Truesee's Daily Wonder

35 Million Joints' Seized in Gulf of Aden

July 22, 2009 11:58 a.m. EST

A British ship carried out the largest drug bust ever recorded in the Middle East this week, seizing an amount of cannabis sufficient to make 35 million marijuana cigarettes, the British Ministry of Defense said on Tuesday.

The HMS Cumberland ship caught the drugs off the coast of Oman during a Combined Task Force (CTF) 150 patrol.

The seized drugs, comprised of 12.4 tons of cannabis resin, have a street value of $70 million.

"If you look at individual seizure cases, it's the largest seizure of cannabis resin ever, according to our databases," Thomas Pietschmann, a Research Officer at United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime told The Media Line. "The only larger seizures were in Turkey in 2001, when 19 tons were seized, and in Spain where we had 15.8 tons." Pietschmann explained that while in terms of global of seizures, this drug bust is equivalent to 0.9 percent of seized cannabis resin, a relatively low figure, the significance lies in the quantity seized in a single operation.

In 2007, the last year for which the U.N. drug office has complete information, only 11 countries seized more cannabis resin throughout the year than the amount taken in the one seizure this week.

The HMS Cumberland was examining a suspicious cargo vessel and found a secret compartment with large bales of narcotic material identified as cannabis resin. The drugs were later destroyed.

An engineering mechanic from the Royal Navy team that boarded the vessel was quoted as saying his team was well-trained in these kinds of operations.

"But you don't expect to find this quantity," he said. "Twelve tons is a huge amount of drugs and looked like bags of potatoes piled up when we got it on deck."

Officials believe the drugs were intended to reach the Europe and the seizure is seen as an important step in stopping the financing of terrorism.

"Typically, it seems that this would originate in Afghanistan, exported via Pakistan to the sea and exported from Pakistan onward, either to Europe or to Africa," Pietschmann said.

"We've seen for quite some time that Afghanistan is really expanding its cannabis resin production," he added. "The largest producers of cannabis resin in the world are Morocco and Afghanistan."

The CTF 150 is a multinational coalition naval task force which conducts maritime security operations as part of the war on terrorism. It operates southeast of the Strait of Hormuz, in the Gulf of Aden, Gulf of Oman, Arabian Sea, Red Sea and parts of the Indian Ocean.

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