By REUTERS Filed at 1:04 p.m. ET RABAT (Reuters) - Morocco, Europe's main supplier of cannabis, wants to eradicate cultivation of the drug in seven years by developing alternative economic activities in producing areas, a senior official said on Thursday. The hallucinogenic plant is cultivated in some 162,500 acres of land in the under-developed mountainous area of Rif in northern Morocco. Most of the crop goes to Europe where the plant can yield more than 20 times its price in Morocco. About 300 Europeans, mainly from France, Spain, Britain and Germany, are serving jail sentences of up to 10 years in Moroccan jails for drug trafficking. ``Cannabis cultivation is disappearing in Morocco and we wish to eradicate it progressively during the next seven years,'' the official MAP news agency quoted Hassan Amrani, head of the National Agency for the Promotion and Development of the North (APDN), as saying. APDN oversees ways to find alternative economic activities through funding from the Moroccan government and the European Union. Amrani was speaking in a meeting with Pino Arlacchi, Executive Director of the U.N. Office for Drugs Control and Crime Prevention. The Moroccan official, however, stressed the need for a common stance by the European Union on the thorny issue of legalizing drugs. ``There are some European countries which legalize the consumption of drugs and Morocco would have gained a lot if there was a common position by all countries on this issue,'' he said.
U.N. Office for Drugs Control and Crime Prevention. That would be the........ "American Nations Office of The American World War on Drugs"