Drug lords thrive as conflict rages

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Lebanese authorities too busy worrying about war on their doorstep to be bothered with cannabis farmers

Lebanon's drug kingpin watched his workers sink spades into the piles of marijuana that banked the walls of his factory, throwing the chopped plants on to machines that sifted out the top-quality hash.

The secret processing plant - outwardly an unremarkable cow barn - stands on a hillside overlooking the fertile plains of the Bekaa Valley, where cannabis is once again a multi-million-dollar product.

For years, Ali Nasri Shamas and other Lebanese farmers saw their illegal crops burned by the Government. But in the past two summers, with the army focused on the violent fallout of the war in neighbouring Syria, their plants have flourished.

Security forces have refrained from destroying the industry of the hash growers who, already armed to the teeth, could be useful partners in keeping order should the instability become full-blown conflict.

The farmers too have grown in confidence: they have stockpiled AK47s, ammunition, machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades and rallied around Shamas, who has become the unofficial representative defending their trade.

"We are selling hashish, and if anyone from the Government tries to come close to it, we'll kill them," said Shamas, his heavily armed bodyguards standing beside the doors of two black four-wheel-drive vehicles, their windows blacked out, the licence plates removed. "This year we had a good year."

Subsistence farmers across the region have switched from beet crops to growing cannabis, leaving tracts of agricultural land, kilometres wide, covered in the plants. As well as paying his own growers, Shamas has bought up the produce of the smaller farmers, creating an empire whose economy now has hundreds of dependants.

Inside the processing plant, hashish particles clouded the air, dancing in the rays of sunlight that streamed through the open door. A small army of Syrian workers, cloths wrapped round their mouths to stop them breathing in the fumes, separated the stems and outer leaves from the buds.

In a corner of the barn, partitioned by a plastic tarpaulin, two women carefully re-sifted the refined product, creating a fine dust-like substance that was crushed by machine to make the hash lumps to be exported all over the world.

The valley has become so full of the crop that prices have plummeted through oversupply. Two years ago, for 1kg of hashish, farmers would pocket US$1200 ($1550). Now the price is only a quarter of that - US$350, Shamas said.

But still it remains a lucrative trade, and Shamas' business alone brings in millions of dollars.

Most of the hashish goes to countries in the region, including Syria and Egypt. But some also reaches Europe.

"All of my main growers made at least half a million dollars this year," said Shamas.

With no end in sight to the Syria conflict the future for the Bekaa's hash growers appears bright.

Grass, cows, and the Bekaa Valley
• Lebanon's government has periodically tried to eradicate the drugs industry, which has existed in the Bekaa Valley since the days of the Ottoman Empire.

• Efforts were abandoned after the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, when militias and political groups used the trade to fund the war.

• In the 1990s, when the Syrian military occupation of the country began, the United States pressured Damascus to take action. An American agricultural loan paid for the import of 3000 dairy cows in the hope of building alternative industries.

• A US$300 million ($387 million)-a-year United Nations programme of crop substitution was also implemented, but government corruption prevented most of that money from reaching the people of Bekaa.

• At the beginning of the last decade, the pre-eminent drug lord was Jamal Hamieh, who threw lavish parties for Syrian intelligence officials and New York gangsters.