I would be willing to bet that a vast majority of drug smuggling from Mexico to the United States is successful. We only get to hear about the successful busts but despite the best efforts of Border Patrol, Homeland, and whatever the hell else is involved in the attempted prevention of drug importation, the profit margins of the smugglers is far too great for anyone to ever be deterred from trying it.
There have been some pretty inventive methods of getting things through the legal borders, which I think would be the worse possible place to bring things in. It must be very stressful for the person driving the vehicle and they must have nerves of steel knowing that they have a life sentence in their cargo if it is discovered.
Well one unidentified man, a US citizen, had the wonderful idea of transporting nearly 20 lbs of cocaine inside of 4 huge wheels of cheese.
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I watch border drug bust news with a sense of morbid curiosity because it is really interesting the lengths that people will go to in order to get a payday. I've heard of car batteries that are modified to hide a kilo inside, radiators and even the interior of tires. That last one I think is probably the most inventive as long as they can seal the package well enough that drug sniffing dogs can't get to it. I suppose an xray of the vehicle would reveal it though. I don't know how the tech actually works.
I think this is "dumb" news because of the criminal involved. I think that at any border that attempting to bring in gigantic wheels of cheese from a country that isn't exactly known for their fantastic cheese manufacturing would be a red flag by default. It would be like bringing video games into Japan from Mongolia: There just isn't any logical reason for anyone to be doing that. I mean, how many times have you heard of someone stepping down to Mexico for a cheese convention?
The guy was busted almost immediately when the wheels of cheese were scanned because I would imagine that bags of cocaine kind of stand out among the actual cheese when it is being scanned. Perhaps the reason why it was put inside of cheese was a reasoning that if the dogs went mental about it their handlers would think that "of course the dog wants that, it's cheese after all."
One of the things that I didn't think of that was in the article was something that I would imagine that is all the rage with small time smugglers and that was that there has been an increase in the amount of people smuggling drugs over the border using drones. A $1000 drone could easily carry $20,000 worth of cocaine and fly high enough that it wouldn't be noticed by people on the ground. They wouldn't even need to make a return trip because the ones that get through could just be discarded or if they wanted to reuse it, they could simply drive it across the border since personal drones are so common now that it probably isn't even unusual for people to use them to film their vacations.
The war on drugs is stupid and it is always going to fail. There's too much money in it for it to ever end.
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I just find it funny that someone would think that carrying something like 4 giant blocks of cheese wouldn't arouse suspicion.
1 pound of cocaine has a street value of around $30,000 so if that guy had made it though, it would have been a lot of money for him. I guess to people like this it is worth the risk but because of the laws that we have in the States, this guy is probably looking at 20 years in prison or something crazy like that.
Would you take the risk? What if it was a 1 in 10 chance that you would get caught? I don't think I would chance it myself.
