At dawn on November 10, 2022, a State Police team landed in the village of Rërëz in Berat, where they found four greenhouses covered with plastic and adapted for growing cannabis.
The greenhouses were equipped with electricity and water supply lines, were protected by armed men, and one of them had been transformed into a dormitory with 81 air mattresses spread out on the floor.
Only the dried stems of the narcotic plants remained on the ground. The cannabis had been moved to an improvised silo inside 700 crates lined up one after the other, while 11 black bags containing another 871 kilograms were prepared for the market.
Kapanoni was the workplace for 95 women from different cities in Albania – daily wage workers of the structured criminal group that is accused of producing around 1.8 tons of cannabis during that year alone.
Police forces found the women scattered throughout the greenhouses, and some of them later testified that they had arrived in Berat through a station in the center of Kamza in search of daily payments that amounted to up to 5 thousand lek per day.
This is not an isolated case in Albania, where women’s involvement in the cannabis economy goes back decades and has its roots in the difficult economic conditions since the early 1990s. However, the monopolization of this industry at the hands of organized crime in recent years has brought new legal and emotional consequences for the women involved.
Data obtained by BIRN through three court files shows that criminal groups are exploiting the poverty and unemployment of women in the peripheral areas of Albania to recruit them not only as workers in cannabis cultivation, but in some cases also as collaborators.
During 2022 alone, over 110 women were detained by the police while working for criminal groups in Berat, Shkodra and Puka in the final stage of the process, which involves drying, cleaning and packaging the narcotics.
While most of the women implicated in this industry were released from their cells and investigated while at large, the Special Prosecution Office suspects that a small number of them now have deeper connections with members of criminal groups and have helped them secure free labor for their illegal activities.
SPAK prosecutor Behar Dibra, who led the investigation into the Berat case, told BIRN that at least two of the women are accused of being members of the criminal group.
“[They] have had the quality of recruiting other women into this criminal activity,” Dibra said.
For lawyers who advocate for these issues, women involved in cannabis cultivation are victims of poverty.
