How Canada’s cannabis is tied to a global smuggling epidemic

That law made Canada a leader — the first among industrialized nations to permit recreational cannabis use. Now, Canada has developed an international black eye as a top source nation for the drug, which remains illegal in much of the world.

That means greater suspicion for border-crossing Canadian travellers, a closer eye on Canadian shipments arriving in foreign ports, and pressure on Canadian police and customs officials to catch illicit cannabis before it leaves the country.

What is the most common drug Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers encounter at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, the country’s busiest hub?

“If you’re talking about the number of seizures and volume, I would say cannabis is the most, yes, definitely,” Insp. John McMath, head of the airport unit, told the Star.

Earlier this month in France, eight people — five in the Paris area along with three in Quebec — were arrested on suspicion of drug smuggling on a massive scale.

After finding a 550-kilogram shipment of cannabis at the Charles-de-Gaulle airport in January, police in France and Canada launched an investigation into a criminal organization that is believed to have trafficked about three tonnes of cannabis into France since October 2024 for distribution across Europe.

The RCMP in Quebec told the Star that, in addition to the three arrests, two residences south of Montreal, in St-Hubert and Saint-Paul-d’Abbotsford, Que., and a vehicle were searched.

“We can’t give additional details of the case at this stage in order to protect the integrity of the investigation,” the Mounties said in a statement.

But in announcing the Canadian cannabis bust, French officials spoke of a “phenomenon that has been growing since the Canadian law of Oct. 17, 2018, on the legalization of cannabis, given the surplus of product in the country.”

Canada’s cannabis surplus stems from a market that has granted growing and retail licences to hundreds of businesses but is now seeing many of them struggling  to thrive.

“There’s been this massive overproduction of cannabis in Canada and licensed companies in Canada have actually had to destroy more cannabis than what they’ve been able to sell,” said Benoit Gomis, an expert on the illicit drug trade and lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

He said that Canadian authorities opted for a free-market approach to cannabis legalization rather than a more careful, conservative approach taken in other jurisdictions.

“That means that we have less control over the legal market and, of course, the larger the legal market is, the more options there are for diversion from the legal supply chains and for things like unreported production or other types of illegal activities.”

The Cannabis Council of Canada disputes that view, saying the uptick in marijuana trafficking is a problem of illegal growers in Canada who are looking for new markets.

“This is not an issue of legal cannabis illegally finding its way to other countries,” said Paul McCarthy, president of the business association.

“Perhaps those who are illegally producing cannabis no longer have the market that they used to have because there is legal cannabis being provided, and perhaps they are seeking other places to sell their product.”

Earlier this year, the federal government actually eased regulations for licensed cannabis producers, including the rules for destroying unsold surpluses.

Before, licence holders were obliged to make video recordings of the destruction process, reporting on the total weight of destroyed cannabis and where it was burned, and they had to maintain those records for two years. 

Under revised federal regulations companies need to only report on the number of cannabis plants destroyed rather than the total weight, and can have a regular employee deal with the destruction process rather than the previous two, one of whom had to hold a federal security clearance.

“Licence holders are not required to destroy unsold products,” a Health Canada spokesperson said in response to questions from the Star. “They are, however, required to keep appropriate records of destruction events and retain these documents for at least two years after the date of destruction.”

But Gomis fears there are too many opportunities in the current system for wrongdoing.

“We don’t have an effective track-and-trace system that would be able to track all cannabis from cultivation through processing … all the way to final retail sale,” he said.

In 2022, airport authorities in the United Kingdom seized 2,000 kilograms of cannabis entering the country.

In 2023, it more than doubled to 5,600 kilograms.

Officials say the rise in cannabis smuggling cases follows a sophisticated pattern.

“The exponential increase in importations is being fuelled by organized crime gangs who have access to cannabis grown overseas in locations where it is legal, and recruit couriers to transport it to the U.K. where it can generate greater profit for them than growing the drugs themselves,” Charles Yates, the deputy director of Britain’s National Crime Agency, said in response to written questions.

“Criminals never stop exploring new ways to make money.”

Last September, three Canadians were among 11 people arrested over a two-day span at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports for carrying cannabis in their luggage, according to the U.K. National Crime Agency.

In another case, a Toronto woman, 26-year-old Akuac Mawien, was sentenced to four years in prison in Ireland after she was caught with 12.5 kilograms of cannabis in her luggage upon arrival at the Dublin airport. She said she was homeless, trying to support a six-year-old son, and had been promised a 3,000 euros ($4,692 Canadian) payment. 

The court heard that she had instructions to go to a hotel and await a meeting with the intended recipient of the suitcase.

Elizabeth Lock, a 56-year-old Canadian woman, received a two-and-a-half year sentence in March 2024 after having smuggled 30 vacuum-packed bags of cannabis on a flight from Toronto to Dublin. Lock reportedly testified in court that she had been in financial difficulties, responded to an online job posting and been offered payment of $10,000.

The Canada Border Services Agency’s own statistics show drastic spikes in seizures of cannabis products in recent years, going from 1,700 kilograms in 2018-19 — the year that marijuana was legalized in Canada — to 23,500 kilograms in 2023-24, the latest year for which statistics are available.

On March 30, Nicholas Kirton, a 26-year-old batter with the Toronto Nationals cricket team and captain of Canada’s national men’s squad, was arrested at the airport in Barbados after police discovered 9 kilograms of cannabis in a suitcase.

Border officials in Nigeria have also been dealing with Canadian cannabis smugglers who have used individual drug mules to get the drug into the country as well as more sophisticated methods.

In pleading guilty, Munju reportedly said she was recruited online with the offer of a $10,000 payment, which she hoped to put toward the completion of a master’s degree.

Last December, Nigerian authorities announced arrests in a months-long operation that tracked shipments of automobiles and spare car parts from Toronto, through marine ports in Montreal and Antwerp, Belgium, to their final destination in Lagos. There, the containers were searched and found to contain large quantities of methamphetamine and Canadian cannabis.

But police say their attempts to trace the drugs from a shipping container or a smuggler’s suitcase back to the organized crime groups that are producing and distributing the cannabis are usually fruitless. Most often, those arrested are either unwilling or unable to reveal the identity of their contacts.

But something has definitely changed, said Insp. McMath, of the RCMP, whose 60-officer team at the Toronto airport has seen a clear jump in smuggling activity since 2023. Officials have been trying to educate travellers to the fact that while marijuana is legal in Canada, it remains a crime to transport it across an international border, even in the smallest quantities.

But that hasn’t discouraged the smuggling activity.

“What I would think is that something turned other countries on to our cannabis, and I don’t know what it is yet,” he said. “Perhaps it’s easier to grow in Canada now because of enforcement actions, because people are allowed to grow for personal use, because they’re not scrutinized as much as they were before.”

European countries are still mostly focused on drugs like hashish produced in North Africa and smuggled in large quantities through Spain and across the continent, and the spread of harder and more dangerous substances like cocaine and heroin. 

But the emergence of Canada and the United States, along with Thailand, as source countries for cannabis “is now very well known among law enforcement, customs and police,” said Laurent Laniel, an expert analyst with the European Union Drugs Agency.

He recalled attending a presentation at a policing conference at which a Canadian officer was explaining the process and effects of marijuana legalization in Canada.

“The first questions (from the European officers) were, ‘Well, mate, when are you going to do something, because we can see a lot of cannabis coming our way in Europe?’ ”

Under pressure, the Canadian cop explained that there were other, more troubling trends and policing priorities, as well as resource restraints and financial pressures.

“They were all arguments that the Europeans would use themselves if they were placed in similar conditions,” Laniel said.

One of the investigative assumptions is that the Canadian weed arriving in Europe and elsewhere is product that falls short of the regulatory standards or expectations of exacting Canadian cannabis consumers but that would still pass muster with European buyers.

”(Canadian producers) have invested money in this and they need to recoup their investment, and so they export it,” he said, while suggesting that criminal organizations may also be pulling the strings of some legal cannabis businesses.

Health Canada regulations oblige cannabis licence holders and top employees to obtain a security clearance, putting them through a process that looks for past criminal behaviour and associations in order to determine whether an individual poses a risk to public health or public safety and if there is ”the risk of cannabis being diverted to an illicit market or activity.”

But McCarthy, of the Cannabis Council of Canada, said the federal government should instead crack down on illegal marijuana growers, which he estimates are responsible for between one-quarter and 40 per cent of all cannabis sales in Canada.

That includes unlicensed producers, retailers, online sellers and the shipments made via Canada Post or courier.

“You need to bust up these operations,” McCarthy said. “You need to seize all the product you need to prosecute everybody involved and you probably need to make a bit of show of it to demonstrate that this is unacceptable.”

That alternative theory explaining Canada’s thriving cannabis smuggling activity has merit, said Elijah Glantz, a research fellow specializing in organized crime and policing with London’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

“The illicit markets (after marijuana legalization) were not tackled,” Glantz said. “They were essentially left to grow with impunity, with the idea that legalization itself would solve all the problems without ever having a policy to tackle the still very robust illegal market.”