Albania's War Against Weed Gets Hot

After having their manhoods dented last year by anti-aircraft fire and old ladies unloading AK-47s in their direction, 800 Albanian police have laid siege to the village of Lazarat, where it is said that up to FOUR BILLION quids worth of weed, or 900 tons, is grown every year.

After having their manhoods dented last year by anti-aircraft fire and old ladies unloading AK-47s in their direction, 800 Albanian police have laid siege to the village of Lazarat, where it is said that up to FOUR BILLION quids worth of weed, or 900 tons, is grown every year.

Big numbers.  But also complete fantasy.  900 tonnes into £4,000,000,000, that makes it around £4.44 million a ton, or £4444 a kilo. That’s not far from wholesale price on the streets of the UK.  Most of Albania’s weed goes to Italy, and their street prices are a lot lower than ours so how on earth did the media arrive at this ridiculous figure?  It is well known that in the drug business the farmers are the people who make the smallest profit. The fixers, middlemen and smugglers make big, as do the wholesaler and retailers and at the end of this chain Albanian weed MIGHT be pulling in £4444 a kilo.  And 900 tonnes is a lot of weed – if the average smoker smoked 7 grams a week then that’s enough weed to keep nearly 2.5 million people stoned for a whole year.

Seeing as we’re talking cannabis numbers, similarly strange figures can be found at the UN. According to them the world’s biggest producers are Morocco – at 44,000 tons of hashish a year.  (In 1997 it was  reported to be 3000 tons)  Using the same 7 grams a week average that means, according to the UN, in 2014 the Moroccans are producing enough hash to get over 119,000,000 people stoned for a whole year! That’s equivalent to one in six people in the whole of the EU smoking 7 grams of Moroccan hash every week of the year. If only! Whatsmore, if they’re using the £4444 a kilo price to calculate income then the Moroccan farmers are raking in over £195bn a year! That’s more than the GDP of the whole country. These numbers are obviously complete bullshit, they are vastly inflated to justify the military style raids of police and to scale up the fear factor for those who are still mind-fucked by 90 years of blatant and unashamed propaganda.

The Albanians may be growing 900 tons a year, at a push, but they’re not making £4bn quid a year from it.  The police are kicking their arses for daring to take their economic livelihoods into their own hands though.