This is not Mexico or Colombia, but the latest headache for U.S. drug enforcers - British Columbia, Canada. Busting grow houses like this one has become routine for this drug squad.

As they broke down the elaborate warehouse plantation — clipping plants, disassembling the irrigation system, taking pictures and collecting fingerprints — the Royal Canadian Mounted Police “Green Team” in suburban Coquitlam worked on autopilot, chatting about their stock investments all the while.

“It’s everywhere,” said Peter Macgraf, media liaison for the Coquitlam RCMP. Indeed, marijuana plots have been found in low-rent homes, warehouses, barns and some of Vancouver’s finest neighborhoods. “We’re getting more and more tips as the public gets more educated about what to look for, but we haven’t got any more manpower,” Macgraf said.

Throughout British Columbia and on its border with Washington state, the story is the same: Loads of pot, and too few enforcers to stop its cultivation or distribution, never mind its possession and use. Drug enforcers on both sides of the border say as much as 90 percent of British Columbia’s crop — the prized “B.C. bud” — ends up in the United States, constituting a multibillion-dollar export business.

Canada is under political pressure to crack down — the United States reportedly even threatened to include Canada on its infamous list of countries “uncooperative” in the fight against trafficking and production due to the amount of marijuana crossing the border. But Canada is not Colombia, another country that trafficks drugs for the U.S. market. Canada is one of the United States’ biggest trading partners, and one of its closest allies, which seriously complicates Washington’s “war on drugs.”

One driving force behind the trade, say connoisseurs, is that B.C. bud is good stuff - nearly always a front-runner in the annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. Add to that a flagging Canadian economy, a booming U.S. economy and a long, friendly border in between.

And, as both pot lovers and law enforcers will tell you, lenient Canadian courts have made marijuana growing a low-risk business.

One Canadian, writing in a recent edition of Seattle’s alternative weekly, The Stranger, put it this way: “One would have to be riding to school on the short bus not to recognize the incredible opportunity for easy money that is the result of beautiful British Columbia’s failing dollar, its booming cash crop of high quality marijuana and our relatively easy access to it.”

The Game Has Changed:

There was a time when Canadian law enforcers would nab a large shipment from Colombia and that one seizure would make a serious dent in Canada’s marijuana supply. But in the last few years, Canadians, as well as a fair number of U.S. citizens living in Canada, have begun to grow their own crop for profit, creating a cottage industry made up of as many as 7,000 small pot-growing operations. By “small,” law enforcers are quick to point out, they don’t mean a few plants in a basement for the grower’s personal use. They don’t even have time to deal with those folks. They mean houses where every room contains dozens of female plants that produce the prized “bud.” Canadian law enforcement officials estimate that cannabis cultivation in British Columbia alone yields over $1 billion in annual profit.

Typically, “grow houses,” which are usually rented, have their windows sealed with black plastic. Elaborate water-delivery systems snake through the house, some with submersible pumps and sensors to regulate moisture. Greenhouses made of plastic sheeting allow temperature control, and high-pressure sodium grow lights create climate control. Electricity is diverted from power lines — stolen from the power main so the house electricity meter doesn’t register the astronomical power use.

When a neighbor, or the power company, reports a suspected grow house, police generally find no one there, or just a “gardener” paid to tend the plants. Firefighters responding to an emergency call recently found no panicked people in the burning house, but an impressive marijuana crop guarded by a 175-pound boa constrictor and several alligators.

Police say they believe that Vietnamese criminal gangs are becoming dominant in the marijuana trade - joining biker gangs like the Hells Angels - but so far, they are having trouble proving it. “We can’t keep up with the reports. We’re just putting out fires,” said Cinda Lose, a detective constable with the Vancouver police.

“We need to be more proactive about surveillance,” said Lose, otherwise there’s little hope of catching elusive organizers.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles:

U.S. authorities are equally flattened by the influx. At the border point of Blaine, Wash., a two-horse town about an hour south of Vancouver, U.S. customs officials have seized increasing amounts of pot in recent years. It’s arriving in larger loads than in the past, and there’s no obvious profile of a marijuana runner. For instance, Customs has seized 2,718 pounds of marijuana at the Blaine, Washington border since Oct. 1, 2000.

In the checkpoint offices, in the shadow of the U.S.-Canada “Peace Arch,” long-time customs officer Conrad Leer has watched this round of the war on drugs with some dismay.

Pulling out a photo album he calls the “Hall of Shame,” he shows a sample of people caught trying to transport large amounts of marijuana from Canada to the United States. They include a 54-year-old mother and daughter in her 20s, a 70- and 75-year-old wife and husband team and a former U.S. Customs agent. “We even caught one guy on his way to court for marijuana trafficking with a trunk full of pot,” said Leer.

Meanwhile, a few undercover agents spend late nights staking out the U.S.-Canadian border between the coast and the mountains, trying to catch young runners toting hockey bags full of pot through the bushes.

Here on the so-called Avenue Zero - a 20-mile expanse in which the border is marked by little more than a narrow ditch - the bushes come alive at night, according to U.S. special agent Greg Small.

People who live on the border are used to their dogs barking and strange whistling and honking in the wee hours as runners on the Canadian side await pickup cars on the U.S. side. It means an occasional car chase, said Small, and a lot of sitting around in the raspberry bushes.

And now that there is more pressure on this part of the border, pot is increasingly crossing in the eastern part of Washington state, on snowmobiles.

U.S. special agent Greg Small stands on the wide-open U.S.-Canadian border, where he spends his days trying to catch drug runners. "We're desperate for help," he says.

Most of the marijuana is getting through, with too few border patrols to stop a lot of trafficking - on the ground, or otherwise. As a private plane soars over the border above, Small looks up. “I just sit here and watch them fly over my head,” he said.

The late-night chases lead to a fair number of arrests, but few prosecutions. It takes about 100 pounds of marijuana to constitute a federal case in the United States, but most runners carry just enough to fill the standard-issue hockey bag, about 40 pounds — $120,000 worth. And runners, typically juvenile Canadians, are merely deported to Canada.

Cannabis In Canada's Courts:

In the United States, a larger load could lead to a 10-year prison sentence, though in fact, even in the United States the penalty is often far less severe once plea bargains are made. But in Canada, the penalty, even for hundreds of pot plants, is most often a fine.

And even the fine is likely to be less than punishing. In Vancouver courts, the average penalty for a first offense has traditionally been $1,100 to $3,600, the value of a couple of pounds of pot. “The reason people are out here growing is that our penalties are an absolute joke,” said Lose of the Vancouver Police Department.

In a sense, the penalties reflect Canada’s traditionally more tolerant view of marijuana. Even after Vancouver police shut down the Cannabis Cafe and the New Amsterdam — high-profile pot venues that inspired Vancouver’s honorary title as the “Amsterdam of North America” — others have opened up on the same block in the city. At Blunt Bros., “a respectable joint,” according to its sign, customers light up without hesitation.

“Pot is so ingrained in the local culture,” according to the Canadian writing for The Stranger, “that you can’t swing a skinny hippie without smackin’ a pot dealer.”

Every year, advocates of legalizing or decriminalizing pot light up en masse at the annual smoke-up in downtown Vancouver. Police rarely bother to arrest people for simple possession, though it is technically illegal. And to judge by the Canadian press, the public is as much scandalized by the grow houses, which ruin historic homes and constitute a fire hazard, as they are by the pot itself.

Meanwhile, Canada is close to a major experiment in medical marijuana. According to Canadian reports, the federal agency Health Canada is gearing up to distribute about a million marijuana cigarettes to ailing Canadians and medical researchers over a five-year period.

In Canada, Compassion Through Cannabis
http://www.msnbc.com/news/373705.asp?cp1=1

Getting Tougher:

There are signs of change in the courts. This is in part because the police have documented a handful of cases in which marijuana from British Columbia, which gets increasingly valuable as it travels farther from its source, was exchanged for the far-more addictive drug cocaine. They say that indirectly, the marijuana money is fueling a serious addiction problem on the streets of Vancouver. Also, they report growing evidence of gang-related drug deaths among marijuana growers, incidents that make the trade look a little less innocuous.

And THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, is present in much greater concentration in high-grade marijuana like that grown in British Columbia: from 15 percent to 20 percent, and sometimes as high as 30 percent, meaning that it is more potent. In comparison, THC levels in 1970s marijuana were about 1 percent to 2 percent. “People find their kids are smoking pot, and they don’t realize it’s not the same pot they smoked in their earlier days,” said Thomas O’Brien, public information officer for the DEA in the northwest United States.

Thus, in a precedent-setting case, a house sitter for 400 plants on a first offense was recently sentenced to eight months in prison, though the term is likely to shrink because of Canada’s parole system. Several other major cases are pending, said RCMP Cpl. John Ibbotson, and the court is expected to mete out tougher sentences than usual.

“The courts are trying to turn around the situation a bit,” he said. “They’re starting to get a little more strict.”

Under new laws, Canada has also begun for the first time to pursue aggressively the assets of proven drug traffickers, a long-time practice in the United States.

What the proponents of legalization and law-enforcement officials have in common is the conclusion that the war against drugs is not working. Where they depart is on the solution. While enforcers are beefing up drug squads, urging stronger penalties and greater border control, legalization proponents say the millions spent on the war is a waste.

“It’s just so silly,” said Dan Skye, the editor of High Times, a magazine that writes about and promotes marijuana cultivation and legalization. “Why don’t they just give up and start collecting the taxes on it?”

MSNBC international correspondent Kari Huus is based in Seattle. Her series on “BC Bud” first appeared in March, 2000 and was updated on June 11, 2001.

Coquitlam, British Columbia

Note: Canada and U.S. tussle over ‘B.C. Bud’

MSNBC Investigates: Pot Wars

Monday, June 18, 8 p.m. ET

The most potent form of marijuana on earth is entering the U.S. at a record pace. Come along with cops as they bust up the Canadian grow houses, and hear from the smugglers and dealers who say they are making millions.

Source: MSNBC (US Web)
Published: June 11, 2001
Copyright: 2001 MSNBC
Contact: letters@msnbc.com
Website: http://msnbc.com/news/
Forum: http://www.msnbc.com/bbs/

Canadian Links
http://www.freedomtoexhale.com/can.htm

How B.C. Stands To Gain from Medical Marijuana
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread10007.shtml

CannabisNews Articles - BC Bud
http://cannabisnews.com/thcgi/search.pl?K=BC+Bud

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THComometers are very user friendly too,however the accuracy
may vary somewhat depending on who is doing the testing.

[ Post Comment ]

[ Post Comment ]

Note: almost all organic solvents that can extract THC are Flammable -- do not use this post to try to do it. Find a book (Marijuana Chemistry c1977 is great)

[ Post Comment ]

I've just decided to open up a potency consulting
business,and here's the good news,I am having a
special introductory offer,yes,I will measure the
THC percentage for no charge whatsoever.I guarantee
an accurate measure of THC levels based upon years
of THC measurment research.If you're not happy with
the results,then there is no obligation what so ever.

[ Post Comment ]

I also liked what Dr. Grinspoon said that some people will abuse marijuana like some people abuse other substances but Marijuana is not addicting.

[ Post Comment ]

Dan B

[ Post Comment ]

What will be next?

[ Post Comment ]

neil...the cannabis clubs(SF bay area) are selling
eighths for $40-55 and those that sell ounces are getting
$300-350...street prices for lower quality pot are higher...

[ Post Comment ]

Hi Neil, I have no idea about prices. I think they vary from area to area and state to state.

[ Post Comment ]

overall i'd say the difference is inversely proportional to
the respective governments' commitment to the "war on drugs"...

[ Post Comment ]