U.S. border officials say they are surprised by the amount of marijuana found inside commercial trucks attempting to enter the United States from Canada as smugglers wage an all-out offensive to move enormous amounts of a hybrid marijuana into the states.
Drug smuggling has for years been the greatest threat at the U.S.-Canada border, but federal law enforcement officers are seeing an “unprecedented” surge as the war on drugs evolves amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection Deputy Commissioner Robert Perez.
“The increase in total amounts of drug seizures across the northern border was nearly tenfold when it came to particularly the marijuana trade,” Perez told reporters in a recent phone briefing. “Most all of it was in and around that Buffalo area.”
Several miles downriver from Niagara Falls, tractor-trailers packed with high-grade marijuana are regularly being intercepted by customs officers. In October, 10,000 of the 82,000 total pounds of drugs seized between the southwestern and northern borders were found here.
Drug seizures in upstate New York have been on the rise since 2018, when marijuana legalization was implemented in Canada. However, the busts spiked in March, when a nonessential travel ban left mostly 18-wheelers as the primary vehicles going across the border. In the government’s fiscal year that ended in September, 42,000 pounds of drugs were found by customs officers in Buffalo, New York, compared to 4,000 the previous year.
“With commercial traffic remaining constant since border restrictions went into effect, ports in the Buffalo Field Office remained enforcement-focused, with efforts honed in on the commercial environment,” said Aaron Bowker, a spokesman for CBP’s Buffalo Field Office. “The legalization and overproduction of marijuana in Canada, and the black market profitability in the United States, in part, led to an increase in smuggling attempts by criminal organizations.”
It’s not the standard marijuana being found in these trucks, according to Kevin Kelly, the special agent in charge of the DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations field office in Buffalo. This top-notch marijuana goes for $3,000 to $5,000 per pound on U.S. streets, with the price rising the farther it is taken inside the country. That is as much as six times more per pound than what the marijuana being smuggled from Mexico into the U.S. goes for, Kelly said.
Marijuana from the northern border has a significantly higher level of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive compound that gives users the high sensation. Following Canada’s legalizing marijuana, authorized growers took root. Unlike Mexico’s single growing season, Canadian growers turned to greenhouses to tend to their plants three seasons each year.
“They get an authorization to say, hypothetically, grow 4,500 plants. Well, they’re growing 90,000 plants. So, you take that surplus, and there’s big money to be made with this over mass of production, you know, and a very high demand here in the United States,” said Kelly.
The growers work with their criminal networks in Canada and the U.S. to package, move, and transport — and rely on legitimate supply chains to carry their product, like any other legal product — the drug, to be sold and distributed in the U.S.
“The ports of entry here are the infrastructure for basically all the goods coming into Canada, you know, going into the cities in the Northeast down the Atlantic Coast,” said Kelly. “When you get into distribution, you know, they’ll push it out to major metropolitan cities like New York, Philly, D.C., down into the Carolinas, Virginia.”
For all the marijuana that CBP is seizing, enough gets past them that it is worth the growers taking a loss of millions of dollars on occasion. The profits generated are then reinvested into other illegal ventures, according to all three officials.
Kelly has investigated transnational criminal organizations for more than three decades, including nearly a decade on the U.S.-Mexico border before moving to Buffalo in 2017. The organizations that move drugs here are more akin to massive businesses like drug cartels in Mexico. The difference is that unlike very violent drug cartels that control regions of the southern border and that can move migrants or drugs through their zones, the northern border is much calmer.
“I don’t want to say a gentlemen’s agreement, because there’s nothing gentlemanly about it, but they’re kind of coming together and understanding as a business model it’s better to sort of get along to get along than be violent with each other,” Kelly said.
Kelly’s agency works with other DHS agencies to investigate these underground organizations and dismantle them, knowing that stomping them out in Canada just means they will likely set up shop in another country. For this reason, HSI has offices in more than 70 countries.
“Not putting the burden on our foreign partners, but coming with that information to our foreign partners and working with our foreign partners to disrupt and dismantle it,” said Kelly. “We’re very conscious of the Canadians. We’re very conscious of their political stance on some of this, and, and we have to work around that, you know. We just don’t go into Canada and say, ‘Hey, you know, we’re the U.S., and you’re going to do this. It doesn’t work like that. It’s really a partnership.”
The U.S. and Canada have arrested and prosecuted suspects involved in this growing smuggling ring.
Editor’s Note: An earlier headline stated that the marijuana intercepted at the northern border is six times more potent than usual. While the marijuana has significantly higher levels of THC, the “six times” figure is not correct. The Washington Examiner regrets the error.
