BORDER NO PROBLEM FOR CANADA POT SMUGGLERS

SPOKANE - To Steve Garrett, the U.S.Canadian border north of here is a sieve
through which British Columbia marijuana growers are sending their lucrative
drop' south.

Garrett, assistant chief of the U.S. Border Patrol's Spokane detachment,
say's his force of 29 agents is too small and ill-quipped to stop the flow
of pot-carrying smugglers.

"We not catching much of anything up there," he said. "It's overwhelming."

Garrett's agents are in charge of 350 miles of border in rugged terrain from
north-central Washington's Okanogan country to Glacier National Park in
western Montana.

Increasingly, smugglers in hiking gear are carrying hockey bags filled with
an extremely potent, expensive strain of marijuana called "BC Bud."

Drug-enforcement agents believe hundreds of large growers in lower British
Columbia are producing thousands of pounds of pot every month, most of it
hydroponically.

The Annual crop is believed to be worth at least $1 billion on the streets
of the United States.

The pipeline flows into Spokane, City narcotics investigators say. Here,
the marijuana is loaded onto trains, planes, buses and cars for nationwide
distribution.

The average Spokane-area user pays $40 for an eighth of an ounce,
authorities say

In bigger cities, the price can reach $75 for an eighth of an ounce. There,
it fetches up to $8,000 a pound, compared with about $800 a pound for the
milder, more common Mexican variety.

"America is a land that's starving for marijuana," said Dana Larsen, a
Vancouver, British Columbia, marijuana grower and editor of Cannabis Culture
magazine. "We're not going to stop bringing it in." The Border Patrol's
Spokane detachment seized 3,262 pounds of pot in the fiscal year starting
Oct. 1, 1997, compared with 761 pounds the previous year.

With increased enforcement, agents expect to confiscate more than 4,000
pounds of BC Bud this year. That amount is thought to be a fraction of the
marijuana that makes it across undetected.

Most of the smuggling centered on Western Washington's Blaine border stop
until the Interstate 5 corridor was designated a federal "high-intensity
drug-trafficking area" in 1997.

Increased border raids, car searches and investigations pushed the smuggling
east, said Mark Thomas, resident agent in charge of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration's Spokane office.

The extent of smuggling east of the Cascades became clear after a marijuana
bust in July outside the northeastern Washington town of Metaline Falls.

Three men who had been hiking into the United States were found with about
300 pounds of BC Bud packed in six hockey bags, Border Patrol intelligence
agent Paul Jones said.

"You don't grow that much pot in your basement," Jones said. "We realized
then that we had a real problem."

Northern Idaho also is affected. Two of the biggest Border Patrol busts
this year were at the Porthill border crossing north of Bonners Ferry.

Last month, regional Border Patrol administrators pleaded for .help in
Washington, D.C., before the House subcommittee on immigration and claims.

They won the support of the panel's chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, but
no new agents.

"So few agents cannot monitor a border thousands of miles long 24 hours
every day," Smith said.

"The Border Patrol knows that the drug and alien smugglers monitor their
shifts and simply wait until they go off-duty."

A request to expand the federal drug-trafficking enforcement zone to Eastern
Washington also is under consideration. The designation would offer
narcotics investigators access to federal crime databases, a small pool of
federal money and potentially more agents.

A decision by the Office, the, National Drug Control Policy, expected this
summer.

Canadian officers who enforce drug laws have their own problems. In eastern
British Columbia, only five Mounties patrol 250 miles of border and interior.

"Smuggling is fairly risk-free," said Larsen, the Vancouver-based' marijuana
magazine editor.

He said growers often buy houses in rural areas, using them solely for
growing BC Bud. They set up the operation, hire someone to serve as
caretaker of the crop, then sit back and collect the profits.

"You can make a lot of money, if you're smart and careful," he said.