ALBANIAN ACCESS DENIED

 If you’ve
smoked any herb in Europe over the past decade or so, there’s a good chance it
originated from Albania—or indeed, from a single lawless village in the south
of that obscure Balkan country.

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However, Albania’s
status as a cannabis capital was seriously threatened earlier this summer when
a government crackdown on its entrenched and highly-organized illicit cannabis business
was hailed as a success. “Albania has been reported as
a significant supplier of cannabis products, mostly cannabis herb (marijuana)
to Europe for some years,” said Laurent Laniel, Scientific
analyst, supply reduction at the European
Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA). “In a 2009-11 survey of national reports to the EMCDDA
by 30 countries . . . Albania was the second-most mentioned country as a source
of cannabis products.” Considering that the most-mentioned country in those same
reports, traditional hash hub Morocco, exports mostly resin, Albania, with a
population of just three million, certainly stood amongst Europe’s leading leaf
suppliers.

Cannabis is
illegal in Albania, but since decades of communist rule collapsed in 1991,
successive governments have lacked the political will to reign-in its
cultivation. Only the current, left-leaning administration has shown any
serious stomach for uprooting, literally and figuratively, the country’s gang-controlled
canna-business. As its name implies, the Alliance for a European Albania (AEA),
which was elected into power last September, covets membership of the European
Union and sees cleaning up the country’s reputation as a den of organized crime
as a significant step in that direction. (Albania was awarded EU candidate
status the very week that its anti-cannabis operation concluded.)

 “Albania underwent of period
of anarchy due to the collapse of a series of pyramid-like investments schemes
in 1997,” said Besar Likmeta, Editor for the Balkan Investigative Reporting
Network, based in Albania’s capital, Tirana. “With the following conflict and
refugee crisis in Kosovo in 1999, it took years to uphold state control on the
territory.”

Italian
financial police claim that Albania’s cannabis production was earning more than
€4.5 billion ($6.1
billion in American dollars) annually, which would dwarf the country’s official
$2.3 billion in total
export revenues for 2012 and be equivalent to as much as 30 percent of the
28-country EU’s estimated $20-47 billion cannabis market.

The “Marijuana Mecca” of Lazarat—a village of
5,000 inhabitants close to Albania’s border with Greece that has been
effectively self-governing for around 15 years—is thought to have alone
produced around half of the country’s cannabis. But Albania’s criminal economy is opaque at best, and these
ostensibly staggering statistics are open to both question and interpretation. “The
evaluation made by the Italian financial police on the value of 900 metric tons
of marijuana is based on its street value in Italy,” said Likmeta. “The price
for a kilogram of marijuana sold in Lazarat was between €200-300 [$270-400]. So
at that price, value of exports would be much lower.”

By Likmeta’s reckoning, the true gross value
of Albanian-produced cannabis could be below $350 million (ignoring the costs
of police seizures, bribes, labor and transportation), which would leave oil as
the country’s main export. “The Italians calculated the whole added value of
criminal income that it would create in Albania and Italy, and the majority of
€4.5 billion went to the traffickers who smuggled and sold outside Albania,”
Likmeta continued.

But $350 million goes a long way in a country
with an average per capita income of $4,600 and, judging by the resistance met
by hundreds of police officers when they descended upon Lazarat in mid-June, at
least some people were making serious money from cannabis in Albania. “The pot
trade from Albania was controlled by Albanian organized crime, which in turn
has good links with Italian mafia, but also branches across Europe through the
Albanian diaspora,” said Likmeta.

From Lazarat’s cannabis-covered slopes, where
most menial work was done by seasonal workers from elsewhere, residents
defended their de facto fiefdom with heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled
grenades, mortars and even an anti-aircraft weapon. It took elite police units
in armored vehicles and helicopters to quell five days of furious resistance. “Police
seized more 66 tons of marijuana and destroyed more 133,000 plants and saplings
[in Lazarat],” said Likmeta. “Other drugs and plants were burned by the
villagers as the police closed in.” Albanian police reported also finding two
drug processing laboratories in the village, as well as 11 heavy weapons and
over 7,000 bullets. Fourteen people were arrested during the operation.

The choking-off of such a major supplier
seems likely to impact cannabis prices much further afield, at least in the
short-term, as Lazarat’s product has been seized in Italy, Greece and more
recently, Germany. “There
are already reports that the price of marijuana has gone up in Greece,” said
Likmeta. “The impact on the European market is hard to predict.”