EU-DIGEST: Drug Trade: 'Middle East High' - Drug Trade Booms in Lebanon & Syria

8/4/14

Drug Trade: 'Middle East High' - Drug Trade Booms in Lebanon & Syria - by Boruch Shubert

As revealed in an exclusive report by the Daily Beast, Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a region that stretches for approximately 75 miles from Mount Lebanon to the mountains next to the Syrian border, features a slew of marijuana plantations dotting the landscape.

And they have been doing better business than ever, because as the Syrian conflict drags on interminably, Lebanese hashish and marijuana growers are increasing their production along with their profits.

While all the area authorities are aware of it, none of them seem to want to do anything to obstruct this trade, since the majority of these plantations are controlled by Hezbollah. “The police and the army can’t stop me even if they wanted to,” boasts a farmer working on a plantation in the vicinity of Baalbek, Hezbollah’s de facto capital.

Prior to the Syrian uprising, the Lebanese army routinely entered areas of the Bekaa Valley to destroy fields and crops in order to hamper drug trafficking. Extensive security operations of this nature have been made possible due to aid provided by the United States government to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF).

State Department records show that +the United States has sent over $1 billion since 2005, and since 2007 over $140 million have gone to the Internal Security Forces, who are tasked with keeping drug trafficking at bay.

But the situation has recently changed. Today, the limited resources of the LAF are deployed to patrol the permeable borders with Syria and control the chaotic security situation. “It is no secret to say that these networks [of hashish producers] are very well armed in order to protect their marijuana fields,” claims Ohannes Geukjan, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut.