Albanian Police Go Airborne for Anti-Cannabis Offensive

At 8.30am one day in June, an MI-8 helicopter with room for 24 passengers took off from Farka helicopter base in Tirana for a monitoring operation headed by the state police’s director for crimes, Josif Shtembari.

The helicopter headed north, and after 30 minutes in the air, it touched down at a stadium in the town of Lezha to take on board six police inspectors tasked with monitoring whether there are cannabis plantations in the surrounding region.

These flights have started to become routine for the Albanian police over the last three months, and they are set to continue intensively until July. 

This period is crucial for the police in their battle against cannabis cultivation in Albania.

Seeds can be sown from the end of April to the end of the June, and in July the first harvest takes place. 

The police’s mission is clear: they don’t want to allow a situation similar to 2016, a year in which cultivation of such illegal crops became widespread in the country. 

Police in 2016 were able to destroy 2.5 million of cannabis plants, although it is believed that many others were harvested by the growers. The large amounts of cannabis seized at the country’s borders during the first months of 2017 appeared to be proof of this. 

The widespread cultivation of cannabis become a political issue in February 2017, when the opposition started a round-the-clock protest in a tent outside the prime minister’s office. 

The opposition put the ‘cannabisisation of Albania’ on top of its political agenda, fearing that the money reaped from this illegal activity could be injected into electoral process, and accusing the ruling majority of letting the phenomenon flourish for electoral gain. 

The deal between opposition and government that followed the crisis made the fight against cannabis an issue to be overseen by a task force made up of ministers from the ruling majority and ‘technical’ ministers appointed the by opposition. 

 Police feeling positive

Albanian Police Go Airborne for Anti-Cannabis Offensive from BIRN on Vimeo.

Optimism is running high within the police that this year anti-cannabis operations will be effective, marking the first year in which the country can significantly reduce cultivation. 

Police director Shtembari told BIRN that monitoring from the air over the past months has shown that cultivation has been eradicated. 

“Albanian terrain is very mountainous in some parts, so air control is necessary. But I can certainly say that the situation cannot be compared to 2016; is completely different and the overwhelming majority of the terrain controlled up to now has been clear [of cannabis],” he said.

Shtembari’s optimism also comes from the fact that since January 2017, a three-year national strategy on the fight against cannabis has started to be implemented. 

The strategy for the first time involves almost every state structure in the battle against cultivation, while local government has also been asked to play an important role.

The strategy incentivises ordinary people to join in the attempt to eradicate cultivation – from April, the police are offering a reward of more than 2,000 euros for anyone who provides correct information about cannabis fields. 

“I’m optimistic that this colossal work is going to pay off. Like never before, other state institutions are getting so much more organised and supportive of the fight. Now they have legal consequences if they don’t act,” Shtembari said. 

According to the police, the first result of this year’s offensive have been confirmed by their close partners in monitoring cannabis cultivation, the Italian police’s Guardia di Finanza, a militarised law enforcement agency under the control of Rome’s Minister of Economy and Finance which is Italy’s main anti-drug police force.

A police press statement last Wednesday said that Italian police force colonel Giovanni Conti had confirmed in a meeting with the Albanian police’s general director, Haki Cako that in 23 hours of helicopter monitoring of Albanian terrain, no cannabis plantations were identified.

However, the Guardia di Finanza plans to conduct 92 more hours of monitoring flights over Albania by the end of the year. 

Demand for dope satisfied?

A police helicopter during a monitoring flight. Photo: State Police.

During the flight, the police inspectors from Lezha remained silent, carefully monitoring the areas under their responsibility. They asked the pilots to circle around and turn twice over mountains and hillsides where they suspected there might be indications of possible cultivation. 

For an hour, the helicopter flew over the Lezha, Mirdite and Kurbin areas, and monitoring was also carried out conducted around the Patok Lagoon on the Adriatic Sea shore.

Official reports of the airborne inspections in the Lezha area will be compiled, although the police director told BIRN, not without pride, that the inspectors had already told him that the area was “all clear”.

Artan Hoxha, a renowned Albanian crime reporter, told BIRN that he believes that the cannabis crop in 2017 is going to be much smaller than it was the previous year due to the pressure from opposition politicians, foreign powers and local media.

Hoxha said that the added efforts by the police and other institutions to crack down would have an effect, though he believes that there is also another reason for a low level of production this year – that the huge amount of cultivation in 2016 fulfilled market demands. 

“Given the experience of the two decades of cultivation in Albania, production goes low after years in which there has been mass cultivation [like 2016]. This because the price goes down and the market is already flooded with cannabis,” he said. 

However, Hoxha believes that despite the increased efforts of the police this year, cultivation might continue on a smaller scale in isolated areas of Albania where there are few other sources of income. 

“In remote areas of the country, where people have been doing this for decades, I believe cultivation will continue on smaller plantations, and this is because they don’t know what else to do,” he said.