A group of Italian parliamentarians is contemplating the price of vanity after falling victim to an investigative sting and being exposed as drug takers on prime-time television.
The Italian deputies walking out of parliament on to the sunny piazza had at first been only too pleased to oblige when a reporter and camera crew asked them for their views on the 2007 budget.
They posed for the cameras, offered pithy judgments on Italy's finances and thought nothing of it when a pretty make-up girl wiped the sweat from their brows.
What they did not know was that the interviews were a fake and the attentive make-up girl was using swabs on their foreheads. The results, according to the television program which staged the stunt, showed that of 50 deputies, a dozen tested positive for cannabis and four for cocaine.
One of the MPs who fell victim was Franco Grillini, a member of the Party of the Democratic Left, the ex-communist main party of the coalition Government.
"I had only had half a bottle of Chianti," Mr Grillini, a prominent spokesman on gay rights, said. "I've done drugs in the past, but now my preferred drugs are good wine and sex."
The sting was staged by producers of Le Iene (The Hyenas), a popular prime-time show that combines political satire with investigative journalism. The results, they said, suggested that at least a third of Italy's MPs had taken drugs within the previous 36 hours.
The deputies found the results of their "interviews" all over yesterday's front pages - but not in the way they had hoped. But amid parliamentary uproar, the show was ordered by Italy's privacy authority to withdraw the part on drugs and deputies.
The program, an irreverent, fast-moving show aimed at younger viewers and broadcast on Italia Uno, one of the three commercial channels owned by Silvio Berlusconi, claimed that the deputies' faces would have been obscured and their voices altered to hide their identities.
But the story was out and deputies campaigning for the liberalisation of tough anti-drugs laws passed by Mr Berlusconi's former centre-right government were quick to accuse their colleagues of hypocrisy.
Paolo Ferrero, the communist Minister for Social Solidarity, said it was "common knowledge" that Italian politicians took drugs, including cocaine.
"Perhaps that's why the drug possession thresholds set by the last government were more permissive where cocaine was concerned compared with cannabis."
Paolo Cento, leader of the Greens, part of the nine-party centre-left coalition led by Romano Prodi, attacked deputies who "vote for anti-liberty laws while sniffing cocaine".
Daniele Capezzone, leader of the Radical Party, also part of the centre-Left coalition, accused the privacy regulator of censorship.
"I respect the regulator, but I demand that the show be aired," he said, adding: "I have always said that if a police dog sniffing for drugs were taken into certain political offices, first its nose would go crazy and then it would give up altogether."
No comments:
Post a Comment