Albania has become the largest producer of outdoor-grown cannabis in Europe. The potent plant has been described as “green gold” for struggling farmers. In a poor nation, it’s a billion-euro industry.
Off a dirt road, in a small village north of Tirana, there’s a half-built, tumble-down, brick house. It stands alone and looks abandoned. It isn’t. The sweet, heady odour that seeps from one of the rooms reveals its current function: cannabis production. Inside, more than half the floor space is covered with buds of the drying drug.
“There’s about 20kg here,” says the man who owns it. He is young – late 20s maybe – dressed in skinny jeans, a tight top and trainers. And he is one of thousands making money from the cannabis boom.
In Albania, a kilo of this illegal drug sells for between 100 and 200 euros (£85 to £170). In Italy it will fetch about 1,500 euros. And most of the country’s cannabis crop is trafficked out – north through Montenegro, south to Greece, or west across the Adriatic to Italy. There is no significant home market. One source estimates the illicit industry may be worth five billion euros (£4.25bn) per year – about half of Albania’s GDP.
This man employs 15 people to pick and process, and armed guards to defend his crop. When asked about police raids, he replied, “I pay the police 20%. Everybody has to pay. If you don’t pay they will take you to jail,”
For decades Albanians lived under a punishing, closed regime. Then, after communism fell, came a period marked by civil unrest and the rapid growth of organised crime. Twenty-five years later, unemployment is still high and corruption rife – conditions that enable the cannabis trade to flourish.
The government says more than two million cannabis plants have been destroyed this year, and now that the growing season is over, police are concentrating on confiscating the drug as it is prepared for trafficking out of Albania.
In a vast warehouse in the town of Rreshen, tucked into the foothills of the mountains north of Tirana, tier after tier of drying cannabis is laid out on mesh shelves. On the concrete floor, there are more waist-high mounds of the drug. Sacks of it lie around, and it spills out of the open back doors of a transit van.
In the middle of this sea of weed – his woolly hat pulled low, his glasses on the end of his nose, and a gun at his hip – is the police officer in charge, Agron Cullhaj, who describes it as the largest ever find in this area.
In their mission to rid Albania of the cannabis scourge, the government has the support of the Italians. The Guardia di Finanza pays for aerial surveillance to identify plantations, and it is their statistics that Albanian politicians quote.
Corruption is critical to the success of this illicit business – something the Home Minister recognises. “For sure police have been corrupted,” he says. “Since my first day in office, more than 3,000 police officers are under criminal or disciplinary investigations. That’s nearly 20% of the whole troop.”
Another reason the cannabis trade is hard to stub out is that it pays well – about 20 euros (£17) a day in some places. Fleets of minivans carry workers out to the countryside. In the growing season they labour in the plantations. After the harvest, they prepare and pack the drug ready for its illicit export.
Critics say it’s these daily workers who are most likely to be caught in police raids, while the big fish escape. And that even if someone connected to organised crime is picked up, there are few prosecutions on serious charges, such as membership of a criminal network.
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