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When you go to court, dress professionally. Well, maybe not if you’re a professional drug dealer:
A man accused of drug trafficking showed up for court Friday in Fort Lauderdale sporting a jacket that bore a cartoon-style recipe for cooking crack cocaine. [...]
The man’s white jacket looked like a how-to guide for making crack cocaine, with a series of little pictures of a white substance with a spoon, a carton of baking soda and a little pot over a fire. The end product was a “rock,” slang for the drug.
The finishing touch was the slogan “stack paper say nothing” — make money and hold onto it, in the vernacular.
Witnesses, including the man’s attorney Joshua Rydell, would not reveal the name of the man, who did not get into trouble for his threads.
Rydell said his clients still surprise him by wearing drug-related attire to court.
“Giant marijuana leaves on their T-shirts…” Rydell said. “It’s so common that I routinely advise clients, ‘No drug-related clothes when you come to court.’”
Link -via Dave Barry | Photo: Michael D. Weinstein
You know the name, but you probably don’t really know much about drug lord Pablo Escobar. Now you can read the short version of how he clawed his way up the ladder in the cocaine business.
The profits were astronomical at every step. In 1978 each kilo probably cost Escobar $2,000 but sold to Lehder and Jung for $22,000, clearing Escobar $20,000 per kilo. In the next stage they transported an average of 400 kilos to south Florida (incurring some additional expenses in hush money for local airport authorities) where mid-level dealers paid a wholesale price of $60,000 per kilo; thus in 1978 each 400-kilo load earned Escobar $8 million and Lehder, Ochoa, and Jung $5 million each in profits. Of course the mid-level dealers did just fine: after cutting the drug with baking soda each shipment retailed on the street for $210 million, almost ten times what they paid for it.
Soon Lehder was hiring American pilots to fly a steady stream of cocaine into the U.S., paying them $400,000 per trip. At one trip per week, in 1978 this translated into wholesale revenues of $1.3 billion and profits of $1 billion.
The profits and risks soared after that. The Jung in the quote is American George Jung, whose story was told in the 2001 film Blow. Read the rest of Escobar’s astonishing biography at mental_floss. Link
This may sound like an anti drug scare film, but according to Good Morning America a new type of cocaine is hitting the streets of Los Angeles and New York that will eat your flesh.
It seems cocaine has been behind a rash of flesh-eating disease outbreaks in Los Angeles and New York. Cocaine cut with the veterinary drug, levamisole has apparently been linked to a number of cases of rotting flesh, according to Good Morning America. While the cases reported thus far have been on the coasts, officials have warned that it could very well be a nationwide problem.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. But what about if life gives you the bullet-ridden estate of cocaine king Pablo Escobar? Here’s what the city of Medellin, Colombia, decided to do: a macabre narco-tourism called "Pablo tours."
Pablo’s old country estate, the Hacienca Los Napoles, where he kept his collection of exotic animals, threw wild parties, and drowned enemies in the pool, is now a theme park with rides and the trafficker’s giant dinosaur models. The main attraction of the national police museum in Bogota is a reverential display of Escobar’s possessions: his custom-built Harley Davidson, gold-plated pistols, and desk with hidden compartments. The Escobar family home in Medellin is slowly being turned into a museum complete with Pablo memorabilia, and exotic animals from his private collection are on display in the city zoo.
Medellin, once the world’s most dangerous city, has become a poster child for urban regeneration. Instead of trying to hide from its notorious past, the city is turning its notoriety into profits by trading on the dark old days.
“Medellin has moved on,” says Jamie Gerig, who runs the meet-the-Escobars tour. “It’s now a beautiful, safe city, but we can’t ignore what happened.”
Hannah Stone of Prospect Magazine has the story: Link
Photo: Colombia National Police/AP
The World Cup fever is everywhere, and everyone wants a piece of the buzz, including Colombian drug lords:
Fans worldwide have fashioned replicas of the World Cup trophy out of everything from papier-mache to plastic. But a lawbreaker in Colombia gets top prize for most original material: cocaine.
Airports anti-drug chief Col. Jose Piedrahita says that Colombian authorities found the unusual statue during a routine security check by anti-drug agents Friday in a mail warehouse at Bogota’s international airport.
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Weird Items People Tried to Smuggle
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Coca-Cola used to contain coca, a plant that can be refined into cocaine. Bolivians are now putting it back into cola and calling it “Coca-Colla”:
The drink, made from the coca leaf and named after the indigenous Colla people from Bolivia’s highlands, went on sale this week across the South American country.
It is black, sweet and comes in a bottle with a red label – but similarities to Coca-Cola end there. One is a symbol of US-led globalisation and corporate might; the other could be considered a socialist-tinged affront to western imperialism. [...]
It is made from the coca leaf, a mild stimulant that wards off fatigue and hunger, and has been used in the Andes for thousands of years in cooking, medicine and religious rites. [...]
Bolivia tried to wipe out the leaf at Washington’s behest. But that was before Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian and coca grower, was elected president, championing coca as a crop with legitimate uses.
Link via Fast Company | Photo: Dado Galdieri/AP
Last October, I posted about a drug that binds antibodies to cocaine to diminish its pleasurable effects in users. Well, it’s not working out terribly well because some users are responding by taking enough cocaine to overwhelm its protection:
Nobody overdosed, but some of them had 10 times more cocaine coursing through their systems than researchers had encountered before, according to Kosten. He said some of the addicts reported to researchers that they had gone broke buying cocaine from multiple drug dealers, hoping to find a variety that would get them high.
Thankfully, the drug was able to help some test subjects avoid cocaine.
Link via Popular Science | Image: US Department of Health and Human Services
Katherine Harmon writes in Scientific American that pharmacology researchers are developing a drug that could diminish the pleasurable effects of cocaine. Taking the drug might help addicts detoxify with greater success:
The vaccine itself does not destroy cocaine molecules, rather it induces antibodies that bind to it, making the opiate lose its ability to pass through the blood–brain barrier—and thus unable to trigger a high.
To test the vaccine’s effectiveness in humans, researchers (with some help and financial backing from Celtic Pharma) enlisted 94 subjects who had enrolled in a methadone treatment program for opiate addiction—and who also regularly used cocaine—for a placebo-controlled, double-blind study. (They decided on this group because methadone programs historically have better retention rates than programs for cocaine abuse only.) One group received a placebo, another a low dosage of vaccine, whereas a third was administered a high dosage over a series of 12 weeks with five total injections.
More than half of the subjects in the high-dosage group (53 percent) appeared to have laid off the cocaine for more than half of the trial period, the researchers report after tracking traces of the drug in urine samples collected three times a week. Just less than a quarter of subjects with the low dosage had the same track record, according to the results published online yesterday in the Archives of General Psychiatry. A drop in cocaine usage across all groups may also be attributed to a curb in opiate drug consumption from the methadone treatment.
Link | Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Officials acting on a tip searched a bus in Tarapoto, Peru for cocaine. They had been alerted that the cocaine was in a crate of turkeys, but they didn’t see any. However, the two live turkeys appeared bloated. Police chief Otero Gonzalez said the turkeys had been surgically implanted.
“Lifting up the feathers of the bird, in the chest area, police detected a handmade seam,” he said.
A vet extracted 11 oval-shaped plastic capsules containing 1.9 kilograms (4.2 pounds) of cocaine from one turkey.
A further 17 capsules with 2.9 kilograms (6.4 pounds) were recovered from the other, he said.
The turkeys survived the surgery to remove the cocaine and are recovering. Link -via Arbroath
If the residents of Madrid and Barcelona, Spain, seem a little bit high, that’s probably not because they’re high on life. Instead, it may just be because of the cocaine and LSD found in the air. Yes, you read that right:
A new study has found the air in Madrid and Barcelona is also laced with at least five drugs – most prominently cocaine.
The Superior Council of Scientific Investigations, a government institute, said on its website that in addition to cocaine, it found trace amounts of amphetamines, opiates, cannabinoids and lysergic acid -a relative of LSD – in air-quality control stations in the cities.
But authorities say that the amount is so miniscule that there’s no reason for alarm: Link (Photo: cuellar [Flickr])
Spanish police seized a 42-piece dinnerware set from a man who received the delivery. The blue plates, cups, and bowls decorated with sunflowers turned out to be made from 45 pounds of cocaine!
It was sent by recorded delivery from Venezuela to Barcelona via London.
Now police have arrested a 35-year-old Spanish man, known only as JVLL, who is believed to have received the crockery in the mail, after an international investigation.
They believe JVLL was forced into the deal by Venezuelan drug lords. The dealers had hoped to treat the drug and then sell it in Catalonia, police said.
