Achi news desk-
More than 1.5 tonnes of suspected cocaine was seized last month at a container inspection facility in Halifax. A Nova Scotia RCMP federal criminal operations officer says while it’s unusual, it doesn’t happen infrequently.
The huge shipment was destined for Europe, although the Superintendent. Jason Popik says cocaine is the typical drug of choice on the East Coast.
“In Halifax itself, there is a trend towards crack cocaine, which is produced from cocaine. In Nova Scotia, we see cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl, and then the club drugs like MDMA or ecstasy,” he told CTV Atlantic’s Todd Batti during an interview.
A 2020 wastewater study showed Halifax had the highest per capita use of cocaine, marijuana and ecstasy compared to Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver.
Popik says fentanyl is also being used on the East Coast, though not as much as out west.
“When we start seeing fentanyl mixed into cocaine it becomes much more dangerous to people. We’re seeing more of that,” he said. “Fortunately, in Nova Scotia, we’re not seeing a lot of fentanyl like they’re seeing on the west coast. They’re seeing a lot more of it in Ontario and Quebec than we see here.”
Popik says federal police are also trying to crack down on the globalization of the drug trade.
“(We’re) looking at transnational organized crime from source countries to Canada, we work within the Five Eyes, which are New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, where we trying to install surveillance equipment to detect those large shipments so we can interdict them and hopefully go after the organized crime group.”
Air travel also makes moving drugs between countries even easier.
“Five, 10 years ago, if you wanted to buy a load of cocaine, you had to be a preferred or respected buyer. These days, we have more and more people who succeed at that intermediate level. They go out and they outsource their own line, they bring it in themselves, and succeed at it.”
While the geography of the East Coast makes it easy to import drugs, Popik says they are often moved to more central states before being shipped back.
“More and more we are seeing professional drivers, the professional companies that are not known to them though,” he said. “It’s shipped through the post, it’s shipped through the commercial companies, because the companies don’t know it’s shipped, unless the merchant declares it to them , so it’s actually ground transportation that brings him back to Nova Scotia. “
Popik says organized crime groups switched to using transport trucks and the internet for drug distribution after ports were closed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Last year, we did a file with homeland security where an individual from Halifax was exporting drugs to the United States from Halifax, so that’s the flexibility they can work within,” he said.
While the RCMP works closely with local police departments and the Canada Border Services Agency to combat organized crime, Popik says a provincial drug strategy is needed right now in Nova Scotia.
“(There is) someone who sells a kilo to 10-to-20 kilos, then we have to continue our operations at the street level,” he said. “It’s a spectrum of effort that we need to put forward and that’s what police chiefs are trying to achieve at the moment.”
