Food and Drug Pairings: Hiding Contraband Edition

This being Florida, drug news seems to make headlines more often than elsewhere. And the trend will likely increase as South Florida will become an even more dominant hub for drug traffic. This week The Washington Post reports that old drug smuggling routes between our state and the Caribbean are likely to see a traffic spike as the government clamps down on routes in Mexico and Central America.

That means getting creative with the transport which, in today's news, involves food. This rubberneck item comes to us from Arizona,  where a shipment of watermelons was confiscated when an x-ray detected three-thousand pounds of pot. Why on earth would you choose watermelons to hide a shipment that large?

The news inspires today's ridiculous list: food mules for drugs, from the genius collective who thought it would not get caught.

Pot Watermelons
Three thousand pounds of marijuana was confiscated in Nogales Monday, a shipment worth $1.5 million. A 44 year-old man crossing the Mariposa border attempted to transport the motherload into the US. More after the jump.

Cocaine Cakes
Last month, a 17-year old British girl was arrested in Miami for transporting 30 pounds of cocaine from Jamaica. The boxes were packed among clothes in her suitcase. She'll be tried as an adult.

Cocaine Plantains
Noticing especially firm plantains when he checked them, a border patrol officer in Miami decided to cut them open to find they'd been stuffed with cocaine. The 750 pounds of the white stuff held a street value of $6.1 million back in 2005, when US Customs and Border Protection first noted the rise in food used to hide drugs in transport.

Smack Mac
From the land of heroin, we have a 27 year old man who hid 4.2 pounds of it. Worth $500,000 on the street, the heroin was found among food items such as macaroni in his Portland, Oregon apartment last year.

Airplane High
Last year, twenty people from the Netherlands tried to smuggle 110 pounds of cocaine in containers used for in-flight meals. Eleven of them worked for an airline catering company hired for meals on flights between the Dutch Antilles and the Netherlands.