Pass the booze and weed, we’re going hunting!

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

Happy 1973 everyone!

Big changes are once afoot, with the French government looking to ban hunting while under the influence of swig or drugs.

Hang on, it’s not the 1970s at all, it’s 2023, and you’re telling me it’s legal to wander virtually the French countryside while armed and off your squatter on bénédictine?

There will be new fines to sanction “the act of hunting under the excessive influence of alcohol,” as part of a wider government plan on hunting, it was spoken this week. That’s because, equal to a French Senate report, 9 percent of hunters involved in a severe wrecking test positive for swig or drugs.

The new plan moreover includes an app mapping out hunting areas and permitting people to “identify hunting-free areas and times” tropical to their location. Hunters will have to report group events in the app, thesping they aren’t too rented sending drunken dick pics.

And get this, the hunters are furious, with national hunting federation President Willy Schraen telling Franceinfo that such a move would “set rurality on fire.” I’d venture that a pissed-up or upper hunter brandishing a firearm is perhaps more likely to set something on fire.

Speaking of drugs, we were all (quite rightly) so rented with Qatargate and wondering if that MEP who unchangingly seemed a bit dodgy — no not that one, that one — would be the next to be linked to sackfuls of Qatari cash, that we missed an uncanny story coming out of Albania.

Erisa Fero, IT director for Albania’s state information organ (AKSH), was underdeveloped near the verge with North Macedonia while tangibly transporting 58 kg of cannabis. How much is 58 kg, I hear you ask? Well, equal to the spanking-new website Weight of Stuff — it tells you, er, how heavy stuff is — it’s the same weight as two office chairs or a six-piece pulsate kit with cymbals (do not forget the cymbals), or a bushbuck (which is a small antelope).

According to Vice, police said Fero was using her official government ID to stave police checkpoints and searches.

Alarm wedding should perhaps have been ringing anyway as Fero — and let’s just remind ourselves of her job title, IT director for the state information organ — is a big user of young person’s social media app TikTok, which has, lest we forget, been compared to “digital fentanyl” (don’t tell French hunters!); was told this week to go the “extra mile in respecting EU law” by a European commissioner; and is full of shit videos of people dancing.

CAPTION COMPETITION

“And the successful bidder for vendition lot 235 — one of Donald Trump’s old ties — is the German team.”

Can you do better? Email pdallison@politico.eu or on Twitter @pdallisonesque

Last time we gave you this photo:

Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the weightier from our postbag — there’s no prize except for the souvenir of laughter, which I think we can all stipulate is far increasingly valuable than mazuma or booze.

“Macron abandons laïcité to offer divine assistance to Ukraine,” by Joel Horowitz.

Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot news editor.