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"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, March 18, 2006

UD Makes a Poem
Out of a News Article
In The Globe and Mail




"U.S. officials are calling the Thursday seizure of 671,000 tablets of ecstasy at the Washington-British Columbia border part of an increasing new smuggling problem.

"The ecstasy is significant," said Mike Milne, a spokesman for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. "The marijuana . . . we've just kind of gotten used to that over the last few years.

"The new trend we're seeing up in western Washington coming down from British Columbia is a rise in ecstasy over the last few years. It's just grown in leaps and bounds," Mr. Milne said Friday.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized 210 kilograms of the drug as well as 375 kilograms of marijuana as part of a routine check Thursday night at Blaine, Wash., 40 kilometres southeast of Vancouver.

The drugs were found in 21 drums stashed among a total of 128 drums in a truck with Canadian licence plates. The manifest recorded the cargo as shredded scrap plastic.

While the truck driver and passenger were briefly detained, they were later released. No charges have been laid yet, Mr. Milne said.

Officers became suspicious after doing a gamma ray scan of the truck and ordered it to a loading dock for a complete examination. During that search, officers found the drugs.

"They were in bags inside the drums," Mr. Milne said. "Some of them were hockey bags, some of them were not concealed at all."

Lynn Gardner, an official with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, called the seizure "significant."

"Narcotics smuggling from British Columbia continues to be a major... enforcement priority. Our continued vigilance has once again paid off."

Mr. Milne said use of ecstasy in the state is a growing problem.

"Certainly we're seeing more and more of it being smuggled in from Western Canada. We're certainly on the lookout for it," he said.

Mr. Milne said U.S. officials are working with the RCMP to see if the drugs are being manufactured in Canada or being trans-shipped through Canada from other countries.

He referred questions about what is being done to combat that problem in Canada to the RCMP.

The RCMP could not be reached for comment Friday afternoon.

The smuggling of drugs across the border south of Vancouver has not been far from the news in the past year

In January, U.S. customs officers charged two 17-year-old Canadians after they seized 5.3 kilograms of ecstasy concealed on them when they tried to cross the border in a vehicle.

The two male youths face state charges in Whatcom County.

Officers arrested the pair after examining the vehicle and doing personal searches.

And in a story that made news around the world, border officials found a drug tunnel running from a Vancouver suburb into Washington state.

The last of three men charged with digging the first sophisticated drug-smuggling tunnel under the U.S.-Canadian border pleaded guilty two weeks ago.

Timothy Woo faces at least five years in prison and a maximum fine of $2-million (U.S.) when he is sentenced for conspiracy to smuggle marijuana, as do Francis Devandra Raj and Jonathan Valenzuela, who previously entered guilty pleas.

The Surrey, B.C. men were arrested last July.

Authorities said they had just finished the 109-metre tunnel north of Lynden, Wash., which ran from the living room of a home on the U.S. side to a boarded-up Quonset hut on the Canadian side."


*******************************************



The Ecstasy

The ecstasy is significant.

As if tablature
On a manifest, recorded
As shredded scrap plastic,
Were suddenly gamma-rayed;

As if boarded up Quonset huts,
Running over drug tunnels
For Canadian transshipments,
Opened, under continued vigilance.

It’s just grown
In leaps and bounds
Over the last
Few years.