Hash (24 page)

But most of the British hash gangsters I have spoken to for this book claimed that despite their public pledges to the contrary, the agency has done little to stem the flow of hash into the UK, although the UKBC would no doubt disagree and they have certainly been trying to publicise their so-called ‘crackdown’ on hash in recent years.

Unlike their Spanish counterparts the Guardia Civil, the UK Border Control (UKBC) were extremely reluctant to help me with my research for this project. It was frustrating because the UKBC’s efforts to catch hash smugglers had led to a number of very dramatic high-profile arrests in recent years and I wanted to hear directly from the men and women who claimed they were cracking down on the hash
smugglers, as well as those dealing in more dangerous Class A substances.

Eventually I traced an old contact who’d been one of the top officials in the drugs investigation arm of the UK Customs and Excise before it was absorbed into UK Border Control. Part of his job had been to travel the world uncovering hash supply routes from places as far afield as Afghanistan and Tibet. He turned out to be a mine of information. We shall call him ‘Robert’ here to protect his identity since he still works undercover on a freelance basis for the UKBC and a number of other forces around the world.

Robert explains: ‘There has been this tendency in recent years for nations to pull back from cracking down on hash in favour of concentrating on heavier drugs but in the UK we always believed that hash was an inevitable precursor to those more serious drugs and their associated addictions. Hash may not be as harmful in itself but the profits for smuggling it for the criminals are vast and I believe that many of those same smugglers also carry A-class narcotics.’

Robert continues: ‘I know it may sound a tad old fashioned, but we believed and still do as far as I am aware, that hash is definitely worth our attention. It’s helping feed a huge section of the underworld and it needs to be dealt with seriously and efficiently. Our partners in Europe and beyond are, quite frankly, useless. They are just not prepared to prioritise it. There have been many times when I’ve tried to discuss this with our alleged partners in the fight against drugs and realised everything I was saying was falling on deaf ears.’

He says that in his day dealing with the authorities in many of the Narco States such as Afghanistan, Morocco and Mexico was a ‘nightmare’. ‘I’d fly out to these place with appointments to see police chiefs and they wouldn’t even turn up for meetings. I knew a lot of them were corrupt but you’d think they would at least go through the motions, surely?’

One time Robert tracked a major UK criminal’s articulated lorry when it travelled across Europe into Turkey, where it picked up a shipment of hash, which had originally come from Afghanistan. Robert says: ‘The idea was to make sure all the hash was on board and then track the lorry as it travelled back through Europe until it turned up at Dover. Trouble was that most of the countries it was going to travel through were riddled with corrupt police, so we decided we couldn’t even inform them of our plans in case the cannabis smugglers got wind of what was happening. We just crossed our fingers and hoped the lorry would get to the UK eventually.’

Robert says that for the following ten days, his team continued shadowing the truck and then raided the vehicle within minutes of it driving off a ferry ramp in Dover.

‘But it could easily have ended in disaster and I hated the attitude of all those different countries. No wonder criminals think that hash smuggling is a “safe” option compared with dealing in cocaine.’

Robert currently works for various countries as a consultant in drug prevention and anti-smuggling operations. ‘It’s been
an incredible eye opener for me. So few countries even have a clear anti-drug policy. Most of them just don’t have the finances to properly try and crack down on drug shipments. I often get hired to help on the ground officers learn how to uncover drug shipments but of course that is only a small part of the preventative programme. You need money and technical resources to really make a dent in drug trafficking.’

Robert is not optimistic about the future. ‘I think the influx of foreign gangs into countries like the UK, France, Spain and Italy is already causing a flood of poor quality recreational drugs into those nations. These gangsters are desperate to make the biggest profits possible while they attempt to make a mark for themselves as criminals. Countries like the UK are being swamped with four times the amount of hash that used to come in as these criminals try to create huge markets out of substandard, dangerously-cut drugs, and that includes hash.’

And, says Robert, the authorities have little or no chance of infiltrating these gangs. He explains: ‘The police and other authorities rely on informants but it’s getting harder and harder to infiltrate these criminal gangs because they are such tightly knit groups. Informers are few and far between these days. The gangs from eastern Europe are so ruthless that other criminals don’t dare cross them.’

Three years ago, Robert was given a six-month contract to work with the Afghan police to try and stem the flow of hash from the troubled, war-torn nation. ‘It was pretty pointless. I felt as if I had been hired by the Afghan government simply
to keep the Americans happy. None of the locals care about the illegalities of hash or even heroin for that matter. Many of the farmers have been selling it to the west for thirty, even forty years. They consider it a crop just like anything else and most of the local police feel exactly the same way.’

Robert believes that the Afghan government tacitly allows the cultivation of cannabis because it employs tens of thousands of Afghans. ‘It’s similar to Morocco but on a smaller scale,’ he explains. ‘I tried my hardest to explain the attitudes [to drugs] in the West to the Afghan police but even the top officials looked at me like I was mad.’

But it wasn’t until Robert agreed to go for dinner at the house of a local police chief that he fully appreciated just how different that attitude was. He continued: ‘It was typical Afghan generosity. This police chief laid on a huge meal for me with his family and friends in his house. I felt quite humbled when I turned up there and saw how much effort they’d made.’

Then two of the police chief’s adult sons sat down either side of Robert. ‘And d’you know what they did? They each lit up a hash joint and started smoking it there right in front of my eyes. I didn’t know what to say, so I ignored it but then the police chief himself pointed out what they were doing and I realised it was a deliberate attempt to try and convince me that hash was part of normal Afghan society.’

Robert sums up: ‘I don’t know how we in the West can overcome those sort of attitudes towards hashish. Sometimes
even I believe that it might be a whole lot easier if recreational drugs were legalised and then we could at least control it more closely but I can’t see the politicians doing that in my lifetime, although they will in the end.’

If the current rate of new hash recruits continues it is estimated there will be one billion smokers by the end of this century.

A recent United Nations report on cannabis in Afghanistan revealed that between 10,000 and 24,000 hectares of cannabis plants are grown in Afghanistan every year. While other countries have far larger cannabis cultivation, the astonishing yield of the Afghan cannabis crop (145 kilograms per hectare of hashish, the resin produced from cannabis, as compared to around 40 kg/ha in Morocco) makes Afghanistan the producer of the world’s most powerful hash. The UN survey exposed large-scale cannabis plant cultivation in half of Afghanistan’s provinces, where it is three times cheaper to cultivate a hectare of cannabis plant than a hectare of opium poppies. The UN has urged authorities to find legal crops for the Afghan farmers to make their income
from, but there is little hope of this ever happening as long as worldwide demand for hash continues. And like so many terrorist groups across the globe, the Taliban’s struggle against the Coalition forces is said to be subsidised by hash production.

In Argentina hash is an immensely popular recreational drug. In early 2012, the Argentine Navy stopped a lorry driver on an isolated coastal road in the province of Missiones after the vehicle was seen making a beachside ‘pick-up’ that turned out to be of more than a ton of hash. The navy also discovered an abandoned boat nearby. The final haul consisted of 822 bricks of hash with a weight of 1,047.49 kilograms, said to be worth at least $1 million on the open market.

Australia’s vast coastline is virtually impossible to police so authorities have fought a long and difficult war against hash smugglers. One of their few successes was in June 2012, when New South Wales police arrested 18 people and seized more than 20 kilograms of hash during simultaneous raids targeting the drug trade. Nearly 150 officers executed 18 search warrants at locations from the Sydney suburbs of Bondi and Cabramatta
north to Tuggerah Lakes, Forster and Tamworth in a massive swoop by officers.

Bali fiercely protects its reputation as a safe, peaceful holiday island by warning hash users and smugglers they risk a death sentence if caught. Two Russian nationals are the latest narco-tourists to face the death penalty if convicted. One of them, a 30-year-old yoga teacher was held in Bali after arriving from the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, with 88 hashish capsules in his stomach. Two days later another Russian national, a 43-year-old art designer, swallowed 359 hashish capsules and was also arrested in the Bali airport. Both men had bought their hash in India and officials said the total value of the drugs was estimated at 966 million rupiah ($105,300). Meanwhile in neighbouring Indonesia, a 57-year-old Dutchman was arrested at Lombok’s airport in 2012 after arriving from Singapore carrying 3.7 kilograms of hash in the lining of his suitcase. He also could face the death penalty if found guilty.

In one notorious Rio
favela
(shantytown) called Mandela, drug dealers have stopped selling crack and encouraged more
dealing in hash because they believe it is ‘less harmful’ to the community. The drug bosses, often born and raised in the very slums they now lord over, say crack destabilises their communities, making it harder to control areas long abandoned by the government. Law enforcement and city authorities, however, take credit for the change, arguing that drug gangs are only trying to create a distraction and persuade police to call off an offensive to take back the slums.

Canada’s role inside the secret underworld of hash is pivotal as it provides a gateway to the lucrative US market. As a result, there has been a steady increase in hash seizures over the last ten years. The home market for smoking has also increased significantly and latest Canadian statistics show the highest proportion of hash smokers in the country are aged between 15 and 24. Canadian authorities say that by targeting young people, traffickers are leaving a trail of ruined lives, unrealised potential, health care costs, lost productivity, crime associated with drugs and related violence which often affects a user’s family and friends. In Montreal, the alleged head of a street gang of hash dealers was one of three men killed in the city during one deadly 48-hour period in early 2012. In Toronto, a much-feared hash gangster was deemed too dangerous to be released from prison after it was discovered he’d managed from inside jail to arrange
hash shipments from Jamaica, tamper with a witness testifying against him and orchestrate an attack on an inmate at another prison.

In October 2012, Chile proposed a bill that would legalise the consumption, possession and cultivation of marijuana. Prior to the introduction of the legalisation bill, one of its proponents even publicly admitted his own use of hash in an attempt to show that use doesn’t equal abuse. But his comments prompted an attack by hysterical conservative opponents, who then spearheaded a bill to ‘prohibit marijuana use in Congress’.

China has a steadily increasing number of cannabis smokers. The Chinese government estimates that there are between 2 and 3 million drug users in China and at least one million of them smoke hash. To put these figures into perspective, when Mao came to power in 1949 there were an estimated 20 million drug users in China. Using harsh methods, including executions, the Communists were able to rid China of its drug problem almost overnight. Then in the 1980s, China opened up more and eased its border controls and
drugs began flowing into the country. But it wasn’t until the turn of the new century that drug use really took off. China still has tough, some would say draconian, drug laws. Getting caught dealing or trafficking even small amounts of hash can result in a death sentence. Meanwhile secret hash ‘farms’ have been set up in some of the poorer regions of the country. It is reckoned that over the next 20 years, the Chinese underworld will push up production in order to cash in on the international hash market.

Back in the late 1970s, Colombia was one of the world’s major marijuana producers before it became better known for its cocaine production. Now drug barons are encouraging a comeback to their former days of hash glory. In the summer of 2012, Colombian police seized almost 10,000 pounds – nearly five tons – of marijuana with an ‘estimated street value’ of $5.5 million over the span of three days in the cities of Medellin and Pereira.

The city of Medellin – once notorious for its cocaine traffickers and birthplace of the legendary drug baron Pablo Escobar – is emerging as the new ‘capital’ for hash production. Police uncovered 5,000 pounds of cannabis in a truck carrying oranges in 2011. The massive payload – consisting of more than 101 bales of marijuana – weighed almost 6,000 pounds. That shipment belonged to a crime lord known only as
‘Sebastian’, head of the ‘Oficina de Envigado’, a crime syndicate founded by Pablo Escobar, which still allegedly holds majority control of Medellin’s underworld.