Marijuana skyrockets 64% and is five times more potent

Marijuana fever is higher than ever.

Illegal plantations are multiplying throughout the country, with four clear sources of very high production: Madrid, Andalusia, the Valencian Community and Catalonia.

Last year the plants seized by the security forces soared 64% more to reach 2.3 million compared to 1.4 million in 2020. Spain has been Europe's cannabis garden for years and its leading producer, but now the problem has risen several degrees because the mafias are established and expanding their dangerous edges.

An amazing example: narcopisos grow like mushrooms in cities like Madrid, Malaga, Barcelona and Seville, and to achieve four harvests of buds a year —only one is harvested outdoors— they use hundreds of thousands of lamps that replace the sun thanks to illegal connections to the network.

This theft of electricity reached 1.5 terawatts/hour in 2020, an energy equivalent to what Palma consumes for a year, valued at around 300 million euros, according to experts in the electricity sector.

“The huge economic benefit has attracted Albanian, Kosovar and Chinese gangs who contact growers because the demand is brutal.

The exponential growth of now has not arisen from one day to the next, but either we stop it now, or later it will be much more serious, ”warns the head of the cannabis section of the Central Narcotics Brigade of the Police.

If about 700 plants that require an initial investment of 6,000 euros can fit in a 50-square-meter flat, the benefit is between 25,000 and 32,000 euros a year, according to a recent report by the Mossos d'Esquadra.

In Catalonia, whose proximity to the Pyrenees facilitates transportation to the thirsty European market, the 826,697 seized plants shot up 212% last year compared to 2020.

No expert dares to calculate how much drug escapes police control and permeates the Spanish and foreign population.

In Spain alone, 49% of secondary school students admit to having used marijuana in the last month, according to the latest ESTUDES survey by the Ministry of Health.

The hiding places of the crop are endless (apartments, large farms with difficult access, truck trailers buried in the field, etc.) and the price of the drug skyrockets up to 10 times in countries like Cyprus, which is why it generates juicy profits.

The largest marijuana plantation in Europe, with 415,000 plants, intervened a month ago in Navarra.

In 2020, the Security Forces arrested 7,182 people (record number) for trafficking marijuana, more than half of them without a record and attracted by easy money.

The 59,888 kilos intervened in police operations were also a record, 83% more than in 2019, with 32,568 kilos, according to data from the Ministry of the Interior.

The escalation of this illegal traffic led the Ministry of the Interior to present last December a national action plan to quell organized crime linked to this drug throughout 2022. Despite the fact that drones and technology help locate the plantations interiors and exteriors, which blow up the electrical network, the business and its zeros prevail.

The scenario rows in favor of its expansion: Spain enjoys a favorable climate for plants to have large blooms and production to be prolific;

the economic crisis has pushed numerous people to tempt fate with small plantations that they do not internalize as a crime until the agents knock on their door;

the large expanses of land camouflage the crops outdoors and the large stock of empty houses makes it easy for the exorbitant consumption of light to go unnoticed.

Crime is so widespread that in provinces such as Granada, 90% of its 168 municipalities have had police interventions in recent years, according to Civil Guard sources.

“Social acceptance added to the climate, the soil,

Plantation intervened by the Police in Toledo.

If justice does not show that the citizen converted into a gardener belongs to a criminal organization, the penalty for trafficking ranges between one year and three years in prison because the damage is not serious to health, according to the Penal Code.

In parallel, the crime of occupation of public housing and electricity fraud are minor crimes.

The latter establishes a fine of 3 to 12 months and the large electricity companies affected (Endesa, Iberdrola and Naturgy above all) have been calling on the Government for years to toughen the penalties and make them equal to neighboring countries such as France, Italy or Germany, where the punishment ranges from six months in prison to five years.

For now, he has fallen on deaf ears.

“In Catalonia, we used to do one intervention a month, now three a day.

Society is not aware of what is coming our way.

Narcopisos are concentrated in the humblest neighborhoods of big cities, where plants flood the entire surface or sometimes the neighbors sleep in the living room and their bedrooms are full of pots and lamps.

Illegal connections (each floor consumes about 80 homes) often cause fires due to voltage overload and carry the risk of electrocution.

Anything goes, and to hook into the general network, drug traffickers have even drilled load-bearing walls, putting the stability of the buildings at risk.

The tricks are repeated: to diffuse the stench they use carbon filters that purify the air and often the extractor fans direct the air current towards the sewage system, so that the smell floods the streets of entire neighborhoods.

To avoid Police thermal imaging cameras,

Hole in the load-bearing wall of a building in Granada, made to pass the wiring of a drug store.

Technological innovation and the digitization of meters allow electricity companies to more accurately locate the buildings that house narco-flats and the flow of information with the security forces is continuous.

Another thing is to obtain the authorization of the judge to break down the door, since the indications that there are pots behind it must be solid and sometimes it is complex.

With the same number of homes, the northern area of ​​Granada today has three times the electrical power of a decade ago, and all the power transformers operate at 100%.

“There are hundreds of thousands of families in a very precarious economic situation who supplement their income with an activity that does not mean that they depend on large drug-trafficking clans for hashish from Morocco, cocaine from Colombia and heroin from Turkey,”

In recent operations, "rudimentary" machines have been detected to obtain hashish resin, which has traditionally been imported from Morocco.

"It will be the next step after going from being importers to producers (...).

The only thing that this traffic brings is insecurity because it leads to murders and robberies with violence between gangs.

The majority of people without criminal records start farming for money and come out badly,” reflect sources from the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office.

Agents of the Civil Guard move part of the marijuana plants seized in a macro-operation in Granada. Paco Puentes

A drug five times more powerful than before

The marijuana that is smoked today is not the one of yesteryear.

The average level of THC (psychoactive component of cannabis) was around 4% half a century ago and today the caches reach an average of 20% thanks to genetic manipulation, police sources point out.

The NGO Energy Control, oriented towards responsible drug use, has found an average percentage of 12.3% of THC in samples of marijuana that consumers have brought to it in the last five years.

When THC exceeds 0.2%, trafficking the plant becomes a crime.

Experts fight the widespread perception of marijuana as a soft drug that hardly causes addiction or mental disorders.

This multiplication of THC by five and the abuse of consumption among young people has caused the gaze of many experts towards this drug to be blunt about its dangers: “More than half of the cases we have due to psychosis are linked to the use of cannabis.

It is evidence that it is a very important triggering factor and in psychoses the weight of cannabis-related conditions is increasing in recent decades”, illustrates Mari Fe Bravo, head of the psychiatry service at Hospital La Paz in Madrid.

In parallel, the majority of the Congress of Deputies will foreseeably approve at the end of June to regulate the use of cannabis for medicinal purposes, in a presentation by its Health Commission that will urge the Government to allow its legal consumption for patients with ailments such as multiple sclerosis or cancer.

The debate on the regularization of recreational use has been open in the Lower House since last September by the parliamentary partners and allies of the PSOE, but also by Citizens, who demand a law that decriminalizes the recreational use of the substance.

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