Vancouver’s Tolerance Makes Border a Pot-Smuggler’s Paradise

They toss it across the border inside footballs.

They paddle it down in kayaks.

They float it down from British Columbia in hollowed logs equipped with global positioning satellite devices.

But the marijuana smuggler’s favorite is simply toting it over on foot, in that most Canadian of accouterments--the hockey bag.

“They’re just big, long, black bags full of dope,” said Wes Vanderheyden, head of the Border Patrol sector in the small town of Lynden, Wash.

“It seems to be a standard for them,” said Keith Miller, assistant chief patrol agent for western Washington. “They don’t talk about it in terms of pounds; it’s how many hockey bags’ worth.” (A single hockey bag load runs from 60 to 100 pounds.)

Gangs Muscle In on Smuggling Business

With its tolerant drug policing and abundance of pot-friendly businesses, Vancouver has become known as the “Amsterdam of North America.” British Columbia is home to a $4-billion industry that grows pot four times more potent than the stuff from Mexico.

But while Vancouver still looks the other way where discreet, individual pot-smoking is concerned, it clearly has had enough of the “Amsterdam” label. It has been shutting down businesses and coffee shops that deal overtly in cannabis.

Meanwhile, smuggling has boomed as Hell’s Angels, Asian and other gangs have muscled in, and outnumbered law enforcement agencies on opposite sides of the border have joined forces in an unprecedented crackdown.

“This is not your normal dope that everybody thinks of, you know, back in the ‘60s, longhaired hippies smoking it. This is not your dad’s marijuana,” said Dave Keller, chief of intelligence for the U.S. Border Patrol in western Washington.

“The smuggling we’re seeing is . . . clearly organized crime for profit,” he said.

Janice Williams, a Vancouver Police Department spokeswoman, said many of the pot farms that authorities have closed down “are organized by Vietnamese gangs. It’s organized crime, and they’re heavily involved.”

In the last six months, U.S. agents have seized 1,300 pounds of marijuana worth nearly $8 million at an estimated Los Angeles street value of $6,000 per pound, Keller said.

That’s more than was seized in the entire 12 months before Oct. 1, and more than 10 times the amount taken in fiscal year 1997.

That may sound like a lot of hockey bags, but Keller said, “we’re just getting a very small amount of what’s available.”

The cross-border cooperation has helped, he said, but he estimates the Border Patrol would need 100 extra agents to smoke out all the smuggling in western Washington.

Fewer than 50 agents now patrol 130 miles of border countryside. Much of the terrain is mountainous or in the watery maze of Puget Sound islands and inlets.

In Vanderheyden’s Lynden sector, about 95 miles north of Seattle, a dozen agents have orders to nab every bag-toting traveler dodging across a 63-mile stretch of dairy pasture, raspberry farms and forest land.

“We’re always screaming for more resources,” Vanderheyden said as the headlights of his Border Patrol sedan illuminated the 6-foot-wide grassy ditch that serves as the international divide between Boundary Road at the very top of the United States and Zero Avenue on the Canadian side.

A favorite ploy of smugglers, Vanderheyden said, is to wait with their hockey bag on the Canadian side of the ditch until their contact drives up on the U.S. side. The trunk pops open, the bag is tossed inside and the smuggler hops back into Canada.

Once back across the ditch, “they can stand there in the middle of the road and do this,” he said, sticking his thumbs in his ears and waggling his fingers.

Smugglers can turn to an Internet site that lists the locations of U.S. Border Patrol offices and patrols, said Inspector Dick Grattan, officer in charge of the Vancouver Customs and Excise section for Canadian Customs.

“If you’re clever and you plan, you’re going to get it over,” said Marc Emery, B.C.’s “Prince of Pot,” who publishes a magazine about cannabis and sells marijuana seeds over the Internet.

“The people who get caught are cocky and quick opportunists. You really have to be stupid to get caught,” Emery said, sipping herbal tea in the Blunt Bros cafe near Vancouver’s Gaslight District. Pot smoke permeated the air of the cafe and a portion of the busy Hastings Street sidewalk outside. It wafted from a glass-walled lounge where patrons stood chatting and openly puffing joints.

But consumer choice has narrowed noticeably. Several coffeehouses and cannabis-based businesses have lost their licenses or been raided by police recently. Dozens of Vancouver’s estimated 4,500 home-growing operations have been raided in the last two months, and 40 children have been taken into custody after raids.

The children were recent Asian immigrants whose families had been drawn into the trade by gangs, said Constable Anne Drennan, spokeswoman for the Vancouver Police Department.

“People in the communities have made it very clear to us that they don’t want these grows in their neighborhoods. They don’t like what goes along with the grows--the break-ins, the home invasions. This is a really serious problem,” she said.

Drennan was careful to distinguish between individual smokers and those who profit from pot by growing or offering it at cafes.

People caught with “a joint or two in their pocket” would be let go and the marijuana destroyed, she said.

Blunt Bros’ smoking lounge was news to her, Drennan said, but by allowing public smoking of pot, “they aren’t playing by the rules.”

Emery was forced in 1998 to sell his Cannabis Cafe, where pot-smoking was allowed at tables, after the city yanked his business license. By his count, his assets have been seized four times, he has been jailed eight times and he has pleaded guilty to 23 drug-related charges in the last few years.

However, he has received little jail time. Emery speculates that a U.S. court would have jailed him “for life, forever.”

Penalties May Be Getting Stiffer

Relatively lax legal penalties may soon be a thing of the past, said Chuck Doucette of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police drug awareness service.

In late March, Jason Sean Neubert, 30, was given two years behind bars for 131 pot plants seized from a Vancouver home. Prosecutors had requested only three months’ imprisonment.

The sentence has sent a scare through the area’s pot farmers and has prompted some to consider giving it up, said a grower, speaking on condition of anonymity from his home north of Vancouver.

In passing sentence on Neubert, Allan Stewart, a British Columbia Supreme Court justice, said the courts shouldn’t wait for politicians to turn up the heat.

“It is this accused’s bad luck that he is the one that has been singled out for the purpose of upping the ante,” Stewart said.