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13 Dec 08

Amsterdam cracks down on prostitution, cannabis: lessons for Victoria? « Robertrandall’s Weblog

Rob blogged about Amsterdam's re-think of its liberal laws regarding drug use (and prostitution, too). I left a *long* comment, a thinking-out-loud about how the factory system of education, coupled with a repression of creative risk-taking and innovation in the culture, enables and exacerbates turning to drugs.

robertrandall.wordpress.com/...-cannabis-lessons-for-victoria - Preview

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21 May 08

How B.C. became a world crime superpower : Canada : News : Sympatico / MSN

Maclean's will no doubt get trashed by all the usual suspects for this article, but there's a lot of truth in it. The underground economy, the black market, the "cottage industry" that takes on the mantle of natural rights, the exporting of the problem to other countries, the cavalier attitude toward "BC Bud" ... it can't be swept under the rug or discounted.

news.sympatico.msn.ca/...ContentPosting_macleans.aspx - Preview

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By almost any measure it was a thriving enterprise, with subsidiaries in eight countries and a flourishing distribution business. Even more impressive, it was run out of Vancouver, a city that's seen many head offices disappear over the years. And with its strong sales, the venture would easily have been considered one of British Columbia's largest private companies. That is, if the operation at the heart of it all wasn't a criminal syndicate trading in marijuana, cocaine, heroin, guns and real estate.
The allegations regarding the crime ring have not been proven in court,
- ...and good luck on getting convictions, given Canada's court system... - on 2008-05-21
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- Consider, for a moment, just a few figures that show the size and scope of the crime industry in B.C.:
  
  • There are an estimated 20,000 marijuana grow ops in houses across the province, and many thousands more hidden in the mountains and valleys of the interior. It's conservatively estimated that marijuana is an industry with revenues of $5 billion to $7 billion a year.
  
  • In the last few years, according to the Canadian Border Services Agency, more than $1 billion worth of cocaine has been seized at borders in the Pacific region. One media report last fall found the amount of cocaine recovered at B.C.'s borders more than tripled in the previous two years.
  
  • The province is the main port of entry for chemicals used in the manufacture of drugs such as methamphetamine and ecstasy, while B.C.-based Asian gangs are the largest suppliers of ecstasy to Canada and the U.S.
  
  • In the last year there have been roughly two dozen gangland slayings in the Vancouver region. The number of homicides in B.C.'s Lower Mainland in the first four months of this year was nearly three times that of Toronto. And when Maclean's recently looked at Canada's most dangerous cities using data from Statistics Canada, 11 of the top 20 were located in B.C. Meanwhile the number of gangs operating in the province has jumped from less than 10 a decade ago to 129.
- you can't help but see British Columbia for what it is - a key hub in the world of international organized crime
- By some estimates, criminal activity amounts to roughly seven per cent of the province's total economy.
- alongside construction and tourism, criminal activity is one of B.C.'s strongest growth industries
- this is a multi-billion [dollar] industry. And as Western Canada positions itself to be North America's most important commercial corridor to Asia, with the much-heralded Pacific Gateway initiative, criminal gangs are poised to expand their operations in a huge way. Crime is big business in B.C., and business, unfortunately, is booming.
- According to police, 40 per cent of all murders in the Lower Mainland are now tied to organized crime.
- In December, the B.C. Progress Board reported that, in 2006, Vancouver had the second-highest combined violent and property crime rate of all major cities in Canada and the U.S. For instance, it had nearly 3.6 times as many break and enters as New York City, when measured per 100,000 people.
  - Victoria is never mentioned in this article, but it ranks in the top crime cities in Canada -- despite its middling size. Why? Because of property crime: drug addicts searching for funds for their next score. That's what's driving the crime. (Incidentally, neither needle exchanges nor safe injection sites will address that issue: addicts will still need money to pay for drugs, and they'll continue to get that money through crime -- which continues to increase social disorder.) - on 2008-05-21
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- Things get far murkier once you start to examine the fuzzy line between B.C.'s criminal and legitimate economies. One car dealer in Vancouver told the National Post a few years ago that a quarter of his business involved selling luxury cars for cash to those involved in the drug trade.
- It's estimated that more people are employed in the marijuana industry than in traditional sectors like forestry.
- B.C. is the only province to have posted a negative, and falling, personal saving rate for 10 years running. One bank economist suggests this reflects the growing size of B.C.'s black market, which doesn't get captured in the data.
- Likewise, a 2005 RCMP report found that if marijuana production was factored into provincial accounts, B.C.'s trade surplus would jump 230 per cent to $8.6 billion.
- The general public is completely ignorant of the extent to which organized crime has infiltrated B.C. communities and the business environment, says Michael Chettleburgh, author of Young Thugs, a book examining gang violence in Canada.
- You really have to look at the price of real estate in the Lower Mainland and ask 'Who is buying?' says Supt. John Robin with the B.C. integrated gang task force.
  - Ouch, talk about giving a whole industry (real estate) a black eye! This is pretty casual hear-say -- if it's true, let's have some statistics. The NIMBYs in Victoria will totally embrace the idea that criminals are buying all those condos ... - on 2008-05-21
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- forget everything TV has taught you about organized crime. There are no Mafia families, with mob bosses and capos pulling strings. If anything, say police, such a rigorous chain of command would be easier to fight.
  - that's like radical Islam or fighting an insurgency or guerrilla war: very difficult. No clear leadership. Any radical imam can become a leader; insurgents are everywhere and nowhere. - on 2008-05-21
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- When a new deepwater port opened last year in Prince Rupert, business leaders cheered because it would shave days off the trip between Asia and the eastern U.S. So did the criminals. B.C. hasn't grasped publicly the size and the affect the Pacific Gateway program is going to have on B.C. and North America, says Kiloh. The projections about the depth of crime that's going to come just from that are absolutely staggering.
- Whenever you let your guard down, you're in trouble.
  - - re. this and the previous sentences in this paragraph: Campbell is just speaking politico-speak. Such drivel. Sure, "examine" the laws around organized crime; sure, say that "everyone" can be "comfortable" here. OMG. - on 2008-05-21
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- But the fact is that criminal groups have built their forces on the back of the flourishing marijuana industry which, until relatively recently, the province seemed to almost implicitly condone.
  - Exactly. - on 2008-05-21
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- The chance to earn enormous profits with little risk of serious incarceration acted like a welcome mat to organized crime. B.C. Bud, a highly potent variety of cannabis, is as synonymous with the province as mountains and old growth forests. And many in B.C. fiercely resent attempts to crack down on its cultivation and use. When roughly 10,000 people lit up at a Vancouver rally last month, a newspaper editorial criticized police for making no arrests. One letter writer responded by equating the protest with a Martin Luther King march.
- The days of hippy-run grow ops, however, are mostly a thing of the past. Plecas, at Fraser Valley, conducted a study that looked in detail at all the grow ops reported to police between 1997 and 2003. He found the average grower had a 13-year criminal history with seven prior convictions. This is not ma and pa stuff, he says. Forty per cent of the these people had convictions for violence. Estimates for how much B.C. Bud is exported to the U.S. and other countries range from two-thirds to as high as 95 per cent.
- Building on their success with marijuana, groups are pushing into other areas of criminal activity. Each year border officers now seize around one tonne of cocaine coming into the province.
- criminal groups are using their existing distribution channels to ramp up the production and distribution of synthetic drugs. Because of lax Canadian laws, it's relatively easy for groups to bring in vast quantities of precursor chemicals needed to manufacturer methamphetamines and ecstasy. We're seeing barrels and barrels of legally brought in precursors that then will sell illegally for over 10 times the [purchase] amount, says RCMP Insp. Gary Shinkaruk. The amount of money being made is staggering.
- Vancouver emerged as a leading centre for credit-card fraud
- Gangs have also found a thriving business in the illegal transport of people through B.C.
- What is certain is that groups like the Vietnamese gangs, who cut their teeth in the business, are finding tremendous success overseas. Hundreds of cannabis farms have sprung up in the U.K. and authorities have a good idea where the industry originated.
- Britain isn't alone in dealing with B.C.'s more enterprising criminals. In California, seizures of indoor grow ops jumped 260 per cent between 2004-2006, says Robert Taylor, a Sacramento-based agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. It was a new phenomenon we hadn't seen before. It blew in like a tornado. The DEA knew precisely where growers had found their model. It was as though they'd taken a page out of the B.C. Bud handbook, he says. In its December drug situation report, the RCMP referred to this shift to the south as the displacement . . . of technical expertise and knowledge but most Canadians would recognize it by its more familiar label: brain drain.
- What Britain and the U.S. want to avoid is allowing marijuana to take root as an integral part of their economies, as it has in B.C. To understand the cash crop's rise in the province, an ideal place to start is Nelson. Located roughly 650 km inland from Vancouver, the haven for Dukhobors, draft dodgers and free spirits is also a big marijuana producer. What started as a cottage industry in the 1960s became a foundation of the local economy, as mills gradually closed and hundreds lost their jobs. Don't kid yourself, old folks, kids 16 and up, everyone's involved in some way or another, says Leah (not her real name), a straight-A university student in her mid-20s who for two years has worked the harvest. In these parts, no one asks what anyone does for a living. It's understood; you talk about the weather instead. One nearby hydroponic store enjoys annual sales of $6.5 million while heavy equipment operators admit to selling quarter-million-dollar excavators - for cash.
- Indeed, B.C. towns like Nelson have come to resemble the remote hillside villages of Bolivia or Columbia, where entire populations are involved in coca leaf production. The bizarre flip side is that when authorities crack down on grow ops, it can hurt some small-town economies. Robert Smith, a 73-year-old furniture store owner in tiny Grand Forks, almost bemoans the fact that last year, police shut down several large grow ops. Because of that, there's more people on the street, he says. With the [forestry] job cuts and the clampdown on marijuana growers, we're a lot short of jobs.
  - ...Holy cow. - on 2008-05-21
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- To Leah, working the marijuana crop is just another summer job, like tree-planting, though the earnings, ranging from $4,000 to $8,000 for the four-week summer harvest, are admittedly higher. Those processing the dried crop can earn more than $600 a day, especially if they're nimble fingered. Even in Vancouver many of those selling marijuana at the street level see it as a full-time job granting access to an almost middle-class lifestyle. Laura, a twentysomething dealer, has been selling marijuana for seven years now, earning around $40,000 a year, tax-free. The local market is huge, she says, and the industry is more relaxed than anywhere else in the country. You can make more money here than anywhere else, she says.
- As organized crime flexes its muscles in the province, many fear the inevitable outcome will be corruption on a massive scale. There has to be people on the take across the spectrum, says Robert Gordon, head of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. From time to time you see little signals. For instance, last October a Canadian guard was arrested at B.C.'s biggest border crossing for allowing people to smuggle cocaine, money and guns into Canada. A month later a corrections officer helped a notorious Persian crime boss escape from a maximum-security prison. It was the first time in B.C. history that a prison guard was charged with helping a prisoner escape from jail; the high-ranking gang leader is still on the lam. Then, just last month, a U.S. border services agent posted to the same, busy border crossing south of Surrey, B.C., was sentenced to 32 months in prison for allowing a Vancouver woman to smuggle several large loads of B.C. Bud into the U.S.
- Then there was the troubling case of Ravinderjit Kaur Puar. In 2005, the 30-year-old lab technician and mother sought a spot on Vancouver city council. Her political aspirations crashed to the ground when she was caught in the U.S. selling thousands of ecstasy pills. (She told an undercover drug agent Indo-Canadian gangs aren't to be messed with: That's what the game is like in Vancouver: you f--k with us, you die.) The episode raised fears gangs were seeking higher office, though nothing came of it. There's been no indication Canadian police have been compromised or that politicians or judges have been bought, but it's hard to imagine these kinds of flows of money without that happening, says Stephen Easton, an economics professor at Simon Fraser University.
- This all makes authorities' failure to curb the growth of crime that much more troubling. Police and prosecutors have faced multiple setbacks at the hands of the courts recently. Few of those arrested by police for growing marijuana actually serve prison sentences. Meanwhile, the biggest blow came in March when prosecutors lost a case that would have seen the Hells Angels declared a criminal organization. Police spent two years and $10 million trying to prove that David Giles, a member of the Hells Angels East End chapter, and two co-accused had been involved in trafficking cocaine. B.C. Supreme Court Justice Anne MacKenzie acquitted Giles, saying the evidence against him was weak. At the same time police say existing legislation hampers their probes of major crime figures. In the course of the E-Paragon investigation, Canadian police required more than 200 judicial authorizations for wiretaps and warrants, while police in Australia and the U.S. needed just 12 apiece. And when the E-Paragon case finally goes to trial, it will surely be a huge ordeal lasting months. Yet according to Kiloh, several suspects arrested in Australia as part of the same investigation are already serving their sentences. Canada isn't heading to be that international beacon that it once was because our laws have not kept up with the realities of the world, he says.
  - ...repeat: holy cow. - on 2008-05-21
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- Some believe the police themselves could be more efficient. There are calls for a single provincial force to replace the 126 RCMP detachments currently serving B.C., while pressure is mounting for the Lower Mainland's 13 police departments to merge into one.
- But late last month a Surrey resident, whose house was searched and found to contain no sign of a grow op, filed a lawsuit with the B.C. Supreme Court arguing the bylaw is unconstitutional.
  - .. ah yes, the charter, good and bad. - on 2008-05-21
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- With each new line of business, crime seeps further into the everyday lives of British Columbians.