Known for centuries as exporters of flowers, I would have thought to check the boxes from Holland for Cannabis a long time ago. Yet police in Britain recently discovered some folks doing exactly that, mixing more than one kind of flowers in their boxes!
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The Dutch flower industry provided the ideal cover for a multi-million pound drug smuggling gang operating between Holland and Britain.
The ring, which has been smashed by police, was responsible for smuggling tonnes of skunk cannabis hidden in lorry loads of flowers from the Netherlands.
The gang based themselves in old buildings at Poplar farm in Wanborough, near Swindon, Wiltshire.
When police struck last year they seized 10 tonnes of skunk with an estimated street value of £30m.
Eight men and a woman were arrested during the investigation, which involved detectives from Wiltshire and their Dutch counterparts.
Perfect conditions
The flower-growing industry of Holland provides the perfect set of conditions and ideal cover for growing cannabis and for exporting the drugs.
Where you can grow tulips, you can grow cannabis - and the dealers took advantage of the flower trade to ship their haul to the UK.
After buying boxes of cut flowers at the giant international flower market at Naaldwijk near The Haig, the gang would then take them to their own warehouses before placing the bags of cannabis beneath the flowers.
Det Sgt Thom Hoekstra of the Dutch police said: "You've got the chrysanthemum, which is a long flower with a long stem.
"The flower itself was cut off by about 10cm from the top and 10cm from the bottom, so as you check the box, you can put your hand in and you feel the flowers, but as you reach more into the box itself, you find the plastic bags with the cannabis."
The couriers drove their lorries to The Hook of Holland and then on to ferries bound for Harwich.
More on this story here.