Forty cannabis plantations were discovered in a week on the island of Huahine by the gendarmerie, the public prosecutor in French Polynesia said on Tuesday March 24 in a statement.
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Huahine is a small island populated by 6,000 inhabitants, in the archipelago of the Leeward Islands, located between Tahiti and Bora Bora.
From March 15 to 21, twelve gendarmes, including a dog team, crisscrossed the island with the municipal police.
"This research made it possible to locate 40 plantations, to seize 3,428 plants of cannabis and to confuse 40 individuals"
, specifies the prosecution.
Checks at the airport and port of Huahine led to other seizures: sticks, dried weed, and bottles of cannabis oil.
Several hundred kilograms of cannabis were cremated.
Pakalolo (brain burn, in Hawaiian), the local name for cannabis, is frequently cultivated and consumed in French Polynesia.
Methamphetamine, a much more addictive and harmful designer drug from the United States and Mexico, has been rampant in the territory for the past two decades.
In certain cases, specifies the prosecutor, the sale of pakalolo
“serves to feed the cash of drug traffickers, which they reinvest in the traffic of ice”
, one of the methamphetamines.
The police destroyed 39,731 plants of cannabis in 2019 and 33,449 in 2020 throughout French Polynesia.
Before the investigations in Huahine, they had already destroyed 5,114 feet in 2021.