Sign up for the VICE Canada Newsletter to get the best of VICE Canada delivered to your inbox.A48-year-old Hells Angel from Ghent is appealing a much lighter sentence for running two cannabis plantations. In addition to a plantation in Goes in the Netherlands, drugs were also grown in Alveringem. In absentia on appeal, he was sentenced to seven years in prison. "I fully suspect they'll find a way to make money off this." “I think you may see them try to paint a picture that they're going to try and gain legitimately, as others will, but an organized crime group generally profits from organized crime." "It's very difficult for us to predict, at this point, how they are going to take advantage of the legalization of marijuana and how they will try to profit from it,” said Renton. Frankly, the surprising thing would be if they didn’t try to make money off this legalization. When medical marijuana became popular there were indications they attempted to get in on the medical marijuana game by facilitating licences for growers or using licences of their own to grow and move their product onto the black market. As Langton says, they’re just so damn adaptable. “The point of the group is they're extremely adaptable,” he adds.Īll that said though, Renton cautions not to think that the Hells Angels won’t attempt to find a way into profiting off legalized marijuana. They make their money not just off drug trafficking but a myriad of things, this Langton explains, can include but not be limited to “prostitution, racketeering, political kickbacks, muscle for hire” and so on. The Hells Angels have, like any good business, diversified. The hot market right now simply isn’t weed, it’s opioids. Remember, prior to this Canada was a net exporter and we can’t have legit growers of marijuana selling their product within countries where it is illegal now, can we? To note, legalization is, obviously, only going to be mostly impacting the domestic portion of the marijuana trade meaning that the export game is still fair. The economic effects will hit the HA, primarily by losing the kickback from dealers on their turf they would have made, but in the long run, it’s a minuscule amount. The most impacted by legalization is going to be the low-level street dealers, Langton explains. To simplify it greatly, the HA get the product from someone, then hand it down to one of their puppet clubs, who hand it down from there, and so on and so forth. It changes by location-as the HA works through localized chapters-but broadly the Hells Angels work more like a cog in the black market weed machine than the primary benefactors. The Hells Angels are involved with the overarching marijuana trade in Canada, yes, but in a much more indirect way than the majority of Canadians think. The illicit drug trade is vast, there is a number of different products, is substantial, but it is just one piece, there is a number of illicit drugs that are a part of that trade." "When we get into our investigations we find that there can be that marijuana component just as easy as the cocaine trafficking component,” Renton told VICE.
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