KIF: Hashish from Morocco

By Bob J. Zehmer

Routes, bribery, fight against crime, mafia-style organizations, connections with hard drugs, money laundering
and even more disquieting world scenarios

A trip among the illicit traffics and the
main characters in an ongoing foul play.

You will unlikely find such impressive information about hashish, drug-trafficking, economic backstage and interviews with traffickers and police officers, all rallied in only one book so clearly expressed and direct.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456600204

Book preview

2010

Contents

Preface

What went before

Hashish

Geography of trafficking and a tip of history

Sitting on the edge of the volcano

Criminal organizations

Directly from the mouth of the protagonists

Money laundering

Final remarks

Acknowledgements

Let me take the pleasure to acknowledge all the people who made this book possible. They are so many, and I wouldn’t want to forget anybody.

My wife and daughters for their patience in letting me take my time to carry on my research being often unavailable.

Siddik, and all his relatives, for being so kind and largely generous with support and information.

Terrence for his precious suggestions and economic hints; without his valuable help this book would still be floating on air.

Then again, all the police officers with whom I dialogued, their colleagues and all those from Justice Depts. who do their best for a more just world day after day.

Special thanks to Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy geographer from the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, for his courtesy to share his marvelous photos, and significant warnings I treasured.

I do want to address my gratitude also to Jefferson who helped me get ahead when I felt discouraged, and John for his interest on my work, his indications were of extreme worth.

My heartfelt appreciation to Grace Huber for helping bowdlerize, her professionalism has been a great spur to me.

Still there are more people who have a say and they are: Dominique, Teresa, Helen, Freddy, Manuel, Burt, Juan, Xavier, Liefer, Ace and Bodes, a sincere word of credit to you all.

Last yet not least, many thanks to Bo Bennett and all the staff from eBookIt.com for getting this e-book published. I have no qualms of suggesting their highly qualified service.

All those above mentioned are the ones who gave me all the backing I needed to accomplish my work, I would not have gone that far without them.

I even want to express thanks to those who revealed a lot of information through interviews, from which I could get impressive, and somewhat startling, stuff for this book.

I beg your pardon for approximations and errors that may appear in this work; I take it upon myself.

In addition, I had to take into due account information of practices, feats, traditions and activities quite so distant from my usual knowledge and practicing.

Therefore, I will enjoy any of your suggestion and criticism at bobjzehmer.joyspoon.com or bobjzehmer.posterous.com

Under no circumstances, this book may be meant as an invitation to breaking the law and/or using drugs.

The law is the pact we have accepted for living in harmony each other, and by respecting human rights we may as well be said good citizens everywhere.

Only what is sanctioned by law may amend the law; in other words, laws can be changed as a result of democratic procedures as laid down by the law itself.

To conclude, my warmest thanks to all of you who spend your time on this book; I hope you’d find it worth reading.

"The cause of all wars, riots and injustices is the existence of property"

(St. Augustine)

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.

(Karl Marx)

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

(Oscar Wilde)

What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?

(Immanuel Kant)

Dedicated to:

All my family and friends

those who sacrificed their lives for fighting against organized crime

those who fight day by day against all arrogance and abuse

anybody may love and try for truth

Preface

This is a nonfiction book on a scabrous subject, the drug trafficking, with particular reference to hashish smuggled from Morocco.

This work has been realized thanks to a personal inquiry lasted several years, in which I’ve had the good luck to interview drug smugglers and various front-line policemen from different European Countries.

I take leave to spell out that I am neither a physician nor a pharmacologist, so I won’t dwell upon psychotropic and medical effects of cannabis.

I am far more concerned about the critical outbreak with which a criminal action like drug trafficking socks our societies. That’s why I have been canvassing this phenomenon focusing my attention on criminal associations, police forces’ efforts to fight against it, human dramas, and economic damages that even a so-called soft drug may cause.

Phytocannabinoids, that’s to say the active principles contained in the plant of Cannabis sativa L., are considered soft drugs as against other substances as cocaine, heroin, crack, ecstasy and so on.

All in all, the division illustrated on the tables A, B, C or I and II, in relation to the distinct legislations, is based more on political stance than on scientific investigations.

As always, opinions vary on this point; no need to say that many scientists don’t get on at all well together upon this topic. Some studies argue that it is possible to get hashish and marijuana both from Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica, and likewise from hybrid varieties. However, these are particularly divisive themes on the scientific side, let alone the political viewpoint.

Not for nothing, these controversial issues have been the source of much confusion.

In the UK, for instance, Cannabis was downgraded from B to C in the psychotropic substances classification; yet later, in 2009, it was brought back to B after social alarm caused by the skunk, a special crossbred cannabis – indica and sativa – that popped up around in the 1980s.

Nonetheless, Professor Leslie Iversen, pharmacologist from Oxford University, asserts that the so-called skunk doesn’t contain a high percentage of THC – the compound of cannabis. In fact, he states that it does not exceed 10% – 12%; like many other independent studies prove it.

Other Countries, like Italy since 2006, for example, make no difference between hard and soft drugs.

The notion that Marijuana wasn’t a soft drug, started off during the late 1980s and in the 1990s, because many sustained that the compound had stepped from 4% up to 16% of THC, which has deserved this hypothesis the name of Theory of 16%.

Yet there are many scholars and specialists in the field, who affirm that we should query whether the repressive stance on drugs must be held like the right thing.

Jacques Derrida, French philosopher (1930 – 2004) in his work Rhétorique de la drogue published in 1989, argued that the notion of ‘drug’ is just founded on moral and political viewpoints, and it is completely devoid of any scientific approach.

At the same time, so as to come clean, I won’t have you searching between the lines, and so I come out straight; I agree with Derrida’s perspective. I am a convinced supporter of legalization, and I think drug trafficking is a fake quandary! I am a hard fighter against all criminal associations too – did it need to be spelled out? – and that’s why I think that organized crime would suffer a deadly stroke if the prohibition era should terminate!

To wage war to narcos it’s a good thing, a world rid of criminals it’s just what all truthful people wish, but a question rises, What about narco-mafias if drug trafficking were not a business any longer?

Therefore, someone could say, Let’s decriminalize murder, and we’re going to have fewer criminals. If murderers are not outlaws, we mustn’t keep prosecuting them on!

By Jove, don’t overdo! In due course, we will deal with this stance any better, but let me tell right now that there is a substantial difference. When someone kills a person commits an irreparable evil by depriving the victim of his/her right to live; conversely, when someone rushes to a chemist’s shop, for example, to buy narcotics – in case drugs were legalized – they are only taking up their right to be free.

Now, one more time that guy would say that ingesting drugs is not freedom at all since they cause addiction and death!

Yes, I’d reply! I don’t think I would be more free if I could consume cocaine any given day; nevertheless, are we sure that anybody would make it?

Should people be brought up to respect their lives, as well as the others’, should our civilization value the environment as a resource instead of making a garbage can out of it, I wouldn’t fear six billion people in the world wake up at morning goaded by the need of drug.

Around 250 million people in the world use drugs, most of them – between 143 and 190 million – fall back on cannabis; nonetheless, I am convinced that legalizing drugs would not mean increasing the number of users.

Tobacco and alcohol are officially permitted, yet most people don’t smoke or exceed with alcohol.

There is a leitmotif among prohibitionists; they believe that drugs drive people to raise violence with the consequence that there would be more criminal offences, most of all those related to bloodshed.

We can make sure that cannabis is not the perfect drug to draw on to be brutal to kill; yet again, I guess this is a misplaced question.

Let’s assume that someone would want to mug or even kill, and he or she would take drugs to behave with cold determination. Well, everybody knows that one can find all kind of drugs in the black market, just because of the trafficking, but do you seriously think that bloodshed can be linked to drugs legalization?

We know that some individuals take drugs with no bad intention, and then they end up doing horrible things when crazed with high buzz, for sure; yet no prohibition policy would ever cease that.

Are our societies so weak not to be able to communicate values? Here goes the matter, and thus we are so scared!

I wouldn’t want a society that conveys taking drugs as a good idea, and I wouldn’t be pleased to hear that freedom is to be rid of all proscriptions that keep us from slaughtering each other; it is not what I want to emphasize.

I want to suggest taking into due account if it’s worth to maintain a prohibition stance that enriches more and more the mafias. In my opinion, this policy is pushing billions of people to hell, and obliging Countries to be equipped with means and forces to fighting drugs trade, but at the end of the day, more social and human costs is what we get.

Just like terrorism, even drug trafficking gives rise to wars, and this results a persuasive tool to coerce governments to contain people’s freedom and help fear grow, and fear is quite a fitting instrument of social control. Well, maybe I’d better say fear is a tremendous device to shape, as much as they like, the instrument of social control par excellence, the law!

Thus, narcotraffic is a global fact that is born from prohibition, and we don’t ask for it to be decriminalized. Actually, we suggest legalizing drugs under the State’s control and, the way it works for tobacco and alcohol, it should be supported by a massive educational campaign, to get the message through people about all the risks for health. Obviously, the informative campaign should make clear that, everybody under psychotropic substances, is going to be punished with the utmost severity, when taking drugs with the intent to hurt.

No one with common sense would ever suggest authorizing all drugs all of a sudden. It is just a rough matter, and it must not be made light of; it takes but a shallow smattering, hence, starting by legalizing cannabis could be an overture.

We all know that we live in such advanced world where everything is market-orientated; all must be thought as business, that's why even human life is deemed an item to squeeze in order to earn money. Well then, when shall we have such a serious, and indicative debate humanly sustainable?

Men make much of a nonsense you know, and sometimes we wonder whether they are stupid or someone else’s plan is in between. I sense a little of both.

What’s the point of handing a child a gun then lamming him because he shot you in a leg?

As showed in the title, in this research we analyze what happens in Morocco, but we’ll turn our look also at another region somewhat affected by these traffics: the so-called Costa del Sol, sited between Capo de Gata and Tarifa, in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia in the south of Spain.

Although nowadays this phenomenon impinges on the entire Spanish coast that overlooks the Mediterranean Sea, it’s in the Costa del Sol that everything began about four decades ago.

Yet, since the 1950s Spain has been crossroads for the drug trafficking. In that early time, it hosted leading figures of the Italian-American organized crime, but it’s in the 1970s that cannabis becomes visible in the list of smuggled substances.

Still we have to wait for the 1980s to record a significant interest from the international criminality, when larger freights of hashish start to be shipped from side to side, finding receptive and rich markets in West Europe and North America.

What went before

Juvenile revolts in the 1960s

A revolt deserves to be considered the mother of all students revolt. It dates October 18, 1967, and it ensues at University of Wisconsin-Madison, soon after the call for new recruits by the Dow Chemical Company.

Some hundreds of students rise barring the entrance to the University’s commerce building in what has passed into history as the Dow riot.

It is at full stretch of Vietnam war, the famous 28th Infantry of the 2nd battalion – a.k.a. the Black Lions – on October 17, suffers an ambush by the NLF (National front for the liberation of south Vietnam) better known as the Viet Cong. The American soldiers – in a ratio of 1 to 10 as against the Vietnamese – are overcome; it comes up to be a butchery.

Americans begin to feel vulnerable, and rumors begin to sway at homeland. It smells like a rout.

Those boys wouldn’t mean to make war and die; they have been immolated in the name of such a freedom that is harder and harder to get. They never meant to sacrifice their lives, but the war took their lives away, however.

American people begin to think that Vietnam is becoming a morass, which is going to cost grief and severe collateral damages before to see the light. Boys come home in plastic bags, what’s left of them, just assembled pieces, like dismantled toys in the warlike craziness of those who don’t fight, and yet they want the war to get their business going and ensuring large profits.

American propaganda is unable to stem the tide and rebellion outbursts as soon as the Dow sets to taking on applicants.

The Dow was the chemical industry that produced the napalm used by the US Army in Vietnam, which caused many casualties even among the same American soldiers.

Wisconsinite students had had enough, and they broke out – just a few hours after the Black Lions faced defeat – carrying signs reading Vietnam to Vietnamese, let’s get out!

At first, the Authorities stand aside, but then they call the police to charge.

The truncheons spin like hell, they are the authoritarian ramifications of the capitalist fiend. The grim sound of the broken heads echoes all around; later some of the protesters would claim to have heard like the thud of melons that split.

The young dissenters are reproached like filthy hippies, pigs, communists, reds.

In the clash, two old school mates meet each other quarreling in opposing factions. The policeman shouts to the student, What are you doing in here?; the student retorts, You tell me! We’re just vindicating our rights, those principles that are sanctioned by our constitution!

Yet there is a time where the freedom of speech, even when endorsed by the law in a democratic State, cannot be exercised for fear of spoiling economic interests that are considered as key reasons by that same Country.

It is a paradoxical merry-go-round, as if freedom were guaranteed by the free market that, through the free initiative, would emancipate the people.

Some months after the riot at Madison University, on January 1968, soviet tanks crushed in Prague to suffocate Czechoslovak revolt, and confirm communist totalitarianism.

This was the specular order the world was then given: on the one end the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the other side the free market that makes people free, but when the market itself is threatened, there is no other freedom to be sheltered, the sole to rise to dignity can be but its own.

American students were aware of it, and that’s why they would fight back, they didn’t want to give up to a world that claimed to hold the rights and lives of the human beings, into the capitalism schemes, or inside a despotic system.

Chancellor William Sewell, who called the police to put down the riot, regretted what he did. Years later, he conceded that the reaction had been excessive as to the possible menace. He admitted, indeed, that it was just a lawful and peaceful protest, and those boys and girls had the right to direct their complaint toward something they thought to be extremely unfair. Then, in June 1968, Sewell quit the chancellorship to return to his career as a scholar.

More than 70 students were driven to the hospital with various bodily harms on head, back and legs, and dozens had to go under treatments to recover from tear gas.

The boys were upset, they thought to be true patriots just claiming the rights of the American people along with those of other peoples to self-determination. Those same human rights consecrated in their own law. They couldn’t realize why in a Country held as the symbol of freedom, the police would react like the armed arm of a despotic regime.

It was