Dankr.ca – Your Toronto Connection
Article by Emma Spears, Growth Op
The U.S. Customs and Border Security is cracking down as Buffalo becomes a key point for sneaking Canadian bud across the border.
This year alone more than 40,000 pounds of Canadian weed having been seized at New York’s points of entry. The area has the distinction of catching more cannabis smugglers than any other region of the border between the two countries — and it’s all thanks to the already built-in trucking routes that facilitate easy smuggling and speedy delivery to the East Coast.
“Our officers are trained, have inspection skills and gut instincts but we also have a lot of technology,” says Rose Brophy, director of field operations for the Buffalo Field Office for U.S. Customs and Border Security, told WGRZ News.
Canadian weed entering the U.S. via New York is often destined for “major metropolitan cities like D.C., Philadelphia, Newark, Boston, move its way down in to Virginia into the Carolinas and even down toward Florida,” according to Buffalo Homeland Security Investigations’ Special Agent-in-Charge Kevin Kelly, who claims that a pound of Canadian cannabis can net sellers up to U$6000.
Kelly attributed the majority of the illegal cannabis entering the U.S. to organized crime.
“You have traditional Italian organized crime. You have Chinese organized crime. You have East Indian organized crime. And mixed in between the organized crime families are outlaw motorcycle gangs that are fueling a lot of the smuggling between the U.S. and Canada,” Kelly explains.
Despite various agencies’ continued monitoring of the situation — and a plethora of recent busts in the area — no one really knows exactly how much illicit Canadian cannabis ends up heading South across the border.
