Hash
Authors: Wensley Clarkson
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
55 Baker Street
Seventh Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW
Copyright © 2013 Wensley Clarkson
The moral right of Wensley Clarkson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
TPB ISBN 978 1 78206 197 7
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78206 198 4
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WENSLEY CLARKSON
is one of Britain’s most knowledgeable writers when it comes to the criminal underworld. His books have been published in more than thirty countries and sold more than one and a half million copies. He has also written movie screenplays and made numerous TV documentaries in the UK, US and Spain.
What are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention. If this villainy wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralised that it acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues people, it openly arrogates itself the title of kingdom
.
– Saint Augustine
To Zaid, who paid the ultimate price for dealing in hash
.
PART ONE
MOROCCO – THE KILLING FIELDS WHERE IT ALL BEGINS
1. The Secret Kingdom of ‘Kif’
PART TWO
SPAIN – THE HASH FRONTIER
6. Jeff and Pat – keeping it in the family
8. Inside Spain’s ‘Hash Central’
9. Eddie, a member of the foreign ‘pack’
PART THREE
THE AMSTERDAM CONNECTION
PART SIX
HASH – ON A GLOBAL SCALE
24. A Worldwide Survey of the Hash Business
Appendix: The Dirty Dozen Biggest Ever Hash Busts
4.4 per cent of the world’s population consumes marijuana – about 190 million people – and 0.6 per cent use it on a daily basis (22.5 million people)
.
Marijuana is a highly lucrative cash crop with a worldwide value of $35.8 billion. That exceeds the combined value of corn ($23.3 billion) and wheat ($7.5 billion)
.
Cannabis has the greatest non-medical usage of all the drugs in the UK controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Overall, about 10 million people in the UK admit having tried it, with at least 1.25 million regular users. Over a third of 16–24 year olds, or around 2.3 million people, have taken it at least once in their lifetimes
.
Because of the nature of the revelations contained in this book, some names have been changed in order to protect the identities of the people involved.
Welcome to HASH, renowned as the world’s most socially acceptable recreational drug. Yet its illicit tentacles spread across the globe, financing everyone from poverty-stricken farmers to professional criminals. Hash is a business worth many billions of dollars a year with a truly dark and sinister side; fuelled by a chilling underworld network of dealers, gangsters, drug barons, crooked cops and even terrorists using sex, intimidation, bribery and murder in their quest for vast profits.
It’s reckoned that hash provides the biggest single source of actual income for organised crime across the globe.
The world’s law enforcers are failing to eradicate it from our streets because they tend to target other more lethal, so-called harder drugs. As a result, the hash business goes from strength to strength.
Even the United Nations admits that its attempts at hash eradication programmes have dismally failed. Authorities often resort to law enforcement crackdowns without
implementing any economic or development measures to help cannabis farmers cope with the sudden loss of income. Officials are supposed to conduct alternative development projects in the areas targeted by the eradication measures. But, more often than not, no economic help is received by the farmers, meaning they often go back to producing hash in order to survive.
So what is hash and how has it hooked so many hundreds of millions of people around the world?
Hash is essentially a concentrated form of cannabis, made from the resin of the female cannabis plant. It is consumed for the effects of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, THC, which causes a euphoric high in the user. Hash can contain up to 35 per cent THC, while other forms of marijuana usually only have between 5 and 15 per cent. The strength of hash depends on the strength of the marijuana from which it is produced.
Smokers of hash say it alters sensory experiences and perceptions of reality and insist it is harmless. Critics say regular consumption can cause psychological dependency and destroy people’s motivational senses.
Hash can be produced through two different processes, depending on techniques employed in various parts of the world. In Morocco, the resin glands of the cannabis inflorescence – where its main psychoactive substance, tetrahydrocannabinol THC is concentrated – are collected by sieving when the plant has been harvested and dried. Sieving is also favoured in the Bekaa Valley, in Lebanon,
where Lebanese Red hashish was renowned for its high quality up until the early 1990s, when the violence in the Middle East slowed down production.
The other technique for producing hash – used in some parts of Asia – is hand rubbing. Much less technical than sieving, it consists of rubbing the flowering cannabis branches back and forth between the palms and fingers until the resin builds up on the hands. This process occurs mainly in India, including Kashmir, and Nepal.
But sieved hash is much easier and faster to obtain than hand-rubbed hash. One kilogram of sieved hashish can be collected in only a few hours versus 10 to 25 grams of hand-rubbed hashish by one collector during a full working day. Sieving also makes hash more potent because almost no resin is left on the plant.
*
My interest in unravelling hash’s secret criminal underworld began more than twenty years ago when I was investigating the activities of one of Britain’s most notorious professional criminals. This man had been a London bank robber back in the 1980s but one of his oldest associates explained to me that cannabis was where this character – we’ll call him ‘H’ – had made his biggest fortune. ‘Going across the pavement’ – as robbery was known in London in the 1970s and ’80s – was a far more risky crime. Drugs were where the really big money could be made and ‘H’ insisted on dealing only in cannabis because he believed the authorities would be more lenient with him if he was caught. UK authorities had already
started coming down hard on cocaine and heroin, so ‘H’ believed cannabis was much ‘safer’ for him. And, as I was to eventually discover, the profits he could make from hash were one hundred times that of any robbery.
So, I gradually began to unpeel a layer of the underworld that has existed very much beneath the radar for the past forty years. Those inquiries would eventually take me to many parts of the world because the influence of hash is truly global.
Many people I know simply shrug their shoulders at the mere mention of hash as if it is barely worth anyone’s attention, which perfectly sums up the way this illicit industry has been allowed to balloon into a multi-billion-dollar worldwide drugs network. The authorities are often too stretched to prioritise capturing hash gangs and, as a result, its availability has continued unchecked. As one old-time British criminal told me: ‘Most police forces aren’t that interested in hash and the villains like to make out it is virtually harmless.’
Yet most of the world’s hash is produced in some of its poorest nations where farmers can survive only if they cultivate cannabis. Many of these farmers say they would much prefer to be growing vegetables or herd cattle but hash provides them with a guaranteed income, which nothing else can do.
In Morocco’s Rif Mountains, for example, lives a population the size of Wales and it is estimated that at least 70 per cent of those inhabitants rely on hash for their income. Many
believe the Moroccan government has deliberately ‘stepped back’ and allowed the area to virtually govern itself because the hash business employs such a big chunk of the population.
It is also clear that cannabis crops in many of the world’s so-called troublespots help finance terrorism. In Afghanistan, for example, the Taliban have a stranglehold over hash production because it helps feed and arm that war-torn country’s deadly insurgents. Hash is relatively easy to grow and the farmers know that even extreme bouts of weather are unlikely to ruin their crop.
Experts believe that pressure put on the cannabis farmers by gangsters and terrorists has led to the worldwide output of cannabis almost doubling in the past 20 years.
One of the first cannabis smugglers I ever met was a professional criminal called Tony from Kent, in south-east England. He’d set up a ‘removal firm’ with another gangster’s backing and began shipping cannabis in from Afghanistan and Turkey almost forty years ago. It was a perilous drive back then and still is to this day. Tony’s employees continue to drive the 10,000-mile round trip because the profits from hash remain sky high.
Tony and his secretive group of hardened professional backers are virtually guaranteed that their ‘cash investment’ will give them a return of five times the original amount within a month of the shipment arriving back in the UK. ‘It’s just a commodity to me and I run a business, which needs to make profit. It’s as simple as that,’ says Tony.