The court of Barcelona has brought good news to Albert B., 47 years old: after a year and a half accused of drug trafficking, with fear in the body, the case is open against him and several of his partners as the owner of a plantation of 10,000 industrial hemp plants, including theirs Buds, archived in Viladecans (Barcelona). The court is categorical: “Due to the lack of minimal psychoactivity in the substances seized, the proceedings carried out did not provide sufficient evidence for a criminal offence.” The remains of former plants hang on the ceiling of the two naves, which belong to Albert B. You are dry. “You are worthless. You ruined me,” he laments. This material already had a buyer, an Austrian company, with whom they had previously signed a commitment: 300 euros per kilo of biomass. A total of 475,200 euros for a loss of more than 1,500 kilos. A money that Albert B. and his partners will now demand in court.
Terrain appears in lots between roads and plastic warehouses. “I bought it especially for this,” says the man who took the plunge two years ago, gave up his job as a bricklayer and tried his luck with hemp. “A friend knew some Austrians who wanted to buy the harvest from us,” he explains, referring to Allpot Trading GmbH.
Before getting down to business, he consulted a lawyer to make sure he was following the rules to the letter. With a letter of intent to purchase and a legal incorporated company to grow hemp, they processed all the necessary permits. The order of the Sixth Section of the Court of Barcelona, ordering the investigation against him to be closed, puts them in concrete terms: they informed the Ministry of Agriculture, the Viladecans City Council and the National Police and presented the bill with the acquisition of some certified seeds .
They also briefed the Mossos d’Esquadra on the area, who Albert B. says went to the warehouses more than once to take samples. They informed everyone except the Guardia Civil, who knocked on the door one day. “It was a Tuesday when we already had everything ready, because on Friday we were already going to Austria,” the man recalls resignedly. The keeper, seeing the flowering plants, said to him, “You know you can’t.” He didn’t arrest Albert B., but he sealed off the plantation (which continues with the seals despite court records).
The sinkholes, called buds, have become the main target of the entire police force. Prosecutors issued a directive in 2021, assuming all bud is a drug regardless of the level of psychoactivity — which distinguishes marijuana from hemp. Since then there have been constant police operations against this type of crop. “Hemp is a cover for drug trafficking,” Chief Drugs Attorney Rosa Ana Morán said in a statement to this newspaper four months ago.
But the decision of the Barcelona court shatters this thesis. “It’s very relevant because it takes into account that the bud isn’t directly a drug. Psychoactivity must be established,” summarizes lawyer Martí Cànaves from the law firm DMT Advocats, pleased that the court is applying the teaching of the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) in this way. “Not everyone is interpreting it that way at the moment, even though the EU decision is binding,” he insists. The public prosecutor’s office itself “goes against the criteria of the ECJ”, canaves laments, That relieves the police. The Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products (AEMPS) also considers that “the inflorescences, ie the buds of these plants, are narcotic” and cannot be used “for any purpose” without its authorization.
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another interpretation
But here, too, the court of Barcelona – whose decision is final – does not see it that way. In his order, he emphasizes that the Albert B. plantation is registered as industrial hemp, without the investigation deducing any other purpose from this, even if it contains buds.
The man reiterates that he does not touch the plant or extract the flowers. He sells everything together. For the Guardia Civil, however, there is no doubt that the end users only wanted to smoke the buds and not all the biomass afterwards. They deduce it from the buying company’s website, the security measures Albert B. had in place – cameras, alarms and some guards over the past 15 days to deter theft – and the lack of authorization from the AEMPS. The court reiterated that the Civil Guard’s conclusion of just looking at buyers’ websites was “unfounded” as it contained “very little information” and that the security was warranted by the nearly half a million transactions involved go. And he stresses that the research “provides no evidence” that the plant requires approval from the Spanish Medicines Agency.
The sun’s rays penetrating the plastic roof of Albert B.’s greenhouse make for sweltering heat in mid-March. “I set it up,” he says while turning on the fans in the largest building at 4,000 square meters; the other is 1,300. When the civil guard arrived, I was still hoping to clarify the situation in a few weeks: that’s why you see a cloth covering the already dry tree trunks. “We thought we were going to save it,” he says.
A total of around 100,000 euros was left over from the investment. Out of his own pocket, he now has to pay for a truck to haul away all the plant carcasses that he himself has been cultivating sleeping “from sunrise to sunset” in a trailer in front of the ship, together with two partners, when harvest time approaches to avoid theft. He intends to plant again but admits that the whole situation has created uncertainty: “And if the Civil Guard returns again?”
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