Find Out The Chilling Facts About Drug Use And Learn If Your Kids Are At Risk Mayerthorpe Freelancer -- Do you think drug abuse is an issue left for big cities, think again. Find out the chilling facts about drug use and learn if your kids are at risk. On April 22nd, Detective Steve Walton will be coming to Mayerthorpe to offer insight into street drugs and raise awareness about drug use in his presentation "Street Drug Awareness." A retired 25 year veteran of law enforcement, for the last 10 years he was assigned to a Drug Unit and in that capacity he supervised an undercover street team and managed more that 120 undercover operations and 780 undercover drug transactions. [continues 470 words]
Hundreds of marijuana plants are burned in the village of Cakran, about 70 miles south of Tirana, Albania, Saturday during a campaign against drug cultivation in Albanian villages. The anti-trafficking and anti-corruption initiative is part of Albania's efforts toward integration with the rest of Europe. [end]
The poorest country in Europe, Albania, has grown into a major transit point for the drug traffic between Asia and the west. Albanian and foreign criminal groups fixed on Albania for its geographical position and turned it into a transit country for drugs being shipped to western Europe, said former Interior Minister Spartak Poci. On Monday, the speaker of the Albanian parliament, Namik Dokle, resigned, complaining he was being harrassed from one side by "the barons of politics" and from the other by "the drug barons." [continues 331 words]
SKOPJE -- EXTREMIST Albanian rebels seeking to start a new round of conflict in the southern Balkans have bought millions of pounds worth of weapons with the proceeds of heroin smuggling from Afghanistan to the streets of a dozen European capitals. Senior drug trade analysts from the United Nations Drug Control Programme in Vienna and Western police officials say much of the heroin being sold in countries such as Austria, Germany and Switzerland is starting to come from multi-billion pound stocks of Afghan heroin in Central Asia. Much of it is controlled by al-Qa'ida and the former Taliban regime. [continues 262 words]
It's a normal workday in the town of Himare, which is to say the townspeople aren't doing much at all. In fact, the whole place is bathed in an almost narcotic stupor. Only a bunch of snazzily dressed young men sipping cappuccino underneath the palm trees by the wharfside cafe seem to be engaged in any business. ''Fifty kilos? No problem,'' barks one twentysomething lad into his mobile phone. ''It'll be ready tomorrow.'' [continues 664 words]
In the shadows of the war in Kosovo, a ferocious upheaval is reshaping the criminal landscape of Europe. As NATO bombs and Serbian troops disrupt a Kosovar crime network that has dominated the narcotics trade across the continent, underworld clans from neighboring Albania are making a powerful bid to take over. They are the real government of Europe's poorest -- and most lawless -- nation, and by some estimates even more dangerous to the Allied campaign than the tanks and anti-aircraft systems of Yugoslavia. [continues 2029 words]
Inside Albania
