Albanian police destroy thousands of cannabis plants

Albanian police have found and destroyed more than 17,000 cannabis sativa plants in operations carried out in the past few weeks, general police directorate spokesperson announced Thursday.

The number of cannabis-sativa plants discovered by the police officers has exceeded 100,000 in the past few days, showing drugs cultivators have not stopped growing such plants despite frequent anti-drugs raids undertaken by the Albanian police, according to the spokesperson.

Drugs in Albania are mostly cultivated in remote areas, mainly forests, while in 90 percent of the cases, the land where the narcotic plants are cultivated have no owners, making it difficult for the police to locate drug traffickers.

This is the reason why the number of arrested persons is insignificant considering the size of the cannabis or other narcotic plantations.

Several police operations have been carried out from July to August in the mountainous, remote areas in the northern and southern parts of Albania, the most popular places for the cultivation of such plants.

During the operation on Wednesday, the police found and destroyed over 80,000 cannabis plants across Albania while a week ago more than 5,000 plants were also destroyed by police, Albanian police sources said.

The district of Tepelena, Vlora, Berat in the south and the zones of Shkodra, Kruja in the north are the areas with the highest level of herbal drugs cultivation, according to police reports.

A report released by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction said Albania is one of the major herbal cannabis-producing countries in the Balkans supplying central-eastern and south-eastern Europe.

In this report, Albania was considered as an important outdoor producer of these plants. Enditem