FROM HEAVEN TO HELL: 18 DIE AS DRUGS WAR RAGES ON STREETS OF VANCOUVER

The Canadian City Has Been Named The Best Place In The World To Live.
But Those Halcyon Days Are Over

Once upon a very recent time, Vancouver had a clean, safe image.
Nestled between a spectacular bay and snow-capped mountains, this
Canadian city, which is twice the size of Birmingham, was described
by The Economist as the most liveable in the world. Not any more. As
it prepares to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, what it's got now is
not cuddly, eco-friendly publicity, but blood-spattered streets
littered with shell casings and corpses.

Vancouver is the battlefield in a war between myriad drug gangs,
which include Hell's Angels, Big Circle Boys, United Nations, Red
Scorpions, Independent Soldiers and the 14K Triad. Guns - often
machineguns - are fired almost daily. "We've always been told by
media experts to never admit that there is a gang war," the chief of
police, Jim Chu, said last month. "Let's get serious. There is a gang
war and it's brutal." Vancouver's Mayor, Gregor Robertson, confessed
that the police are fighting a losing battle. Since mid-January, the
city has recorded 50 gang-related shootings, 18 of them fatal. And
the violence is not confined to seedy neighbourhoods. The cross-fire
is happening in quiet, residential cul-de-sacs and the car parks of
up-scale shopping centres. It's a suburban civil war.

Nor are hardened criminals the only victims. An attack on one
gangster's car killed a 24-year-old man hired to fit it with a new
stereo. In February, Nicole Alemy, 23, the wife of another gangster,
was gunned down in her white Cadillac - with her four-year-old son in
the back seat. On Friday, police arrested James Bacon - one of three
brothers who left the United Nations gang to join the Red Scorpions,
intensifying the rivalry between the two - for conspiring in the
deaths of four gangsters in their flat in Surrey, south-east of
Vancouver. Two innocent men were forced from the hallway into the
flat and also killed. Police said they intend to make more arrests
over the weekend.

As Vancouver has boomed over the past two decades, attracting wealthy
immigrants from across Canada and the Pacific, so too has the illegal
drugs trade. It is now the third largest industry in the province,
generating between C$7bn (UKP 3.8bn) and C$8bn a year. A young,
party-loving population with liberal attitudes to drugs has created
strong domestic demand, while the province's mild climate and a ready
supply of well-educated horticulturalists has led to supply of a
premium brand of cannabis called "BC bud", produced mostly in
hydroponic "grow-ops".

The drug's superior quality - "one puff and you're anaesthetised,"
reported one academic - also found favour with customers in the US,
encouraging an imaginative corps of smugglers. Customs agents have
found shipments in church vans, hollow logs and even kayaks. One
enterprising crew emulated the prisoners of Stalag Luft III, digging
a 110m tunnel "under the wire". The bigger problem for Canada,
though, was the return trade. The US drug distributors preferred to
pay in kind, with cocaine and guns.

Many commentators think Vancouver's violence is just a skirmish on
the fringe of the much larger war in Mexico, where 6,000 were
murdered last year as the state tried to reassert control over
territories seized by drug lords. The result has been a 50 per cent
rise in the price of cocaine in Canada, and correspondingly higher
profits to fight over. But not everyone is convinced. Experts at
Simon Fraser University argue that the problem is home-grown, and
that it's exacerbated by police efforts to bang up mob leaders. "All
you do is create vacancies as you put people in jail," said Ehor
Boyanowsky, an associate professor of criminology. "Suddenly there's
an opportunity."

In the short term, say the academics, Vancouver's problem is one of
unco-ordinated enforcement. By one count, as many as 11 different
agencies, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and local
police forces, were responsible for suppressing the drugs trade. The
courts are almost as confused. Canadian justice is more tolerant than
America's. No one has been successfully prosecuted for simple
possession of marijuana in years, and Amsterdam-style hash cafes
operate in a grey zone, only occasionally being shut down. Because of
judicial leniency, officers prefer to see their targets collared in
the US. The "Great Escape" gang were under surveillance on both sides
of the border, but were arrested in Washington.

In the long run, many British Columbians, on both left and right,
accept that legalisation and regulation are the answer. Just the
sales tax on C$7bn of drugs would pay for several hospitals and
schools, policing costs could be reduced, property crime by addicts
to pay for their drug habits would be slashed, and the gang wars
could be quickly reined in. "But the international politics are
unbelievable," said Dr Rob Gordon, director of Simon Fraser's school
of criminology. "The DEA [US Drug Enforcement Administration] starts
to foam at the mouth at the idea of there being a huge, legal
marijuana farm just north of the border. Under George Bush, the
concensus was that if Canada ever moved to exercise its economic
sovereignty, they would shut the border down by searching every vehicle."

Until then, the best hope may be that one gang or another comes out
on top, allowing it to impose stability, much as the Hell's Angel's
bike gang used to do up to 15 or 20 years ago. Professor Boyanowsky
said: "Those were the good old days."