Medical cannabis

Police in Athens on Wednesday arrested three suspected members of a large drug-dealing racket after confiscating 222 kilograms of cannabis from their homes.

According to sources, the racket had set up a bogus firm – a Piraeus-based commercial company – as a front for their illicit operations and procured winning lottery tickets to launder their gains.

A 24-year-old foreign national faced a prosecutor in Thessaloniki on Tuesday on charges of drug dealing on the campus of the northern port city’s Aristotle University.

Police arrested the suspect on the university grounds after receiving a tip-off about his alleged illegal activities.

They found six packages containing a total of 796 grams of cannabis on his person.

Two methamphetamine labs and a greenhouse for cannabis have been uncovered in an operation of Bulgaria's State Agency for National Security (DANS) in Sofia.

During the special police operation, which was conducted on September 25-26 and was supervised and managed by the Sofia City Prosecutor's Office, five Bulgarian nationals were arrested.

Zlatibor Loncar, Serbia's Minister of health, has admitted that use of cannabis can produce good results in medicine and has said that the government may legalise its use for medical treatment.

"The Ministry of Health will not object to the introduction into medicine of anything that gives results in treatment, including marijuana," he said.

A 25-year-old police officer has been arrested in northeastern Greece on suspicion of drug dealing.

He was arrested with five other men on Wednesday, when police raided a house in Komotini.

The raid was conducted after police had arrested an Albanian man at the city’s train station a day earlier.

He had several small packets of cannabis and cocaine in his possession.

Police has destroyed almost 10 tonnes of cannabis near southern Bulgarian town of Petrich, said the Blagoevgrad directorate of the Interior Ministry.

Acting on tips from informants, police found 532 marijuana plants near the village of Krandzhilnitsa, which weighed more than 7 tonnes. The owner of the land plot is yet unidentified. 

Nearly 14 tonnes of cannabis plants were found and destroyed in a police raid in the village of Lebnitsa in Southwest Bulgaria, the Regional Directorate of the Ministry of Interior in Blagoevgrad reported.

Drug enforcement officers in Kalamata have arrested a 34-year-old man suspected of being behind a plantation with 315 cannabis plants that was raided in early July on the outskirts of the coastal town of Pylos.

German Green Party co-chair and one of the most prominent European politicians of Turkish descent Cem Özdemir was the latest figure to join the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge campaign that has been viral for more than two weeks.

In the video, which he filmed on his roof terrace in his Berlin home, the politician was seen pouring water on his head right next to a cannabis plant.

German Green Party co-chair and one of the most prominent European politicians of Turkish descent Cem Özdemir was the latest figure to join the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge campaign that has been viral for more than two weeks.

In the video, which he filmed on his roof terrace in his Berlin home, the politician was seen pouring water on his head right next to a cannabis plant.