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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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Czech: Vietnamese control cannabis trafficking
Prague Daily Monitor Wednesday 18 Jul 2012 Last year, the Czech police arrested a total 192 Vietnamese in this connection and they have also uncovered several Vietnamese-run huge hemp growing facilities this year, MfD writes. Besides, Vietnamese in the Czech Republic are becoming more and more involved in the production of pervitine (methamphetamine), the paper says. "The Vietnamese's activities in pervitine production have steeply intensified," the paper quotes National Drug Squad director Jakub Frydrych as saying. From this point of view, the most critical localities are the Vietnamese market places along the German border, it adds. In 2006, ethnic Vietnamese still made up a mere 0.5 percent of perpetrators arrested for delicts linked to marijuana. Last year, they made up as many as 13 percent of the arrested suspects. This, nevertheless, still does not correspond to their real share in the marijuana business. Since they usually operate giant growing facilities, the share they control is far bigger, MfD points out. A couple of weeks ago, for example, the police uncovered four hemp growing facilities in the Chomutov area, north Bohemia, and arrested a 13-member Czech-Vietnamese gang led by two Czechs. Of the 5600 hemp plants seized, the gang could produce 0.5 tonnes of marijuana and sell it for 40 million crowns, MfD writes. This is the highest amount of hemp ever seized by the Czech police, it says. The overall consumption of marijuana in the Czech Republic is estimated at 22 to 25 tonnes a year, the paper writes. Unlike other foreign gangs, the Vietnamese produce pervitine and grow marijuana themselves. They never take drugs themselves. "Their production costs are low and they sell the drugs cheap," says Frydrych. The Vietnamese also ditribute the drugs, most often via the big market places along the German border. In a crowd of people it is difficult for the police to catch a drug dealer who passes himself off as a T-shirt vendor, MfD continues. The Vietnamese gangs are small, they are usually headed by a Vietnamese. Sometimes the police uncover their links to the Netherlands, Britain, Ireland and Germany, the paper writes. This type of crime may have so quickly increased also in connection with the arrival, in the past five years, of Vietnamese nationals who dearly bought Czech work permits via mediating agencies. These people ran in debts in their homeland. After they lost their Czech jobs as a result of the crisis, local gangs easily hired them as illegal hemp growers, MfD writes. The police say the Vietnamese-made drugs are usually of a high quality. Their hemp, grown beneath special lamps, contains some 15 percent of the efficient THC substance, compared to 4 percent in hemp grown in a garden, MfD writes. The pervitine the Czech police seized in a raid earlier this year was 78-percent pure, the paper writes. The neighbouring Bavaria faced similar problems in the 1990s but the Bavarian police managed to oust most drug-related activities from the country, partly to the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, a part of the Czech marijuana and pervitine production ends in Bavaria, where the amount of the two drugs on the black market increased by more than 200 percent and by 170 percent, respectively, in the past two years, according to local authorities, MfD says. ($1=20.848 crowns) http://praguemonitor.com/2012/07/18/mfd-vietnamese-control-marijuana-trafficking-%C4%8Dr
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