Thanks to the overproduction of cannabis during 2016, more than trying to implement a strategy to change the situation, the Rama government and the Interior Minister Fatmir Xhafaj praised in front of his Italian counterpart the victory in the war against the open cultivation of cannabis.
Meanwhile, as General Toschi, General Commander of Guardia di Finanza, noted that the war front has been moved to the two shores of the Adriatic. There, the Italian police continues to seize huge quantities of Albanian drugs, apparently from the 2016 harvest.
The problem is not that easily solved.
Even if the Albanian government will know how to effectively intervene and conclusively defeat the traffic between the two shores, we would still have to solve the complicated social problem generated by drugs in Albania.
The decriminalization law will slowly, little by little, remove many personages previously involved in criminal activities from the Parliament, the local authorities, and the public administration, but even that is still not enough.
Meanwhile we know that the Albanian mafia already controls the hard drugs trafficking directly to the main European cities and use Albania as a safe haven, as a base, and as a hiding spot. And they will continue to come here, flaunt their undeserved luxuries, corrupt some officials to give them fake documents, and recruit youths blinded by the opportunity for massive income.
But the biggest side effect coming from drugs remains pending and to erase it more sacrifices will be needed in the upcoming decades.
The largest effect today in Albania is that we have a incalculable amount of dirty money created as a result of criminal activities or corruption. This money has been invested in regular companies operating with a loss, bankrupting other companies created by hard work; partly deposited in the banks used as guarantees for participating in public tenders; partly invested to control shopping malls, journalists, televisions, and financial institutions; and partly invested in the private educational system.
In fact we have a whole generation of narco-capitalists used with a system of money circulation that pollutes and destroys any possibility of creating a market, even a little one, working in a normal and orderly fashion.
These narco-capitalists (and these cleptocrats, politiicans, judges, and officials) are the real champions of the free market in Albania, a market who’s money mainly comes from the drug trade. You find them in the the most expensive hair salons and in the VIP lounges of stadiums, frequenting luxurious bars if they don’t already own them. Through their companies and media they exercise power by creating opinions and trends, while their children drive without license in luxurious cars filled with raw cash.
They do this in a place that has morally fallen into the indifferent caress of money and its power, rejecting its humanism, in a triumph of an ignorant and unjustifiable luxury.
Which justice system, which police, with which legality can they ever return to a normal social situation? How long will it take?
Can we trust politics, which just finished protecting the narco-traffickers and which till yesterday denied altogether the existence of the drug problem, to now make everything ok with the help of two agents rented from the FBI?
Once again, the situation is tragic, but not serious.
