Back when I lived on the east coast, my friends and I would occasionally drive the 3 hours up to Canada (Niagara Falls) to drink and go to the casino. Now this was several years ago, but I was retelling this story to some people recently and they seemed to think it sounded pretty extreme so I thought I'd share these two stories.

1st trip:

There are five of us, everyone is 19 or over (legal drinking age in that area of Canada). Now at this age we all dressed a little "differently" and there was probably some piercings and colored hair, but we were still nice, polite kids.

I am sitting in the passenger seat and collect everyone's IDs before it is our turn at the booth so we are prepared. We get there and hand them to the guy. He asks our nationality and what state we were born in (why do they do this?). We are all US but not all born in the same state. The guy looks at the IDs and tells us to pull into the area where they check cars or whatever.

They ask us all to get out. They take our driver aside and talk to him and ask him repeatedly if there are drugs in the car (there definitely WAS NOT). He keeps telling them no - and even tell him that it's okay to admit it, that he won't be in trouble. They tell him to ask us to admit if we have any. We all repeatedly tell them we have nothing.

They then proceed to search the car. They tear up everything, throwing things out of the car, going through our bags and take a dog through the car. They find nothing, of course and finally let us go on through. At no point do I feel we gave them any reason to do this.

2nd trip:

This time there are 4 of us. Same driver, the other two are different people this time. Again, everyone is of age. Again, we have the IDs ready, go through the same process. This time, the guy gives back my ID and one of another friend and asks us to pull into the inspection area.

The other two are informed that there are traces of heroin and cocaine on their IDs. This is impossible, neither of them do these things or were ever in the vicinity of them. Me and the other guy have to sit outside the little building but not in the car. The other two are taken into some kind of interrogation room (separately, I believe) and questioned. I suppose they convinced them, because we were allowed in but this just seemed so crazy. I've never heard of anything like it.

I understand we were kids, but we weren't breaking any rules and everyone handled themselves the way you should. I'm sure they knew why we were going there, but if they did this to every 19 year old going to the Falls to get drunk it would take hours to clear that border!