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Busted! Nova Scotia’s War on Drugs

by Vernon Oickle

As a reporter for a weekly newspaper on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, Vernon Oickle became increasingly aware of the expansion of the drug trade in the region. His research into the situation produced Busted! Nova Scotia’s War on Drugs, a mixture of investigative journalism and case histories of local people who have become involved with drugs and drug trafficking.

As Oickle points out in the early chapters, tough American anti-drug policies initiated in the late 1970s made Nova Scotia’s coastline a particularly appealing destination for smugglers. While the U.S. Coast Guard was policing the Eastern seaboard with increased vigilance, Eastern Canada’s relatively unpopulated and unprotected shores provided a less risky entry point for drugs intended for the North American market.

The impact of this geographic shift in the drug trade provides an interesting premise for further investigation. However, Oickle’s style tends to diminish both the weight of his material and the credibility of his own commentary. For instance, Oickle repeatedly describes Nova Scotia’s South Shore as “idyllic,” and drug-related activity as “illegal” or “illicit.” This implied polarization between local communities and drug traffickers is compounded by references to “Jamaican trafficking groups… groups within the Chilean, Italian, Eastern European, Chinese, and Vietnamese communities” as well as to “Chinese street gangs… East Indian groups and members of the Russian community.”

At this late stage in the history of drug culture, it is dangerously naive to suggest that the problem is “foreign,” merely insinuating itself into our communities from abroad. The demand for drugs and the appeal of a criminal lifestyle are at least partially fuelled by dissatisfaction and lack of opportunity in our own communities.

Perhaps spinning out a story with less narrative appeal than he had hoped, Oickle describes several major drug busts in painstaking detail. Unfortunately, his laborious prose style undermines the tension of these episodes. Neither straight journalism nor fiction, Busted! falls into a grey area somewhere between the two; it is not hard-hitting enough to provide an effective factual account of the situation, and, at the same time, the individual stories are rendered in too clichéd a manner for their protagonists to come to life.

 

Reviewer: Louise Cameron

Publisher: Nimbus

DETAILS

Price: $16.95

Page Count: 224 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-55109-227-1

Released: Aug.

Issue Date: 1997-11

Categories: History