VANCOUVER, British Columbia (CNN) -- When Canadian cocaine smuggler Charles Lai was being sentenced in a Seattle federal courtroom last month, the judge sending him to prison for 13 years offered a small item of good news. A suspected gang member in Vancouver is taken out of a bar in handcuffs. At least behind bars, Judge James Robart said, drug smuggler Lai would not become another fatality in Vancouver's gang wars. Authorities in Vancouver, just 30 miles from the border, are struggling to deal with the boom in the drug trade between the United States and Canada, along with the violence that has come with it.
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Thirty miles from U.S. border, authorities in Vancouver confronting gang warfare
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Violence the result of turf wars over increased narcotics trade
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Innocent bystanders have fallen victim to gangsters' heavy firepower
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Drug dealers sometimes tried in the U.S., where sentencing is stiffer
Tougher sentences may explain why more @placeholder drug traffickers like Charles Lai face a courtroom in America, not Canada.