Meanwhile In Canada...

By Elaine Shannon/Vancouver

Marc Eery expects to earn about $1 million this year selling seed for high-octane marijuana and books on how to grow it. Most of his customers live in Vancouver, not far from his illegal mail-order business, which is largely ignored by Canadian authorities. It's not a place widely regarded as a hotbed of pot cultivation, but that's changing fast, and Emery, 42, steps to his office window to demonstrate why.

He holds up a fat sprig of marijuana buds and points out the crystals of dried resin that sparkle like tiny diamonds in the flat winter sunlight. These crystals make the local pot, which has been perfected through indoor growing under virtual laboratory conditions, twice as potent as competing varieties from Northern California and Oregon and six times as strong as most common Colombian and Mexican products. "This," Emery says, smiling at the minty-smelling weed, "is the top of the market." Across town, Dave Williams, an investigator for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, agrees--but he's not smiling. "British Columbia," he says ruefully, "now produces the best marijuana in the world."

Known as "B.C. Bud," this pot is finding a lucrative market among U.S. users of recreational drugs. A pound of dried B.C. Bud--whose active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, accounts for up to 30% of its weight--sells for about $8,000 in New York City. The more common marijuana from Mexico, with a THC content of about 5%, sells for as little as $300 per lb.

Many B.C. growers tend a few plants in a basement or attic under bare 1,000-watt metal halide or high-pressure sodium light bulbs. The authorities give lower priority to busting cultivators, who, even if caught with hundreds of plants, usually get off without jail time. They face fines and seizure of equipment but are typically back in business within weeks. Canada doesn't have U.S.-style mandatory sentencing laws for drug offenses. Law-enforcement officials say most Canadian judges don't view pot cultivation as a serious crime. Says Corporal John Dykstra of the Mounties: "People in the marijuana-growing business want to do business on our side of the border because the risk is so low."

The Mounties have focused instead on breaking up the organized-crime groups that have broken into the business. Gangs ranging from outlaw bikers to Latin American and Asian gangs are moving into B.C. pot cultivation--and also into lucrative cross-border smuggling and distribution. The Mounties have been busting more and more large-scale operations, often located in warehouse-size buildings, with strings of light bulbs as bright as stadium lights and computer-controlled hydroponic systems for fertilizing and watering several hundred plants. The smugglers move the stuff on every conceivable conveyance--over back roads in four-wheel-drive vehicles, through the woods on snowmobiles and dogsleds, and over water by boat, sea kayak or jet ski.

Seizures of B.C. Bud by U.S. law-enforcement agencies have doubled and redoubled over the past 2 1/2 years. "They're killing us," says Mike Flego, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's office in Blaine, Wash. Seattle customs enforcement chief Rodney Tureaud Jr. agrees, "We could double our numbers at the border and still be understaffed."

--By Elaine Shannon/Vancouver