Via CNN: $2M worth of cocaine found in banana boxes
A German supermarket employee got a surprise this week when she opened two boxes of bananas to find them filled with more than 60 pounds of cocaine worth $2 million, police said.
And since it is easier to understand complex problem via smaller, easier to understand examples:
The cocaine totaled 28 kilos, or 61.7 pounds, police said.
The estimates street value of the 61.7 lbs of cocaine was, as the headline notes, roughly $2 million.
So, something small enough to hide amidst bunches of bananas and weighing a tad more than a big bag of dog food is worth $2,000,000. Is there any wonder that people are motivated to extreme measures and even violence in the trade of this stuff?
And if you want depressing, the odds are that the screw-up that led to the loss of this one small shipment will probably be considered a write-up to the dealers in Germany who lost it. Sure, loosing two million in product is always a bummer, but since some losses are expected in smuggling (part of the reason the drugs fetch such prices) and since they probably have enough supply to makes 10s, if not 100s of millions, what’s a couple of boxes of bananas?
One has to consider the scale of profit at work in this industry before one can fully grasp the utter failure of the war on drugs to date, and the fact that that failure extends into the future as far as the mind’s eye can see. Just think how many such banana boxes (or coffee packets or casts on old guy’s legs or whatever) there are in world and think about how much money is at stake and how that, in turn, motivate human greed and also provides the cash to arm themselves to the teeth.
One does guess, however, that the courier who screwed up is in some trouble at the moment.
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