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Lazarat in the public eye
Two unusual tourists arrived in a mountain village beside the Drino River in Gjirokastër in the summer of 2011. Daan Vonk and Theo Roelofs had set out on an adventure.
They had left Tirana on motorcycles to visit a village about which they had heard many stories. That village was Lazarat.
As they took the road up into the village, the young Dutchmen realised that this area was different from the other places they had visited in Albania. Passers-by gave them strange looks, while cars slowed alongside them and their occupants asked who they were, where they came from and what they wanted.
In one of the cars, a young man stood out for his good English. Having established that the two visitors’ intentions were “harmless”, he offered to show them around the village and reveal what no other camera had yet been able to capture: the hills of Lazarat, with dozens of hectares planted with cannabis.
Daan Vonk and Theo Roelofs included some of the footage in the adventure documentary they posted on YouTube around six months later. The images went viral, earning Lazarat the nickname “the cannabis capital”.
Taulant Balla, then a Socialist Party MP, showed them during a parliamentary committee discussion on integration, demanding an explanation from the interior minister at the time, Bujar Nishani.
“Cannabis grows in every household garden, and tourists are filming it,” Balla said in his denunciation.
At the time, the US State Department described cannabis as the main drug produced and trafficked by Albanian criminal groups. In countries such as Turkey, these groups were able to exchange it for hard drugs such as cocaine or heroin, which they then trafficked through their networks in Europe.
Aerial surveillance data from Italy’s Guardia di Finanza showed 38.5 hectares of suspected cannabis plantations in Lazarat in 2012, and an almost tenfold increase in that area in 2013.
Various international reports described Lazarat as the main source of cannabis flows into Italy and Europe. There are no official figures for the quantity of cannabis grown in the village, but the authorities estimate that annual production may have reached 800 tonnes, with turnover of around €4.5 billion, roughly half Albania’s gross domestic product at the time.
Police operations and changes in cultivation
Political pressure from the European Union and a change of government prompted two large police operations in 2014–2015, in which 38 people were arrested and around 55 tonnes of cannabis seized.
These operations took Lazarat off the map. But the interception of large cocaine shipments and the discovery of at least three hard-drug processing laboratories in Laç (2014), Elbasan (2015) and Has (2018) would show that Albanian criminal groups were now moving to another level of drug trafficking.
Nevertheless, cannabis remained central and continued to be cultivated in other areas beyond Lazarat.
Guardia di Finanza flights reported more than 213 hectares of suspected cannabis plantations in 2016, while police interventions were among the largest, with around 2.5 million plants destroyed.
The years 2017–2018 showed that the broad intervention of 2016 had been effective. Flights by Guardia di Finanza during those two years identified one to two hectares of suspected plantations, from which a total of around 6,000 plants were destroyed, just 675 of them in 2018.
But the situation quickly escalated. The data show that Guardia di Finanza flights identified only 28.5% of the plants (25,719/90,175) that Albanian police destroyed in 2019. During the pandemic year, meanwhile, former police director Ardi Veliu acknowledged that cultivation had moved into forests and remote mountain areas.
At the same time, Albanian criminal groups had begun growing cannabis indoors.
In 2020, the number of plants destroyed reached 137,216 (58,423 were reported by Guardia di Finanza). The figures remained high in 2021 (166,212) and 2022 (114,478), while in January 2024 former minister Taulant Balla reported that 293,047 plants had been destroyed in 2023 (108,282 of them had been reported by Guardia di Finanza).
The trend towards growing cannabis under controlled conditions in so-called “grow houses” was described as a concern in 2022 by former police director Gledis Nano, who said that “no one is seeing them” and asked the electricity distribution operator for help in detecting and combating this new method of cultivation.
Alongside the “grow houses”, the widespread use of smartphones, social networks and encrypted communication platforms such as Sky ECC appears to have helped Albanian criminal groups reorganise their drug-trafficking operations.
Drugs near schools
Around a decade after his denunciations based on the Dutch tourists’ documentary, Taulant Balla became interior minister. One of the initiatives he strongly supported was “preventing drug trafficking on school premises”.
The initiative also drew on the latest World Health Organization report on illicit substance use among adolescents, which showed an increase from 7% (2015) to 11% (2022) in the proportion of minors in Albania who had tried cannabis at least once.
The so-called “Tempulli” (“Temple”) operations of 2023–2024 consequently brought proceedings against more than 2,300 people suspected of links to 30 criminal groups distributing or trafficking drugs near schools. More than 1,500 kg of drugs were seized from them: around 1,400 kg of cannabis, with the remainder cocaine, heroin and ecstasy.
The police operations revealed the extent of drug distribution throughout the country. Together with the decoding of communications between criminal groups, they show that drug trafficking in Albania was not a problem that could easily be solved.
On the contrary, the increase in people facing criminal proceedings over the past four years, from 1,989 (2019) to 3,046 (2023), the spread of plantations to other areas far from the historically dominant Lazarat, and the rise in the number of users suggest that Albania faces a new challenge, with drug trafficking and consumption reaching ever deeper into the country’s social and economic fabric.
*Revised version by the author. Previously produced for Shteg.org – A project of the Network for Reporting on Corruption and Organised Crime in Albania – Republication rights belong exclusively to the author and “RRKOKSH”.