14 DAY TRIAL // This Sunday, October 18, Michel Sapin, France's finance minister, announced the country's absolute biggest drug bust in two years.
In a statement, Michel Sapin detailed the discovery of a whopping 7.1 tons of hashish in a van made into a storage unit.
The vehicle was found by law enforcement officers parked on a street in Paris' 16th administrative district, the minister detailed.
Thus, the van was found parked on a local boulevard named Exelmans. When authorities inspected it, there were no people inside it.
Officers suspect the van was meant as a temporary storage space for the hashish, worth an estimate €15 million ($17 million).
An investigation is ongoing. So far, no arrests have been made. Still, authorities are confident they will soon find the stash's owners.
In his statement, finance minister Michel Sapin further explained that, only last year, a total of 200 tons of drugs were confiscated by authorities across the country.
How hashish is made
A fairly potent drug, hashish is a cannabis product. More precisely, it is made from so-called resin glands growing on cannabis plants.
To make hashish, these resin glands are compressed or purified. When compressed, the glands make a solid form of the drug.
Water purification, on the other hand, makes a hashish that is somewhat fluid, but not quite. In a way, this form kind of looks like toothpaste.
Being a cannabis product, hashish packs the same compounds as marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) included.
The only difference is that, usually, these active ingredients are present in higher concentrations in hashish than in marijuana.
Hashish can be either vaporized or made into joints and smoked. Some people, however, add it to foods, sweets in particular.
The side effects of using hashish include feelings of euphoria and drowsiness. Then, users can also feel as if they had been sedated.
Symptoms such as disorientation, distortions of time and space, and an inability to focus have also been documented among users.