News item: American retirees are buying prescription drugs through stores in Canada. Drugs sell for less there than in the United States because of price caps imposed by the Canadian government.

*****

I've see it all in my years patrolling these seductively lush but deadly Canadian borders — from hallucinating pill-heads who think the police are evil space kittens, to motorcycle gang members with saddlebags full of heroin and nothing to lose.

But none of them prepared me for this new breed of smuggler.

They drive in from Montreal with boxes of Zocor, tamoxifen and Fosamax — all set for a party or rave where they'll use these drugs to lower their cholesterol, treat breast cancer or increase bone density. These smugglers are desperate. They feel like they'll “die” if they don't get their “fix” — especially the heart patients. And we're seeing more of these types every day — some of them as young as 50.

I first heard of them last year. We got a call that a smuggler was leading border police on a car chase at speeds exceeding 15 mph. Our officers worked as a team, but this driver employed a clever diversionary technique: She kept her left-hand turn signal on the whole time.

I heard the messages over the police radio for two hours:

“OK, Unit 12, I think she's really going to make a left this time. So cut her off at Canyon Street. ... Wait, she didn't turn there either. Maybe she's thinking of Race Street. Unit 16, can you intercept? ... No, still not turning. Damn. She's good.” But they did catch her eventually. A quick-thinking officer got out of his car and tapped on her window after she had spent 15 minutes trying to parallel park. What he found in the car would have made you hair curl. That's right. He found curlers. And drugs, too — drugs that also would make your hair curl, or, if you had diabetes, stimulate the pancreas to release insulin.

Eventually, we would start to call such drug users “hippies,” due to their large number of hip replacements. We'd watch them at the border as they declared bottle after bottle of hard-core, anti-American, life-saving medication, as well as some yarn they bought in Toronto and a particular brand of cookie they can't find in the States. Cars for these fat-cat drug-runners became all too familiar: 1973 Pintos, 1987 Volvos, slow, boxy vehicles with cracked tail-lights and bumper stickers that said “My grandson is an honor student at Woodland Elementary.”

But mostly, we learned their secret street lingo — typical spaced-out gobbledygook about how everything is “groovy” and how “the universe is perfect” and how “my lower back feels a thousand times better.”

“Far out, man,” one of them will say. “I just took some Syn-flex, and I can totally feel my cartilage mending.”

“That's nothing, dude. I just copped some Bumetanide, and now my kidney doesn't hurt and I think I can urinate again.”

“Well check it out. I just scarfed down some Zoloft. And if I keep taking 25 mg of it every day, my crippling depression will lift in about a month.”

Oh, I've heard it all — and I've heard the arguments, too:

“It's legal. You're not even arresting these people. Why are you wasting your time on this?” Or, “If product manufacturers can leave the country to get cheaper labor, why shouldn't consumers leave the country to get cheaper products?”

And, “Hey, remember when the Clinton administration was trying to assemble a national health plan, and the insurance lobbyists said the absolute worst thing we could do was set up a Canadian-style system? Ah, memories.”

Well, you may be able to sell that jazz to another appropriately medicated senior citizen. But not to me — not to somebody who's held a drug company executive while he sobs like a little girl because he can't afford a titanium satellite dish for his Lexus.

Don't you con me with your health-care slop, Mister. I've got a job to do. Besides, that job provides me with health insurance. So please, for mercy's sake, I can't get fired!