A little less than a month ago I wrote about the three year-old found in possession of a couple of bags of his step-father’s weed and looked forward to the date of the court case. That case has now come and gone with a custodial sentence of eight weeks being handed down at Manchester Crown Court this week.
Reportedly so ashamed of the consequences of his addiction, the convicted man has suddenly had some kind of epiphany and agreed to start attending counseling as well as giving up cannabis immediately. With a string of convictions for possession and production of cannabis over the last two years, I have to say I am more than a little sceptical about this dramatic turn around given the lack of impact that previous court involvement has had in his behavior. The fact that this statement was made to the court by his defence counsel makes me doubly suspicious about its validity…
Recorder Michael Leeming told him he should be ashamed of himself, saying:
‘You allowed this situation to come about. A three-year-old child was able to help himself to the cannabis and then take it into a school setting, and you can imagine the consequences if he had given it to another child or swallowed it himself. I have to take into account the concern of the other parents after drugs were brought into their child’s school. This offense is far too serious to overlook and it will bring home to you the dangers of dabbling in drugs.’
He added:
‘At first you said you had confiscated the drugs from a visitor to your flat . . . but when you were arrested you admitted that the drugs were yours. You left them on the bed the night before when you had been smoking cannabis. You should have put them out of reach of your child but you failed to do this.’
There is no indication that any Drug Treatment and Testing Orders or other ongoing monitoring has been put in place (although I hope that this would be the case) and it goes without saying that the offender will be back out on the streets in less than a month unless something catastrophic happens in the interim. My biggest concern in all of this is that the child involved is looked after. The convicted mans father was, according to reports, murdered in 2004 in a drug related incident. I would have thought that this would send a far more significant message to his family than a month in the clink, but the murdered man’s son has simply continued the legacy of drug misuse, and now, as this case illustrates, another generation has become involved. This cycle needs to be broken…and quickly!
In other related news:
On the other side of the world, American authorities have recovered more than £2,000,000 of cannabis, weighing in at an unbelievable 4 tonnes, from the ocean after 160 bales of the drug were discovered floating off the coast of California, just south of Los Angeles. It would be nice to get a few seizures like this in the UK and stop the dealers getting their hands on it…I shall be down the beach with a set of NVG’s tonight to see what I can find.
