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Channel 4 News go to Albania's onetime wild west, exactly where weed manufacturers were making vast amounts of dollars in earnings up until the legislation, and also the EU, caught up with them.
We had to plod through 2 police force check points to go to the unusual tremendous mountain Albanian town of Lazarat.
Albanian special forces workers in balaclavas required to view our press cards and we were waved through. It seemed like a border crossing, a state inside a state. Up until not too long ago that was a precisely what Lazarat was.
A long time ago this particular remote town, built into the mountains, was forgotten about by the nation's politicians. It absolutely was forgotten with no flowing water, no roads, no laws. Thus villagers chose to care for themselves and became known as self-sufficient outcasts. In the 1990s a small grouping of locals came back from a stint working with criminal gangs inside Italy.
They brought back marihauna seed products and also commencing cultivating on their own family plots of land. Throughout the years this once bad, desolate community became a European marajuana bazaar. Traffickers dealt directly with farmers and greater farmers became bigger players.
Organised crime moved in and made so much marihauna they ran out of places to keep it. Plus they got rich, very wealthy.
"They made 4.5 billion dollars worth of marijuana per year, in accordance with the official report," (that's the equivalent to 1 / 3 of Albania's GDP) explained a nearby reporter we talked to.
The villagers grew to be so rich, they employed help. An estimated 3,000 labourers from elsewhere maintained to the marijuana. Villagers could afford to relocate out from the old family cottages on the mountain and built huge new houses nearer to the road. Then they rented out the bungalows to their labourers.
Many of the new houses were adapted, there were networks of storage bunkers underneath homes. The village and surrounding farms took over as largest producers of marihauna in Europe. Lazarat had become Albania's wild west.
The villagers had mortars, machine guns, grenade launchers.... it absolutely was a 3 day war.
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However in 2013 a new government in Albania decided they would tame marijuana town. A fresh local chief of police, Haki Kaco, was introduced and on 16 June this year, a small army of police showed up over the mountains.
"The villagers had mortars, machine guns, grenade launchers.... it was a 3 day war," says Kaco. Villagers, drug dealers and also mercenaries -- complete with night vision devices - fought the law. Nevertheless the law won.
For a police force in desperate need of a reputation reboot, it had been an enormous success. Absolutely no lives were lost. There was 50 plus arrests and 500 weapons were seized.
So why did the Albanian government not get involved until recently? And also why, with rumours that consecutive administrations were taking a cut, they did intervene at all? A clue: the EU.
Exactly a week after the Battle of Lazarat the EU dicated to give Albania "candidate for membership" status.