Catalonia is the great marijuana nursery in Europe. The title is already several years old and not only has it not become obsolete, but the current situation ensures that the large-scale production of this profitable illegal substance has already been industrialized. The statement corresponds to the various police and economic actors who, at the moment without much success, are trying to deal with a phenomenon that is advancing unstoppably at an uncontrolled rate.
“Catalonia is the Silicon Valley of marijuana”, warned three years ago the head of the Mossos d’Esquadra Toni Rodríguez. There is permanent innovation, thematic fairs, specialization in the economic field, investment of foreign capital and an industrialization process that resorts to a series of services that already work exclusively for increasingly sophisticated indoor and outdoor plantations and technical
In 2020, the Mossos’ general criminal investigation department, specifically its central unit of analysis and strategies, produced reports dedicated to the marijuana boom. The first took a photograph of the phenomenon and the second directly linked trafficking with a violence that has only increased in recent times. Shootings, executions, kidnappings and robberies between criminal organizations are the order of the day in a sector with incalculable profits in which the totality of the mafias have got involved, ready not to lose their piece of the pie.
There are many ways to calibrate the marijuana boom in Catalonia. One is based on the investigations of the different police forces. And here is the latest data. Until June, the Mossos d’Esquadra alone had confiscated 4,000 kilos and uprooted 200,000 plants. Another formula to measure the phenomenon is to look for the equivalence of the electrical fraud generated, or in other words, the energy consumed and not paid for by indoor cannabis plantations.
The company Endesa is the most important electricity supplier in Catalonia and, therefore, its figures allow a precise analysis of the phenomenon. Its unit against electricity fraud has grown exponentially in recent years and its members have become an essential part of the police devices that break into the plantations. Like the acting agents, they wear bulletproof vests, helmets and hide their faces with balaclava to avoid reprisals that they have already begun to suffer in their own skin.
But let’s get to the numbers. From the beginning of the year until the end of June, Endesa technicians carry out five interventions every day in marijuana plantations that steal the light. Last year the figure was three a day. Another fact. The electricity they steal, because they don’t pay for it, is equivalent to all the light consumed by the 250,000 inhabitants of the city of Hospitalet de Llobregat in two years. You read that right. Two whole years.
The sophistication of cannabis production, with salaried electricians and plumbers at the head of increasingly professional installations, has been favored by the existence in Catalonia of a disused industrial fabric, with abandoned warehouses or that have rents at ridiculous prices, and without asking the new use. Enormous spaces, far from residential areas, close to the main communication routes and turned into nurseries where there is no lack of gardeners, watchmen and security systems that recently include very dangerous traps to receive curious people, inspectors or police.
The map of Catalonia with the points where marijuana confiscations were made last year stains red the edges of almost all of AP-7. The mafias have been in charge of occupying the old polygons and for some time they have expanded in the Vallès Oriental and the Occidental, and new spaces are located on one side and the other of the C-58. They are also looking for other territories to conquer on both sides of the Transversal axis, with Vic, Manresa or Lleida as new arenas of action for the cannabis mafias.
It is not unreasonable to ask if this only happens in Catalonia and why. The problem of marijuana has its incidence in other parts of the Spanish geography, but not with a volume like that of Catalonia. The most similar, in terms of activity, would be Andalucia and more specifically Granada, but with a practically familiar cultivation, in the back yards of the houses or a room of the houses, which have turned it into a domestic subsistence system. Unlike in Catalonia, the small-scale monoculture system is dominated by families who opt for it as another source of income or even survival.
What happens in Catalonia is something else. It is innovation, laboratory research at the service of more and better crops with increasingly harmful plants, and it is the national and foreign mafias that lead the market. But why? The Mossos d’Esquadra and Endesa officials agree in the same way.
The legal framework that penalizes the production and trafficking of marijuana in Spain is much more lax than in other European countries. Marijuana is still considered a soft drug despite the fact that more and more dangerous concentrations of THC, its main active ingredient, are being detected for the health of the consumer. This laxity of sentencing is not only detected in the penalties with which traffickers are punished for producing and selling marijuana, but also for electricity fraud. So much so, that Endesa’s legal office has drawn up a report with a comparison of Spain’s prices with neighboring countries that helps to better understand the phenomenon’s boom.
In the rest of the continent, defrauding electricity is a crime associated with prison terms. In countries such as Portugal, France or Italy, the respective laws provide for severe penalties for this crime. But what happens in Spain? One of Endesa’s lawyers, Enric Morena, sums it up: “Practically nothing happens. Criminals know perfectly well that in Spain electrical fraud does not entail going to prison”.
With this illustrative comparative table, Endesa officials have started a round of talks with political formations and social actors to force open the debate on the hardening of prison sentences. In fact, they have commissioned a law firm from Barcelona to draft a proposal to reform the law.
That the laxity of the penalties associated with this crime contributes to the boom in marijuana made in Catalonia is obvious, but there is something more. And perhaps much more decisive. The low cost of producing a gram of marijuana in Catalonia has no competition right now in any territory.
A gram of marijuana here costs six euros this year, one euro more than last year. The figure is provided by the Mossos. So if you cross the border, this same gram of cannabis and surely of worse quality, with a lower percentage of THC, will hardly fall below 15 or 20 euros per gram, depending on the amount you are willing to buy at once. The specialization in the cultivation of cannabis in Catalonia is of such magnitude that there is an important labor market made up of great professionals who are so good in their specialty – the cultivation of marijuana – that they are able to achieve a high yield in their plantations, with productions of at least four harvests a year. Not to mention that there is a fleet of warehouses, houses or flats to occupy for planting connected to an electricity grid that you don’t pay for, and you won’t be punished afterwards if you get caught. Who gives more? “Right now no other territory can compete with Catalonia. The narco will not complicate his life by planting in Germany if he can buy marijuana or order its cultivation in Catalonia”, warns Ramon Chacón, head of the Mossos d’Esquadra’s general criminal investigation department.
