Selling illegal cannabis is a big business.

Police on Teesside raid houses converted into professional weed farms at least every month.

Usually choosing terraced houses in the centre of Middlesbrough, Stockton, Thornaby or Redcar, the drug lords who make their money from the trade find live-in gardeners to tend their crop.

When it’s fully grown, harvested and dried, each farm can be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

But often, those on the bottom rung of the drugs ladder, those whose work produces the drugs, are not rewarded handsomely.

They’re the fall guys – the ones caught red handed when cops raid, the ones putting in the effort and often living in squalid conditions, and accepting all the danger.

Lots are brought to the UK from abroad, many not speaking English, and with no choice but to do the work.

It used to be on Teesside that cannabis growers were brought from Vietnam – with 47 Vietnamese nationals arrested on suspicion of producing cannabis by Cleveland Police in one three year spell, between 2011 and 2014.

But there’s a new nationality that dominates a slew of recent Teesside Crown Court cases – Albanian.

A Daily Telegraph investigation last year heard from a senior Albanian detective fighting organised gangs from the country’s capital, Tirana, who said criminals were targeting the British drugs trade.

In recent months, Teesside Live has covered a dozen sentencing hearings in which Albanian…

Source: https://mmpconnect.com/albanian-cannabis-farmers-forced-to-grow-weed-on-teesside/