RCMP trumpet drug busts worth $117M

Two separate international drug seizures worth a street value of $117 million have led to the arrests of eight men from the GTA, the RCMP announced Monday.

Five Toronto men were charged in October in connection with the seizure of 5.7 tonnes of hashish worth $69 million bound for Toronto from Afghanistan.

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson said the hashish, discovered en route in Kyrgyzstan, was hidden in 500 hollowed out wooden boards that each contained about 10 kilograms of the drug.

“We pursued this international investigation and allowed the container with only a small portion of the drugs to travel through (a numbers of countries) before finally arriving here in Canada,” he said, adding that since 2009 the RCMP and the Canadian Border Services Agency have intercepted and seized more than 70 tonnes of hashish overseas and domestically.

Superintendent Rick Penney, RCMP GTA Drug Enforcement Commander, told the Toronto Star there is always the fear that some of the profits from the hashish shipment could have made it back to Afghanistan to fund organized crime and even the Taliban.

In the second case, three Markham men were charged last month with importing 2,900 litres of Gamma-butyrolactone (GBL), which could produce up to 4.8 million doses of the date-rape drug worth $48 million.

Full Story(The Star)