Half of Lebanon’s production of cannabis is smuggled to Europe

The office of “Anti-Drug of the Internal Security Forces” seized in 2016 around 7.5 tons of hashish in Lebanon, 200 Kg of cocaine, 15 million packages of captagon and amounts of various other drugs. In addition, the said office detained 548 persons who deal with drugs, according to what the head of the office, Brigadier Ghassan Shamseddine told to the newspaper L’Orient le Jour.  Shamseddine also emphasized that 50% of the hashish manufactured in Lebanon is consumed locally, whereas the rest is exported to Europe, especially through Egypt and Libya. Through his conversation, Shamseddine presented the most prominent achievements of the office in fighting this trade, revealing the arrest of several smuggling networks throughout the past year, the most prominent being the arrest that was made two weeks ago, where 400 thousand packages of captagon were seized at a store equipped with tools and materials for manufacturing captagon, and another in Beirut airport, where the entry of four laboratories for manufacturing captagon that were coming from India was halted. These equipment were supposed to enter as university laboratories. Shamseddine concluded the conversation by demanding that the government find alternative crops to replace hashish in Lebanon such as saffron since the weather in Beqaa resembles that of some areas in Iran. (L’Orient le Jour, January, 26, 2017)