How to Turn Liquid Cocaine Into Powder Again

If you think the Drug Enforcement Administration or whatsoever other global narcotics agency can stop the international illicit drug trade, think over again. As law enforcement turns to Predator drones, special forces operations, and satellite surveillance to provide round-the-clock tabs on smugglers, it is imperative for narcos to stay alee of the game—and that's exactly what they're doing.

Technological evolutions like liquid cocaine, hyperspeed boats, and cartel submarines, have completely changed the game when information technology comes to policing drugs.

The UN estimates that the global drug trade is now worth somewhere between $450 to $750 billion annually. Smuggling those drugs across the globe has evolved from the employment of simple drug mules, to the use ofhighly secretive design and development of intercontinental submarines capable of carrying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contraband in a single trip.

Add together to that a global crisis such as the Russian capture of Crimea which opened up a highly assisting new smuggling route, and drug trafficking is fix for the dawn of a new era. Stuff like submarines and drone are get-go to appear as regulars in underworld drug smuggling tradecraft.

Not only is the applied science in the drug trade evolving rapidly, only the global drug smuggling ecosystem itself has been undergoing seismic shifts over the past few years. The United nations announced that in 2013, Peru had overtaken Columbia, the traditional home of cocaine cartels, as the world'due south largest producer of the famous white pulverisation-opiate. Instead of being shipped north to Miami, an increasing amount of this S American cocaine is now flowing into W Africa to be candy into scissure instead of passing through southern Europe.

Backside a large part of this global trade is the Sinaloa Cartel, or as journalist James Bargent calls them, the "General Electric" of drug trafficking. The enormity of its smuggling empire allows the outfit the resource to develop innovative methods of getting their products from point A to point B.

Drug enforcement agents in America are constantly bewildered by the ingenuity of Sinaloa tools, like the firetruck sized drillers it used to tunnel into America. Yet, despite the effectiveness of expensive systems, drug traffickers have maintained a reliance on human drug mules—they're reinventing the historic period-old drug caravan.

Equally researchers from the Journal of Forensic Scien​ce, Medicine and Pathologybetoken out, "there are numerous and highly imaginative forms of smuggling, simply one common method for illegal drug transport is intracorporeally in the alimentary canal, ordinarily by swallowing, and to a lesser extent, by rectal or vaginal insertion."

In that location are ii problems with this method of smuggling, however. The drug mule is forced to navigate, for one, through airports, the majority of which are heavily surveilled. And then the person smuggling the drugs is too highly susceptible to death if the drugs spill or leak inside their bodies, rendering the product unextractable.

Liquid cocaine is a novel method for smuggling drugs

That'south why cartels are increasingly turning to liquid cocaine. For narco traffickers, liquid cocaine is the future of drug trafficking. "Liquid cocaine is a novel method for smuggling drugs," said the same researchers. "Cocaine pulverization tin can exist dissolved in a diversity of solvents to produce a liquid form which allows later conversion back to pulverization. Liquid cocaine'south radiologic properties are different than those of cocaine powder making it harder to detect on abdominal plain films."

So difficult to find, in fact, that the packets of cocaine remain hidden to trained specialists . Unlike the pulverization form, the liquid packets have indistinct borders and can therefore resemble regular bowel content. That ways a suspected drug mule would have to exist processed all the way through to a CT browse in gild to confirm the presence of cocaine.

Airports don't exactly take CT scanners lying around, either. While they do have full torso scanners, the level of particular from a total torso scan doesn't requite you lot the aforementioned thorough imaging a CT scan gives you. Co-ordinate to Dr. Andrew J. Einstein, manager of cardiac CT research at Columbia University, those machines lack the sheer ability of a CT scan.

"A passenger would need to be scanned using a backscatter scanner, from both the front and the back, nearly 200,000 times to receive the amount of radiation equal to ane typical CT scan," Einstein told me.

One other enormous benefit of liquid cocaine is the ability to incorporate the substance into any other textile, like clothing, or in ane recent example, a very long hiking rope. The problem is then extensive that Bolivian authorities officials have even admitted to being wholly unable to detect the presence of liquid cocaine. Instead, the Bolivians are resorting to retraining aerodrome agents to observe smugglers based on their appearance and behaviour.

The problem is beginning to evidence itself stateside as well with U.S agents recently arresting a human at JFK airport who attempted to smuggle $300,000 worth of liquid cocaine disguise​d as rum.

Drug enforcement agents around the globe will continue to confront more and more of these attempts until surveillance systems capable of clear detection are built. The prospect of that however seems dim at this point in time and with the resources at their disposal, it'south quite likely that the smugglers are already working on the adjacent iteration which will keep them one step ahead.

As officials from Argentina discovered in May, drug smug​glers have already found a way to produce the liquid cocaine en masse. The shipment they tracked down in that particular example was worth over $40 million, and headed right for the US. The crime syndicate mixed liquid cocaine into a shipment of insulating oil with the help of a Mexican chemist.

With this type of ingenuity at play, and the lawlessness of Crimean ports, information technology's easy to sympathize how enormous the opportunity to smuggle drugs through new routes like Sevastopol into Europe really is. At this point, global authorities face a growing challenge when it comes to keeping up with the latest technologies and tactics of the world'southward narco elites.

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Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgaqj7/drug-smuggling-is-getting-a-high-tech-makeover

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