Canada exporting huge quantities of marijuana?

 Washington Examiner:

U.S. border officials say they are surprised by the amount of marijuana found inside commercial trucks attempting to enter the United States from Canada as smugglers wage an all-out offensive to move enormous amounts of a hybrid marijuana into the states.

Drug smuggling has for years been the greatest threat at the U.S.-Canada border, but federal law enforcement officers are seeing an “unprecedented” surge as the war on drugs evolves amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection Deputy Commissioner Robert Perez.

“The increase in total amounts of drug seizures across the northern border was nearly tenfold when it came to particularly the marijuana trade,” Perez told reporters in a recent phone briefing. “Most all of it was in and around that Buffalo area.”

Several miles downriver from Niagara Falls, tractor-trailers packed with high-grade marijuana are regularly being intercepted by customs officers. In October, 10,000 of the 82,000 total pounds of drugs seized between the southwestern and northern borders were found here.

 Drug seizures in upstate New York have been on the rise since 2018, when marijuana legalization was implemented in Canada. However, the busts spiked in March, when a nonessential travel ban left mostly 18-wheelers as the primary vehicles going across the border. In the government’s fiscal year that ended in September, 42,000 pounds of drugs were found by customs officers in Buffalo, New York, compared to 4,000 the previous year.

“With commercial traffic remaining constant since border restrictions went into effect, ports in the Buffalo Field Office remained enforcement-focused, with efforts honed in on the commercial environment,” said Aaron Bowker, a spokesman for CBP’s Buffalo Field Office. “The legalization and overproduction of marijuana in Canada, and the black market profitability in the United States, in part, led to an increase in smuggling attempts by criminal organizations.”

It's not the standard marijuana being found in these trucks, according to Kevin Kelly, the special agent in charge of the DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations field office in Buffalo. This top-notch marijuana goes for $3,000 to $5,000 per pound on U.S. streets, with the price rising the farther it is taken inside the country. That is as much as six times more per pound than what the marijuana being smuggled from Mexico into the U.S. goes for, Kelly said.

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There must be a lot of people going to pot to deal with the lockdowns in blue states like New York.  How will the Mexican cartels deal with the competition?