The traffickers of dope prefer the indoor crops because they are easier to hide –in urbanizations and industrial estates– and because, in addition, they allow environmental conditions to be controlled –sunlight is replaced by light bulbs– and they deliver up to four harvests a year. But one in six nurseries dismantled by the Mossos d’Esquadra this 2022 was abroad. If with the former the narcos defraud more and more electricity, with the latter they illegally take over a scarce resource: water.
Criminal organizations carefully choose the places where they set up outdoor marijuana plantations. Zones of high forest levels thick as those that abound in the mountains of the Guilleries or the montseny They are ideal. Above all, because it usually rains more than in other regions and because they are close to the border with Francethe door through which the value of the drug multiplies its value exponentially, explains the sub-inspector Carlos Ribasin front of the commissioner of Santa Coloma de Farners (La Selva) in recent years, a region in which the eleven of the 72 outdoor plantings discovered by the regional police in 2022.
Light and water
95% of these ‘indoor’ crops are illegally connected to the general network and the traffickers do not pay for the very high consumption that they steal. In a modest plantation there can be twenty light bulbs, which means that it defrauds the same amount of electricity that an entire block of a district like the Eixample consumes, according to the head of inspection of the company Endesa. And when the media report that the police have dismantled a plantation with 2,000 or 3,000 plants, it implicitly alludes to an electrical cost similar to that of an entire neighborhood.
Ribas stresses that there is more and more talk about the social damage caused by this theft of electricity -more if possible during the energy crisis linked to the war in Ukraine and the consequent increase in the cost of the bill- but too little about the damage caused by the illegal appropriation of water by traffickers, especially to irrigate outdoor plantations, a problem that should be more worrying in times of drought, in the opinion of the sub-inspector.
Two meter tall plants
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Marijuana plants, which can measure more than two meters in outdoor crops, need a lot of water, more than that provided by rain. For this reason, traffickers steal thousands of liters from the streams that supply the swamps. They use gasoline pumps to lead it through hoses to large inflatable pools. Later, they dissolve the fertilizers inside that tank and irrigate by gravity, flooding the plantation.
It is not a social damage comparable, in absolute terms, to that caused by electricity fraud. But it is a strikingly unfair phenomenon for the peasants who have had to interrupt its production of fruits and vegetables this year because the flow of water has been interrupted due to the drought.