Pubdate: Mon, 04 Apr 2005
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited
Contact:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/175
Author: Julian Borger, in Blaine
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mjcn.htm (Cannabis - Canada)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

BEHIND THE IDYLL, THE DRUG WAR THAT THREATENS TO ERUPT

US/Canada Border Patrols Struggle To Stop Smuggling Of Marijuana and Guns

It is a sunny spring day; the water is sparkling, dotted with the white 
sails of jauntily leaning yachts and the green islands that speckle the 
US-Canada border. Welcome to the frontline of a vicious multibillion-dollar 
drug war. A high-powered grey patrol boat with a three-man crew from the US 
department of homeland security buzzes across this Pacific idyll like a 
frenetic killjoy, boarding sailboats, disrupting jolly outings on family 
motor launches and even accosting tiny sea kayaks.

In theory, the crew's primary task is to stop terrorists infiltrating the 
US. Ever since Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian militant, was caught a few miles 
from here in December 1999 with more than 45kg (100lb) of explosives in the 
boot of his car, border patrols have been braced for the next episode. One 
of the crew wears a radiation detector at all times. Since then, however, 
the homeland security patrol has been finding mainly marijuana on the boats 
they search - industrial quantities of a potent strain known as BC Bud, 
named in honour of the Canadian province where much of it is grown, British 
Columbia.

More than 900kg (2m lb) of BC Bud is thought to reach the US market every 
year. The whole industry is thought to be worth $7bn (UKP3.7m).

The product surges into the US like water flowing off a mountain, finding 
its way through every crack. It is dropped by small planes or helicopters 
into the raspberry fields and parks of Washington state. It is walked 
across the mountain forests in backpacks, stashed among frozen berries and 
driven in articulated lorries or in the back of vans on country roads. Or 
it comes by sea, on a flotilla of unassuming watercraft.

"See those boats. That's what BC Bud boats look like," said Kevin Anderson, 
one of the patrol's marine enforcement officers after boarding and 
searching a sailboat and a small motor cruiser, and finding nothing more 
menacing than an expired sailing licence.

The crew have been paying special attention to kayaks since last year, when 
a Canadian junior Olympic champion was caught putting his skills to 
lucrative use plying the sea border that runs through the Strait of 
Georgia. His boat was weighed down with his country's finest marijuana.

He was unlucky to get caught. On a fine summer's afternoon there can be 
10,000 pleasure boats in the archipelago that forms the coastal borderline, 
and just one patrol.

BC Bud is so well thought of on the west coast it has been known to trade 
at the same price as cocaine, more than $3,000 a pound. In fact, it is 
commonly bartered for cocaine and guns, which travel in the opposite 
direction, north into Canada, making it a less safe and predictable place - 
and more like America - every day.

Drive-by killings are on the rise in the Vancouver area, as are house 
invasions, by which one gang seeks to take over another's marijuana crop 
without the bother of grow lights and hydroponic cultivation.

About a month ago four officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were 
shot dead when they stumbled on a BC Bud-growing operation - the most 
Mounties lost in one day since the middle of the 19th century.

The killings shocked Canada, and have challenged the country's generally 
tolerant attitude towards drug offences.

"It showed Canadians that the people who have grow-ops [growing operations] 
aren't all nice guys with mom-and-pop operations," said Inspector Paul 
Nadeau, the head of the force's coordinated marijuana enforcement team in 
British Columbia. "Nothing could be further from the truth. Every single 
criminal organisation in the region is involved."

It is a big pie everyone seems to want a slice of. A lot of the smugglers 
caught on the border are from ethnic Indian and Pakistani gangs in Canada. 
Many of the 50,000 grow-ops thought to be hidden across British Columbia 
are run by Vietnamese clans.

But police on both sides of the border say some of the biggest 
organisations coordinating the trade are chapters of the Canadian Hell's 
Angels.

Joseph Giuliano, the deputy chief patrol agent at the Blaine border post, 
has been watching them evolve from gangs to corporations. "They mostly farm 
out the dirty work," he said. "They have become administrators, 
bureaucrats, executives. The old days of them driving a Harley in a leather 
jacket are gone. Now they wear a three-piece suit and drive a Mercedes."

As the organisations behind BC Bud smuggling have grown larger, their 
operations have become more sophisticated, and the battle of wits at the 
border has become a technological race.

Mr Giuliano's patrols put sensors down along the border which send signals 
to a central command post in Blaine, generating a computerised voice alert 
announcing where there is movement and in what direction. Agents can then 
train one of 32 cameras on the area to determine whether a smuggler is 
making a crossing or a cow has gone astray.

The smugglers have equipped themselves with night-vision goggles and metal 
detectors in an attempt to locate the sensors under the cover of darkness. 
They also conduct surveillance operations watching the border patrols and 
testing their reaction times to the sensors, and intercepting radio 
messages with computerised scanners.

"They even have their own scientific sorts working on the capabilities of 
our gamma ray machines at the border," Mr Giuliano said. "They're testing 
what has similar density as BC Bud so that it's invisible." Apparently, 
frozen raspberries [this is one of the world's premier raspberry regions] 
come pretty close."

The cat and mouse game can also be as low-tech as a smuggler in a pick-up 
truck timing a run across the 45cm (18in) ditch that marks much of the land 
border in the north-west. Smugglers will swerve off the road over the ditch 
and gun their cars through rows of raspberry canes.

Until now, the casualties in this contest have been low but the deaths of 
the four Mounties have strained nerves. The stakes are getting higher and 
there are more guns involved.

Barbara Kremzner, a border patrol agent who drives around the Blaine area 
alone trying to stop cars getting across, said: "You never know what it's 
going to be. It gets hairy."

"We have a big problem on our hands," said Leigh Winchell, the special 
agent in charge of immigration and customs enforcement in Seattle. 
"Whenever that much money is involved, crime-related money, the violence 
follows.

"Huge quantities of cocaine and firearms and bulk cash are going north. The 
Canadians are dealing with a murder rate that is growing exponentially. I 
can't help but believe that if the violence continues to grow there, it 
will grow here."

Battle of BC Bud

The choice of British Columbia, Canada, for the cultivation of high-potency 
BC Bud is due in large part to its location. Sharing the world's longest 
undefended border with one of the world's largest drug markets - the US - 
Canada in general and British Columbia in particular is a logical haven for 
traffickers of cannabis.

Sophisticated cultivation techniques are used in British Columbia to 
maximise production. The plants are grown in large greenhouses where 
temperature, light and nutrients are carefully controlled, enabling growers 
to produce up to six crops a year.

Drugs cultivated in the western Canadian state are smuggled to Seattle and 
Portland, from where they can be distributed easily to the US's main 
marijuana markets, mainly using the highways which link large cities along 
the west coast from Canada to Mexico.

The US's office of national drug control policy estimates that between 75% 
and 85% of cannabis grown in British Columbia is exported to the US, where 
drug dealers can fetch higher prices than in Canada. The scale of illegal 
activity along the 4,000-mile border has prompted a big increase in US 
funding for stricter customs searches and more border patrols. Some 
traffickers have reacted by seeking safer markets in eastern Canada.

There is some debate over the relative potency of BC Bud, harvested from 
female plants. American enforcement agencies claim the drug contains 
between 15% and 25% of the active ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC - 
twice as strong as varieties from the US and up to six times stronger than 
cannabis from Colombia and Mexico. But campaigners accuse the authorities 
of stoking up panic about the drug and say the reality is closer to between 
5% and 8%.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager