Marijuana has found in our country fertile ground for mass cultivation and carefree consumption, despite the harmful effect on health. We have recently published in our newspaper how the production of marijuana has been industrialized to the point that industrial warehouses are used, where they invest in civil works to build tunnels and service galleries, as if it were any factory. This marijuana industry is booming here because of the low cost of its intensive cultivation based on stealing electricity. Unlike other European countries, illegally connecting to the electricity grid is very cheap criminally in Spain because it does not entail jail sentences. In addition, marijuana is considered a soft drug in our country, with which its trafficking has a lighter punishment. All this means that producing a gram of marijuana here costs six euros, between two and three times less than in our neighboring countries, where the law is tougher. Thus, we have become the European cannabis garden, causing the police to break up industrial marijuana plantations almost daily.
On the other side of the market are increasingly younger consumers. In our country, not only is the trafficking of this drug criminally cheap, but there has also been a desire to minimize the effects it has on health. In this sense, the wake-up call from the Fundación de Ayuda contra la Drogadicción (FAD), which you can read in the Society section, is important. This entity dismantles, one by one, the supposed benefits that circulate about the consumption of marijuana. But it places greater emphasis on young people between the ages of 15 and 18 because almost 30% admit that they consume cannabis. The FAD warns them of the negative impact on their mental health, their personal relationships or learning difficulties. Once again, the information that is transmitted to young people must be clear and serious to counteract the falsehoods that circulate through youth networks and that are induced by the industry itself, which has a lot of money at stake. The less consumption, the less business. If once informed, they continue to consume, there each one. Pity is being a victim of lies.
