The British newspaper The Telegraph has dedicated an exhaustive article to the so-called "epidemic" of cannabis houses in Great Britain, revealing that in just 3 months, over 100 Albanian boys caught inside cannabis farms have been imprisoned on the island.
Accounts show that police have seized £130 million worth of cannabis in the stocks where these illegal immigrants have been arrested. Meanwhile, regarding the punishment, all these individuals were punished with 300 years in prison in total.
Three quarters (77) of the 101 Albanians sent behind bars between August and October of this year were convicted of cannabis production in England or Wales.
Almost all of them have been detained during the operation codenamed "Mille", which led to the destruction of dozens of "grass houses" and 180,000 cannabis plants, but also to the crackdown on gangs involved in other criminal acts, such as money laundering, smuggling cocaine and hard drugs.
The Telegraph reports that many of the illegal immigrants were recruited by gangs after the British government launched a crackdown on black jobs, making it difficult for these boys to find honest work.
Ministers have tripled fines for landlords who employ illegal immigrants to £60,000 per worker, leaving hundreds of young Albanians "out of the market" in jobs such as builders, laundresses or even waiters and cooks.
So, in the last five years, Albanian gangs have taken over the cannabis market with "gardeners" recruited from their homeland who have brought their hydroponic culture to the island, usurping the Vietnamese.
The number of Albanians who crossed the English Channel by dinghy in 2022 was 12,301 people, which is more than ¼ of the immigrants who arrived in Britain.
Among those detained this summer was Nard Nidri, 34, who entered the UK illegally last summer and lived in Birmingham. He then moved to Swansea where he worked in a car wash before being recruited to become a gardener in a manor house.
He is one of four "gardeners" jailed for a total of six years in August after police arrested them at a property in Neath, south Wales, where two rooms and a loft had been adapted and isolated to grow cannabis.
Sentencing them, Judge Geraint Walters said cannabis farms run by Albanian criminal gangs had reached "epidemic levels turning into an industry".
The judge suggested that the authorities "scrutinize" the rental housing sector.
Other Albanians from the above 100 have worked for the gangs, in order to pay off their debts, as otherwise they claim that their lives are in danger.
20-year-old Artenis Shehu was jailed for a year after working on a cannabis farm in the Norfolk Broads to pay off a £2,500 debt owed to a gang which paid for medical surgery for his father.
Judge Andrew Shaw told Shehu that the bar where he has been arrested could produce £225,000 worth of cannabis and this shows that we are dealing with a "sophisticated criminal organisation".
Albanian gangs have taken over the cannabis trade because of the lower risk and minimal penalties, but also because of the growing consumption, as the British spent 2.4 billion pounds to buy 240 tons of cannabis in total, in 2021. (A2 Televizion)
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