Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/01/police-just-made-historys-bi.html
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Holy shit, that’s a lot of drugs.
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Coincidence?
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Cops are gonna have to do a lot of overtime to deal with the paperwork for that bust, I suggest a little meth might help speed up the job.
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…15 tons worth US$1.12 billion
That’s in Adjusted Dollars? Adjusted to make it look like the War on Drugs is making even a tiny dent in the supply?
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15.4 tons of amphetamines
Why does drug reporting make amphetamine plural like that?
Granted, there are a number of amphetamine-class substances, but arent 99.99% of the time you going to be talking about straight-up amphetamine (and probably just the dextro isomer) or methamphetamine? I highly doubt anyone doing drug reporting is going to also include compounds like MDMA, although they could get away with it.
But why is this done? I don’t recall hearing about seizures of “opiods” in the same manner — it’s always specifically heroin, fentanyl, on any of several named prescription compounds.
ETA: Aha, the truth is more interesting by half: Fenethylline - Wikipedia
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I hope the cops have wiretapped the conversations between the smugglers, and that the tapes from when they find out their huge cargo had been seized become public in a future trial. I imagine a slightly tense conversation, and probably a very bloody aftermath. It’s ISIS, when they say heads will roll they mean it.
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I prefer “amphetaminz”, but I’m all hip with the kidz and whatnot.
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The Saudis and their friends are like the Hell’s Angels of the Middle East slinging speed to buy guns.
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I thought major international drug distributors diversified their portfolio so smaller ~10 million USD shipments were expendable. Looks like they put all of their eggs in one basket and the handle broke.
That, or they forgot to pay off the right people. The people they did pay off are probably looking over their shoulders right now.
Oh, well.
Honest question. How are things like this disposed of? Incineration?
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Redistributed throughout the streets in exchange for information.
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Interesting political spin put on this drug seizure.
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When they write it up as 5 tons, there’ll only be a third of the paperwork.
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You mean 14 tons worth. 
This is a bummer. I mean, this is seriously going to make it harder to find the raw materials for making pseudophed now.
Also, the original shipment was clearly at least 20 tons. Come on, these are professionals. They’re going skim off their share long before they announce it.
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Problem solved!
From my extensive Narcos-watching expertise, I know this means one thing: 2 drug cartels are fighting it out, using the state government’s apparatus to burn each other. It probably didn’t come from the inside and it’s unlikely Italy has an undercover agent. But the cartels know do each other well enough to harm one another. In the Mexican case, the importer cartel was jealous that it “only” made profit on delivering drugs (not distribution), so it delivered it, but immediately ratted on the distributor cartel.
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I seriously doubt that.
This is the current map of the civil war situation in Syria:
ISIS territory is coloured black on the map. As you will see, there isn’t any. ISIS is now a group that holds no territory, and is stuck fighting both Kurdish and Government forces in the south-east of the country. It would be hard to run a massive drug production and smuggling operation in those circumstances, never mind smuggling the resultant drugs across enemy held territory and from there on to the Med.
I strongly suspect that the culprit is actually Turkey, using the proceeds of the international drug trade to prop up the proxy army of jihadists that they sponsor as part of their invasion ad occupation of Syria.
Not only does Turkey have form in this area (see below), but the geography makes sense (using the occupied areas of Afrin and Idib province to produce and export, with easy access through Turkey itself to export to Europe).
Of course, the government who made the drugs bust is conspicuously not mentioning any of this, because Turkey is a supposed NATO ally, and their involvement in this dirty little war (Along with that of the Saudis and the other Gulf monarchies) is quietly ignored.
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