My name is Roland Wallis. I'm with the RCMP and presently stationed in the Surrey detachment. Fraser is my boss. I have to be careful what I say--not really.
I have approximately 20 years of experience as a police officer. Prior to that, I had my own plumbing and heating business and I received a plumbing gas certificate for British Columbia as well as a plumbing ticket. The reason I say that is because it has helped me in my career as a police officer to provide expert evidence in court on marijuana growers as well as tented meth labs.
I spent some time in the GI section, the plain clothes section. I went over to the drug section for approximately a year and a half in Mission. In 1996 I was exposed to one of Canada's largest mobile meth labs, with my partner. We were out in the bush at the far end of Mission and we didn't quite know what we had at the time and what we were even exposed to. It was all new to us. I think this was the start of these meth labs coming to our area.
As a result of that, and having our police officers not knowing what went on, I took it upon myself to go and get as much education, as a general duty police officer, on marijuana labs and meth labs as I could. I have taken quite a few courses all through North America, while working as a street police officer, to learn about these types of meth labs and their dangers.
I have attended approximately 35 meth labs in my career and well over 300 marijuana labs. In some cases the people are not aware of the dangers that even a marijuana lab can have. The reason I say that is, as a gas fitter, I've attended a marijuana lab where rubber hoses were used to connect to a gas line in the house to run a CO2 generator, which provides CO2 to the marijuana plants. There's a chemical in the gas that eats rubber and it could dissolve over a period of time, and that's where we get our explosions from.
So this is just a marijuana lab.
As police officers we get exposed to the pesticides and the herbicides in these marijuana grow ops. I attended one where this person tied into the main gas line on the street and had 40 pounds of gas blowing 500 feet away from the road into a huge generator. It was like a 747 jet going on. That's a lot of gas to be exposed to.
I have attended, as I've stated, several meth labs and MDMA labs. All these types of chemicals that are used there--the solvents, ether, that type of chemical, sulphuric acid--are extremely explosive. An example of that is in the paper. A house or apartment in east Vancouver was blown out, and this is the cause of some of these labs that I have attended.
These people have absolutely no regard for any safety when they conduct their business with manufacturing or producing these drugs. It's all about money and who's going to be on the top. We try as best we can as police officers. We do have some other agencies that do help us. Sometimes I think it would be nice to have Revenue Canada sitting right next door to us in some of these places to knock on the door right after we're done and really take a close look at where all this money is coming from from these people.
It's all related to gangs as well. They all want to be on the top and have their turf and their areas and produce the most money. I think these drug labs are one of the areas where most of the money for even our motorcycle gangs and our other street gangs is coming from.
I'd like to see a change in our judicial system with search warrants. If they could make it so that we could make it an exigent circumstance to enter any one of these meth labs and marijuana labs...because public safety is a first concern for us as well as our members. We need to take these labs down. In a lot of cases, I know our members know where some of these places are, but we don't have quite enough evidence to go and take some of these down. We could, based on our expertise and some of the information that we do have, under an exigent circumstance, enter into any one of these labs and at least take them down and deal with the aftermath later.
It's also expensive for these chemicals to be destroyed. It costs thousands and thousands of dollars. This truck in Mission at the time cost $32,000 to be destroyed, and that's quite a bit of money.
Just to sum up, once again our public safety is the major concern. A prime example is what happened last night in east Vancouver. Thank you.