That's some heavy (s**t) stuff man.
Posted on 06/17/2014 7:21:27 AM PDT by PoloSec
Near-continuous gunfire rang out Tuesday from a lawless village in southern Albania as hundreds more police arrived to battle well-armed marijuana growers who were trying to thwart a government crackdown.
By mid-day, about 800 police had surrounded the village of Lazarat after shooting overnight wounded a special forces police officer.
With local television broadcasting the events live, police and the Interior Ministry urged the village's 5,000 residents to stay indoors and warned others to stay away from the area, some 230 kilometers (140 miles) south of the capital, Tirana.
On Monday, about 500 police raided Lazarat, running into 30 suspected marijuana growers who opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades, heavy mortars and machine guns. After many of the growers fled, police say they destroyed 11,000 cannabis plants and found marijuana in barrels and sacks, but they could not enter the whole village.
Albania is a major marijuana-producing country in Europe and a transit point for other drugs coming in from Asia and Latin America to Europe. Gangs based in Lazarat are believed to produce about 900 metric tons of cannabis a year, worth about 4.5 billion euros ($6.1 billion) — just under half of the small Balkan country's GDP, according to the Interior Ministry.
Over the past few weeks, Albanian authorities have launched a nationwide operation to uproot the cannabis plantations.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
Looks like several “authorities” have decided they’re not getting a big enough cut of the action.
“Albania Albania, it borders on the Adriatic”..a hat tip to CHEERS!!
With drug sales being half the GDP, it seems stupid to take the income of these entrepreneurs away. I would fight too.
That's some heavy (s**t) stuff man.
Albanian spring —
Send j kerry over there; tell them to legalize it.
Will solve all the problems.
Prohibition has always been a racketeering enterprise.
I’d never really thought about it before, but Albania probably has an excellent climate for growing cannabis.
It’s situated pretty much the same was as Humboldt County, California - Virtually identical latitude, immediately east of a large body of water, and hilly terrain.
Will solve all the problems.
Not all, but many. There would probably still be a lot of money in pot for Albanians - since I'm confident that most of it is for export - but at least under legalization Albanians won't need to be or become criminals to get a slice of that market.
After legalizing, Tax the sales, like Colorado. /S
Legalizing will just shift the problems.
Meanwhile, the Albanians are still dealing lots of other stuff.
To solve OUR most pressing problem, have them ship one cargo ship full to 1600 Penn Ave. That might let us get our act together, and THEN maybe we might discuss Albania and pot.
Shift which problems to where? Legalizing will certainly substantially reduce the problem of drug-war-inflated profits going to criminals.
Stop making sense.
Criminals don’t ‘go straight’ when a criminal enterprise is eliminated.
They expand/transform to another crime. Such as other drugs, extortion of the legal growers, human trafficking, kidnapping, etc.
Not to mention the problem of providing drugs to humans, and the effect on the person and society. Addicts commit crime to purchase their drugs, or abandon/ignore their children, and so on...
They expand/transform to another crime. Such as other drugs,
For which they can't create additional demand by sheer force of will.
extortion of the legal growers, human trafficking, kidnapping, etc.
None of which offer the return on effort of drugs - since unlike a buyer who cooperates in the crime before, during, and after, real crimes have victims (and their loved ones) who offer opposition before, during, and after.
Not to mention the problem of providing drugs to humans, and the effect on the person and society. Addicts commit crime to purchase their drugs, or abandon/ignore their children, and so on...
None of those problems have been improved by drug criminalization - and theft has been made worse by the increase in drug prices.
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