VIOLENT NEW FRONT IN DRUG WAR OPENS ON THE CANADIAN BORDER

SEATTLE - The drugs move across the Canadian border inside huge
tractor-trailer rigs, pounds and pounds stashed in drums of frozen
raspberries, tucked in shipments of crushed glass, wood chips and sawdust,
or crammed into hollowed-out logs, in secret compartments that agents refer
to as "coffins."

Kayakers paddle them south from British Columbia across the freezing bays
of America's northwest corner, and well-paid couriers carry up to 100
pounds at a time in makeshift backpacks, hiking eight hours over the rugged
mountainous terrain that forms part of the border between the United States
and Canada. Small planes drop them onto raspberry fields and dairy farms in
hockey bags equipped with avalanche beacons to alert traffickers that the
drugs have landed.

The contraband is called B.C. bud, a highly potent form of marijuana named
for the Canadian province where it is grown, and it has become the center
of what law enforcement officials say is an increasingly violent $7 billion
cultivation and smuggling industry.

On Thursday, four officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were shot
to death in Alberta, British Columbia's neighboring province, as they were
searching a marijuana-growing operation, one of many on the rise there. The
killings stunned a country that has apparently not lost that many officers
at once since the mid-19th century.

Leigh H. Winchell, special agent in charge for U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement in Seattle, which investigates border crimes and is part of the
Department of Homeland Security, said the police killings in Alberta were
stark evidence of "how serious the B.C. bud issue is getting, how much
money is involved and the lengths to which these criminals are willing to
go to protect it."

He added, "It's getting worse and worse, and we need to address it at every
level. The funding needs to be there, and the resolve of law enforcement to
address it needs to be there - on both sides of the border. It's a very
dark day for all of us."

This new wave of drug trafficking, with Northwest Washington and Seattle a
major transit point, comes as an enormous challenge to United States law
enforcement agents stationed along the often invisible northern border.
They are already dealing with the threat of terrorism, the flow of
immigrants and new human smuggling operations - some run by some of the
Canadian criminal organizations that move the marijuana south and cash,
cocaine and guns north, American and Canadian law enforcement officials say.

The situation is also spotlighting sharp differences in the way the two
countries deal with drug crimes, with some officials and experts on both
sides of the border saying Canada's less stringent drug laws have made it
harder to stem the flow of contraband moving north and south.

In British Columbia, a once-quiet province in a country that has long
enjoyed a low crime rate, the murder rate has soared in the past two years,
Canadian officials say, because of killings linked to warring drug gangs.

Now law enforcement officials here fear the violence will migrate south.
Mr. Winchell likened Seattle, with its currently low crime rate, to "Miami
before the drug wars" because of what he said was an impending threat of
drug-related violence. Vast amounts of drugs and money are now flowing
through Seattle and other West Coast cities, he said, along the heavily
traveled Interstate 5 corridor from California to the Canadian border. In
many cases, law enforcement officials from both countries say, traffickers
are smuggling cocaine north from California to Canada in exchange for B.C. bud.

Inspector Paul Nadeau of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who runs the
Coordinated Marijuana Enforcement Team in British Columbia, estimated that
in his province alone, 3.7 million pounds of B.C. bud is produced annually,
in up to 20,000 marijuana-growing operations, with as much as 50 percent of
it smuggled into the United States at points as far east as Michigan.

Efforts to combat the flow can be seen vividly in places like Blaine,
Wash., a tiny border town along the shore in the northwestern part of the
state, where agents patrol the waters, mountains and airways in brand-new
boats and planes. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, agents have seen their
manpower and technological resources double or triple, helping them seize
growing amounts of B.C. bud. Along the Washington border alone, agents
seized 20,500 pounds in 2004, worth more than $60 million, up from 4,000
pounds in 1998.

But with possibly more than 1.5 million pounds coming south, according to
the Canadian estimates, many acknowledge they are making a mere dent in
what is coming across.

B.C. bud is grown in indoor nurseries stocked with sophisticated lighting
and ventilation equipment. Growers use a system known as hydroponic
cultivation and carefully control the temperature, lighting and nutrients
in a way that allows a succession of crops to be grown throughout the year.
The process yields a drug that is far more potent than marijuana coming in
from Mexico and other countries, giving B.C. bud an almost mythic
reputation on the street.

Wholesale, B.C. bud sells for about $3,000 a pound, though the price rises
the farther from Seattle it is sold - $3,500 a pound by the time it reaches
California. Marijuana smuggled across the southern border sells for $400 to
$1,000 a pound in the Southwest United States, according to the Drug
Enforcement Administration.

In the past year, agents in and around Blaine have also begun to seize an
increasing amount of Ecstasy and chemicals used to make methamphetamine
headed for the United States. As the agents in the Blaine area have caught
on to the imaginative ways that smugglers sneak their contraband through,
more drugs are being transported farther east along the border - which,
including Alaska, stretches more than 5,000 miles - to places in Idaho,
Montana and North Dakota, law enforcement agents say. This has prompted
lawmakers from many of the northern border states to complain that the
Canadian border is receiving less attention than the Mexican border.

"I think the southern border just has the attention of the media, and with
the northern border, people just assume it is far more secure than it is,"
said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, who, among others, is
lobbying the Bush administration for more agents on the Canadian border.

The drug-trafficking situation is also one more potential strain on the
already tense relationship between the United States and Canada, its top
trading partner, experts say. Canada, which is debating decriminalizing
personal marijuana use but is also considering stiffer penalties for
marijuana growers, tends to mete out much lighter sentences than the United
States courts for drug-related offenses, a situation that has American law
enforcement officials - and even Canada's own police force - increasingly
frustrated.

Officials on both sides of the border say that because Canada has tended
not to pursue growers aggressively, it is difficult to move up the chain
and crack down on the larger criminal organizations controlling the
large-scale drug trafficking, although Canadian prosecutors said they have
recently been arresting and building more cases against the higher-level
criminals.

"The U.S. takes a sterner attitude on these things - more of a prohibition
mode," said Christopher Sands, an expert on Canada at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. "Our philosophies
are out of whack, and this increased flow is freaking out the Americans
while the Canadians are more blase."

That could well change after Thursday's killings, said several officials,
including Inspector Nadeau.

Inspector Nadeau, who said he was deeply frustrated by his own country's
greater tolerance of drug crimes, said he thought the deaths on Thursday
were already sending an alarm throughout the country.

"Because of a tragedy we may actually see people try and address the issue
in an effective manner," Inspector Nadeau said.

Inspector Nadeau said he was irked by what he cited as low rates of
arrested marijuana growers serving jail time. He said in 2004, only 8
percent of growers arrested were ordered to jail, down from 19 percent in
1997. He was citing a statistics gathered by the Canadian police, he said.

"The courts are lackadaisical," he said. "I think we've created a
generation of homegrown criminal organizations involved in this activity.
They see themselves as untouchable."

But Robert Prior, director of the Canadian Department of Justice's federal
prosecution service for the British Columbia Region, said the courts were
taking the marijuana problem seriously and that prosecutors were
aggressively pursuing the larger organizations smuggling both B.C. bud
south and cocaine and guns into Canada. Still, he acknowledged there were
fundamental differences between judicial systems in the United States and
Canada.

"Canada just has a different philosophical view to the use of jail than the
United States," Mr. Prior said. "The only offense we are completely agreed
on is murder. Otherwise, it's very different."

The major criminal organizations moving the drugs and guns, law enforcement
officials say, are outlaw motorcycle gangs, particularly the Hells Angels,
who have denied involvement but who law enforcement officials say do
everything from growing to smuggling the drugs. Vietnamese and other Asian
groups tend to specialize in growing, and Indo-Canadians have a niche is
transporting the drugs, according to Mr. Winchell, of the United States
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency, and Inspector Nadeau.

Canadians caught smuggling drugs into the United States, many of them mules
for the major Canadian criminal organizations, are prosecuted and serve
their sentences here. But typically after a year they can request a return
to Canada, and if the request is granted, they may end up serving a much
lighter sentence because of the differences in the two countries' drug
penalties, said prosecutors on both sides of the border. United States
agents have complained that they see some of the same Canadian smugglers
soon after they were returned to Canada to face reduced sentences.

Meanwhile, in and around Blaine, Border Patrol and other law enforcement
agents are using every tool they have, including motion detectors, giant
X-ray machines and cameras placed around easily crossed and unmanned border
entries. The 32 cameras in the Blaine area, beaming into a control room at
Border Patrol headquarters in Blaine, alerted technicians to a kayaker
attempting to smuggle 104 pounds of B.C. bud in late January.

It is, as the agents in Blaine describe it, a constant game of cat and
mouse with the smugglers, who have lately taken to using BlackBerries and
cellphone text messaging to transmit information about drops and pickups.
It is a constant race to stay one step ahead, said Joseph W. Giuliano,
deputy chief patrol agent for the Blaine sector of the United States Border
Patrol.

"Both of our jobs - the good guys and the bad - is to stay one step ahead
of the curve," Mr. Giuliano said. "Just as we're doing our darndest to hold
that position, they're doing their best to reacquire it."