a number of celebrities had a somewhat tougher time convincing overseas authorities to turn a blind eye to their smoking habits. 

1. Joe Cocker

Back in the 1970s, Joe Cocker was a big deal.  So big, in fact, that his 1972 Australian tour was on track to break touring records the Beatles had set when they toured the country back in 1964. 

But Cocker and his band members had not reckoned with the conservative zeal of Prime Minister William McMahon's Liberal government.

Cocker and five band members were caught with marijuana while in Adelaide, and within days the immigration minister had signed deportation papers and given the singer and his entourage 48 hours to leave the country. 

An unrepentant Cocker didn't try to hide what he made of the outcry. “In five years marijuana will be legalised in Australia, and the same cat who is trying to throw us out now will be smoking it himself," he said. 

2. Paul McCartney 

When the former Fab Four member flew to Tokyo in 1980 to perform, he made the decision to try smuggle more than 200g of marijuana in with him. 

“We were about to fly to Japan and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get anything to smoke over there,” McCartney said 25 years later. “This stuff was too good to flush down the toilet, so I thought I’d take it with me.”

The legendary singer ended up spending nine days in a Japanese jail cell before he was released and deported. Going cold turkey must have cleared his mind, since upon returning to the USA he immediately broke up his band Wings. 

3. Amy Winehouse

Talk of the talented jazz singer's use of Class A drugs regularly made the newspapers, but it was marijuana that got her arrested in Norway. 

She and her husband Blake Fielder-Civil were caught with 7g of the drug by Norwegian authorities in 2007. They were fined 3850 kroner (€410) and released. 

4. Justin Bieber

When the singer was stopped for drag racing in Miami Beach in 2014, police noticed that he was slurring and reeked of marijuana. 

He was arrested and subsequently tested positive for the drug - as well as failing an alcohol breathalyser test. 

An online petition calling for Bieber, who is Canadian, to be deported from the USA got almost 275,000 signatures and even prompted a reply from the White House. 

Bieber eventually made a $50,000 donation to a youth charity as part of a plea deal to settle the case, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to highlight the disparity of treatment between him and other migrants.

5. John Lennon

Like his Beatles colleague McCartney, Lennon was a sucker for a joint.

But when his anti-Vietnam stance began causing then-president Richard Nixon headaches, the singer's guilty plea to a 1968 cannabis possession charge in London came back to haunt him. 

The Nixon administration argued that Lennon, as a convicted drug felon, had no right to be in the country and ought to be deported. 

Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono got their powerful friends to lobby on their behalf, and didn't end up going anywhere - but the case was used as recently as 2012 by the Obama administration as the legal basis to defer the deportation of more than 580,000 migrants.