Rethymno: 63-year-old arrested over 13 cannabis plants

A plantation of thirteen cannabis plants was found on the morning of Tuesday 18 August in an area of the Municipality of Rethymno, in the course of a targeted police operation. According to the press release issued by the General Regional Police Directorate of Crete on Wednesday 19 August from Chania, the plants were at a growth stage and their height reached up to three metres. The operation continued with a search of a man’s home, where 215 grams of harvested cannabis stems that had been laid out to dry, 340 grams of plant fragments, an electronic precision scale and two mobile phones were seized. The man was arrested and is accused of cultivating cannabis plants and of breaches of the narcotics legislation.

On one point the sources differ. The official Hellenic Police release and the Rethymno news outlet Rethemnos News state that the man arrested is 63 years old, while Nea Kriti describes him as 50. This article adopts the age given in the police release, as that is the institutional source of the story, without this meaning that the discrepancy has been clarified. The remaining details, that is the number of plants, the quantities seized and the location of the operation, coincide in all three sources. The preliminary investigation is being carried out by the Narcotics Squad of the Rethymno Sub-Directorate for the Prosecution and Detection of Crime.

Cases of cannabis cultivation in mountainous and semi-mountainous areas of Crete appear with steady frequency in the summer police bulletins, as the period from mid-August to September coincides with the ripening stage of the plants and constitutes the most likely harvest window. The island’s geography, with hard-to-reach valleys and scattered agricultural properties, makes locating the plantations time-consuming and often links it to information reaching the anti-drug services. Cases of this size, with a few plants and limited quantities, differ substantially from the organised cultivations of hundreds of plants that have occupied the authorities from time to time in the interior of the prefecture.

The man arrested was expected to be brought before the competent prosecutor, as the procedure for in flagrante offences of this category provides. The police release makes no mention of other persons involved in the case, nor of whether any further distribution of the quantities seized is being examined. Until the case is tried, the man is presumed innocent and the charge does not constitute a finding of guilt. It has not been made known whether the laboratory result on the composition of the seized quantities has been completed, an element that usually determines the exact content of the charges. The Hellenic Police did not release further details on the exact location of the plantation, a practice consistently followed in comparable cases.