I spent three years trying to discover the answer to that exact question: why were so many South Asian males over the last 19 years getting involved? And before that, why were so many Asian males getting involved in the 1980s in the drug trade?
It seems that for the last 100 years or so, it has moved from one minority to the next. It moved through the Italian community, through the Irish community, all the way through prohibition, through small Honduras communities and native communities. We've had Vietnamese gangs that were very prominent.
I don't believe it is because of the cultural or even religious traits of the South Asian community, which a lot of people have stressed. It's not that easy. I think this is more of a societal issue than a minority importing issue. These young men came from well-to-do families, not broken homes. If we look at the typical North American gangster, for example, if we take a look at south L.A. and African Americans getting involved in gangs, the majority of the time they come from broken homes, with one parent, usually a single mother. They have drug abuse or a parent who is currently in the judicial system or has served time.
None of those factors were really relevant in the South Asian and Asian communities from the 1980s on. It was more of a societal issue. Because Vancouver is a port city, and very prominent in trade routes north to south and east to west, the drug trade is very easy to get into.
Every one of my friends and any one of my acquaintances knows that I'm an activist and that I stand against any criminal activity, yet I can pick up the phone right now and ask one of them to drop off a marijuana plant here at the Four Seasons Hotel and it will be here within half an hour.
We have to look at the fact that the marijuana trade is so prevalent in B.C. I was not an advocate for drug use or drug legalization before, but I do see the logic behind legalizing it now. We have to reduce the incentive for these gangs to exist. The number one reason they exist, especially from one minority to the next, is because of marijuana. It is such an easy trade to get into, and there's so much money to be made. It's not slowing down. Supply and demand is not going down. The amount of money being made from it has not slowed down for years.
Last year, annually, we were looking at $7 billion in illegal criminal underworld trade for marijuana alone. It's not an issue that's going to slow down, unless we can control it. It's just like prohibition. We regulate alcohol. We tax alcohol. We should be looking at doing that for marijuana as well.