PRAGUE, June 13 (Xinhua) -- Czech police seized record 1.1 tonnes of marijuana and uncovered 305 growers in the country in 2017, said a report of the National Anti-drug Center (NPC) of the Czech Republic released on Wednesday.
The annual Drug Seizure Report 2017 said that police officers also confiscated over 93 kilograms of pervitin and disclosed 264 methamphetamine labs.
Marijuana along with pervitin continued to be the most widely used domestic drug in the country, the report confirms.
The authorities have registered some new trends in the production and distribution of the drugs. "The new trend, namely a significant involvement of ethnic groups of former Yugoslavia in certain drug crime sectors, has already emerged in a number of European countries," the NPC report says.
In addition to the Vietnamese criminal groups, the Serbian gangs joined the cannabis business, too. In the Czech Republic, these organized groups set up and operate large-scale weed plants.
Czech marijuana, as declared by NPC, is mainly directed into the domestic market. As many as 37 plantations were found last year in Prague, 36 in the Central Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia regions. The least illegal areas were discovered in the Hradec Kralove Region with only four plants. In large quantities, Czech marijuana is also exported to the neighboring countries, Ukraine, Hungary and Scandinavian countries.
As for the methamphetamine situation, the police reported that Vietnamese gangs moved some volume of the drug production to Germany and the Netherlands, from where the drugs are then smuggled back into the Czech Republic.
The anti-drug document highlights that in order to make it harder for police to detect the drug producers, the laboratories are often split over multiple locations, separated by the different stages of pervitin production. Normally, the gangs reside outside the manufacturing sites; also after one or two production cycles, they tend to move the lab elsewhere.
So far, the production of pervitin in the Czech Republic requires pseudoephedrine-containing medicines, mainly imported to the country from Poland. The police, however, found out that last year the most frequent supply of this medication came from Turkey.
Most of Czech pervitin is trafficked abroad, the report says, mainly to Germany, Austria, France, Norway and Sweden. There have also been reports of smuggling into Japan and Australia.
The annual NPC report states that the drug situation in the country has been relatively stable.
