Originally published at: Video: This is how Colombia's biggest cocaine traffickers move 40 kilos of blow | Boing Boing
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I have a friend who worked at DHL for a while, and she said a lot of drugs are simply shipped. They find large boxes of them all the time. The package stream is far too immense to screen them all at customs, some loss is acceptable for the dealers, and drug sniffing dogs are a myth. There’s very little way to catch them. The only downside is that there is a paper trail that has to be fabricated/obfuscated, which is why it’s only one of many methods. Other methods have other pros and cons. However, more often than people realize, the answer is simply “they ship it”.
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Just legalize and regulate already, prohibition doesn’t work.
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Early 80’s Colombia, it was common place to be propositioned to “mule” cocaine into the USA, approx. 2 kilos was like $300 US, half up front and the rest when you dropped it to the next person.
Here’s the catch, as a US Merchant Marine if you got caught smuggling [anything], your prison sentence starts at 25 to life hard labor in Leavenworth Fed Prison and goes up from there. As one can easily surmise, $300 bucks ain’t worth the risk, but some took the bait, and some went to prison.
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Yep, just like viagra, which imo is also a recreational drug.
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I have this techno-anarchist fantasy that people will develop genetically modified yeast that produces all of the popular illicit chemicals. Then every neighborhood will just have one guy with a garage full of vats who sells to the locals. No cartels, no trafficking, no cuts, and basically impossible to shut down.
It’s already been done with morphine, although so far it’s highly inefficient:
https://www.consultant360.com/story/home-brew-morphine-brewers-yeast-now-possible-study
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There’s no real way to stop the flow of drugs, due to corruption. My home county in the swamps along the Gulf coast saw the construction of a tax- dollar funded wide short highway in the middle of nowhere that, interestingly, connected to no other roads. One poor mullet fisherman was caught with a very expensive cigarette boat. When asked by the prosecutor how a poor fisherman could afford such a fine yacht, he replied that he simply took the change out of his pocket at the end of each day and threw it in a jar, and “it just added up.” I believe they took him at his word. A DC-3 was abandoned on the tarmac full of drug residue. No one was ever able to establish ownership, so it sat there for years. Corruption was near total and permeated all levels from town and county to the state capital. That movie “American Made” was spot on.
Give people in the US respect, a living wage, health care, affordable housing and the demand will probably stow to a trickle.
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Do you have stats to bolster that statement? For example, I’m not sure cocaine is the drug of choice for the demographic you mention. I know that when the cost of heroin plunged due to the war in afghanistan, it became a popular drug in the more affluent high schools, but also among the poor. Meth I associate with the working poor shift workers (eg North Dakota fracking fields), but that may be bias on my part. I used to use mushrooms a lot as a poor kid, but that’s because they were free if you knew what to gather.
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