Smugglers reaping huge profits abroad thanks to legalization, say officials Hidden in a shipping container full of a family's household belongings. Stashed in crates cleverly built inside a facade of wooden fire briquettes. All neatly vacuum packed and labelled, and then shipped across the ocean.

Nearly a decade after it was legalized at home, Canadian-grown marijuana is being smuggled through Europe's largest ports, leading to record seizures and a call for Canadian officials to intervene.

According to Belgian customs officials, a record-breaking 21 tonnes of Canadian cannabis were seized in the port of Antwerp in 2025 alone, exceeding illegal exports from every other country in the world. That includes Morocco, until recently Europe's biggest supplier of illicit weed.

Officials told CBC News that smugglers are taking full advantage of Canada's decision in 2018 to legalize cannabis use to illegally ship it across the world and tap into the highly profitable European market. Criminals stand to make many more times in returns in Europe than what the same marijuana fetches at home.

"According to my information, it has to do with the policy of the Canadian government," Kristian Vanderwaeren, director general of the Belgian Customs and Excise, told CBC News in an interview in Brussels.

"And 320 million Europeans who have money to buy this … it's an immense market." Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency, says the average wholesale price of a kilo of Canadian marijuana in a place like the Netherlands (where marijuana use is decriminalized, but technically illegal, as it is all over Europe) is about 4,100 Euros ($6,429 Cdn), and as much as 6,000 Euros (about $9,408 Cdn) in the U.K. Street prices would be even higher.

Kristian Vanderwaeren, director general of the Belgian Customs and Excise, says criminal organizations either earn a lot of money through smuggling or they don’t do it. (David Iacolucci/CBC) In Canada, the wholesale price for a kilogram of dried cannabis is an average of $1,000 to $1,500 Cdn, according to the RCMP.

Vanderwaeren says he first noted the surge in 2024, and then seizures at the port spiked in 2025, prompting a "red alert." That’s when he contacted the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) for help in stemming the tide.

The port of Rotterdam, the largest in Europe, is also experiencing a surge in Canadian cannabis seizures this year.

CBSA confirmed intelligence indicates "a sustained increase in illegal export attempts since 2022, particularly to Europe" including Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France and others. In an emailed response to CBC’s questions, a spokesperson for the agency said such attempts are done "in cargo shipments, postal shipments, and smuggling by air passengers." In 2025 alone, CBSA says its agents seized about 34 tonnes of cannabis products intended for export at maritime border points.

Still, Canada's policy is having a palpable impact in Europe, says Belgium's first-ever drug commissioner.

"This cannabis is sold in our Belgian streets but it's also going to the rest of Europe," said Ine Van Wymersch. "This is a supply-driven market," she added.

"We see that criminal groups are taking advantage of a gray zone, that it is really hard for the Canadian government to mitigate and to regulate this whole new policy." Legalization policies "sound very good in theory, but we have to take into account human behaviour," she said.

Belgian drug commissioner Ine Van Wymersch says information needs to be exchanged on both sides of the ocean to stop the smuggling. (David Iacolucci/CBC) Van Wymersch, once Belgium's youngest public prosecutor, was appointed drug commissioner in 2023 to aid in the fight against rising drug crime. Brussels alone has seen a significant surge — 74 shootings so far this year, according to the Brussels-Capital region’s minister-president.

"The shootings we see and the explosions are overall mainly related to cocaine but also to cannabis," said Van Wymersch.

The violence has prompted a debate on whether Belgium may be devolving into a "narco state." Van Wymersch rejects that label, but in one indication of the severity of the situation, she is always protected by a security team.

"We can't be naive," she said. "These criminal gangs, they don't have any values.”To do her job, “there are some measures that need to be taken to protect me and my office."

Although drugs are also smuggled through Belgium's airports, most come via the port of Antwerp, officially called Antwerp-Bruges. It has long been considered a top cocaine gateway to Europe.

Smugglers are now using the same maritime lines, well-established criminal networks and logistics through Antwerp and Rotterdam to get Canadian marijuana to Europe, says Europol.

A drug sniffing dog searches a container during a customs control for drugs at the Belgian port of Antwerp-Bruges, on May 20, 2022.

Europol gave CBC News exclusive insights on the movement of Canadian cannabis, including how criminal networks react when they encounter obstacles: "[They] will adjust, for example, by routing containers from Canada via the U.S. It is possible that cannabis from Canada destined for Europe could transit via the Caribbean."

"Smuggling is like surfing," said Vanderwaeren, the chief of customs. "You have to find the wave." Toronto man charged after disguising cannabis as frozen waffles while entering U.S., officials say Hamilton man pleads guilty to smuggling marijuana into U.S. via helicopter In other words, the criminal networks are swiftly adapting.

The surge in supply from Canada has meant Belgian seizures of marijuana at the port of Antwerp have for the first time overtaken those of cocaine.

CBC News is the first Canadian media organization to gain access to customs inspections at Antwerp, as well as a glimpse into some of the inventive ways smugglers tried to get Canadian cannabis through. 'Something was off' One case concerned a container that arrived from Canada last February, ostensibly filled with the belongings of a family moving to France. Agents became suspicious when they spotted two juke boxes whose electrical innards had been removed, stashed among innocuous-looking household goods.

Once they opened the container, agents found packages of marijuana stacked inside the hollowed-out juke boxes.

Agents inspecting X-ray-like images of another container noticed an anomaly: What was supposed to be pallets-full of wooden briquettes for fires appeared darker at the edges.

This image supplied by Belgian customs shows juke boxes that had been stripped of all electronics and stuffed with Canadian cannabis. The machines were hidden in a container full of belongings from people who were moving from Canada to France. It arrived at the port of Antwerp in February. (Belgian Customs and Excise) "My colleagues could see something was off," said communications officer Sara Van Cotthem.

They discovered that the briquettes were in fact a facade hiding crates that held vacuum-packed, one kilogram pouches of cannabis.

The port sees the equivalent of 13.5 million, 20-foot containers a year. Only one to two per cent of those containers are inspected, says Van Cotthem, using tools ranging from dogs, to scanners, to artificial intelligence and plain old intuition.

The rise in Canadian cannabis seizures has meant more scrutiny for Canadian containers than before, said Van Cotthem.

Sara Van Cotthem, a communications officer with Belgian customs, says officers undergo intensive training to learn how to spot suspicious shipments. (Brenda Witmer/CBC) Any seized drugs are ultimately incinerated, she added. Finding the culprits is left to law enforcement in Europe and in Canada.

A recent example was a trial in Berlin that convicted ten men for smuggling marijuana from Canada to Germany, handing the three main defendants sentences ranging from six and a half to 15 years in prison. The judge ruled the three used a front company to move 1.1 tonnes of cannabis in shipping containers ostensibly carrying timber. 'Glocal' problem Vanderwaeren says that since his appeal to Canada, he's noted a slight decrease in marijuana seizures in recent months, though the overall numbers remain high. He credits the CBSA’s ramped up efforts. A letter of intent was subsequently signed between the heads of customs of Canada, Belgium, as well as France and The Netherlands, to cooperate on stymying smugglers.

However, Europol says the profitability of North American cannabis (due to its high potency and low production cost) coupled with the demand in Europe, "ensures that this illicit trade will likely persist and even grow." The profits will help fund other criminal activities, the agency added.

The CBSA says the RCMP is "aware of sophisticated transnational organized crime groups involved in the illegal cannabis market, including networks engaged in both illicit domestic distribution and international exportation."

The spokesperson added that Canada respects its obligations under international drug control treaties, and that the Cannabis Act regulates restrictions on import and export of cannabis. "Any other cannabis imports or exports … are prohibited." RCMP charge 2 men for allegedly using women to smuggle cannabis from Toronto to Nigeria Air Canada employee charged after alleged weed smuggling scheme at Pearson airport Belgian officials are at pains to say they are not blaming Canada. But Vanderwaeren says that Canadians need to be aware of the unintended consequences of policies that are effectively "sponsoring criminal organizations" by enabling their huge profits.

Van Wymersch agreed, describing drug smuggling as a "glocal" problem — combining local and global — and so the solutions must be too. "It will not help us to blame each other.

Because we need each other," she said. "If we don't focus on the global level and we don't act on the local level, we will never come to something sustainable."