BARCELONA, June 28 (Reuters) – Heavily-armed police officers arrived in a well-to-do Barcelona suburb before dawn to raid a two-storey house that turned out to be packed with 800 marijuana plants growing under powerful lamps.

The recent raid, on which Reuters accompanied the officers as they arrested two Albanian nationals, is part of an almost daily police routine in the Spanish region of Catalonia as it cracks down on the booming illegal production of marijuana, often run by local and international drug gangs.

With a number of countries mainly in the Americas legalising or regulating marijuana use in recent years, Spain being legally permissive with personal consumption and Barcelona itself hosting Europe’s largest cannabis-themed fair, such a clampdown may seem counterintuitive.

But police argue that the organised crime that has grown around the marijuana business is making parts of the region a dangerous place and needs to be dealt with to prevent gangs from entrenching further.

They say they are not generally targeting small-scale growers or users, who frequent so-called cannabis clubs that enjoy legal loopholes, but drug rings driven by profitability that export most of the cannabis abroad.

“When it’s a business that generates so much money, criminal organisations focus on coming here,” said Antoni Salleras, chief of the Catalan police’s organised crime unit, noting that foreigners, predominantly from elsewhere in Europe, Morocco and Latin America, accounted for around 60% of arrests last year. [Read More @ Reuters]