Traffickers Find Delicious New Way to Smuggle Coke

Drug traffickers are an inventive bunch. They have to be, really, because these days it's generally fairly hard to walk through airport security with 50kg of cocaine strapped to your body. Usually, their methods work: despite the billions of dollars spent fighting the drug trade, more people are getting high than ever before (almost like the War on Drugs is a wildly pointless exercise?). But not always.

On Wednesday, Spanish and Portuguese police revealed that a joint operation had resulted in the seizure of 745kg of cocaine hidden in plastic tubes inserted into fresh pineapples. The investigation, which took place over a ten-month period, led to nine arrests and broke up an international smuggling ring led by Colombians.

The gak-hidden-in-plastic-tubes-inside-pineapples trick is the most recent in a string of imaginative food-related smuggling techniques to have been uncovered over the past couple of years.

As Business Insider reported in 2017, authorities have discovered narcotics hidden inside: watermelons, limes, bananas, tamales, tortillas, salsa, cakes, donuts, frozen sharks, tins of jalapenos and hugely suspicious "fake carrots", which were in fact massive bundles of cocaine wrapped up in bright orange tape.

Of course, food isn't the only method used by international trafficking gangs. Just today, Leicester Crown Court heard that a gang had smuggled £10 million of cocaine into the UK hidden in furniture.