KETAMA, MOROCCO (AFP) - After decades without legal cover, farmer Mohamed Morabet looks forward to selling his hashish this summer on the open market now that Morocco plans to legalise cannabis for medical use.
The government of the world s top hashish-producing nation last month ratified a draft Bill to legalise its medical use, and Parliament is expected to debate the legislation this week. We will finally come out of clandestinity, said Morabet as he tended to his freshly sown fields of kif - literally pleasure in Arabic, and the term used for cannabis in Morocco. We used to live in fear, added the 60-year-old farmer whose fields lie in the fabled northern Ketama region at the foot of the marginalised and underdeveloped mountainous region of Rif.
The shipping container raised suspicions as soon as it arrived in remote northwestern Laos last July.
Paperwork showed it was packed with 72 tons worth of blue vats filled with propionyl chloride, a relatively obscure chemical, and bound for an area in northern Myanmar notorious for the industrial-scale manufacturing of synthetic drugs.
The cargo had been procured by a broker based in territory controlled by the United Wa State Army, a militia that for years has been accused of funding itself through drug sales.
But local authorities had not heard of propionyl chloride. It is not one of the 30 precursor chemicals scheduled by the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) for use in manufacturing illicit narcotics or psychotropic substances.
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The shipping container raised suspicions as soon as it arrived in remote northwestern Laos last July.
Paperwork showed it was packed with 65 tonnes worth of blue vats filled with propionyl chloride, a relatively obscure chemical, and bound for an area in northern Myanmar notorious for the industrial-scale manufacturing of synthetic drugs.
The cargo had been procured by a broker based in territory controlled by the United Wa State Army, a militia that for years has been accused of funding itself through drug sales.
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But local authorities had not heard of propionyl chloride.