The ship above, the gargantuan M/V Dole Chile, was recently found to be carrying $2 million worth of cocaine into Delaware’s main port. The drugs were stashed in the ventilation system of a container loaded with bananas, which the ship delivers weekly to the Port of Wilmington. All in all, a nice little catch for […]
Tags:cocaine·Delaware·drugs·maritime·smuggling·trade·War on Drugs
If you haven’t read it already, Jon Lee Anderson’s latest dispatch from Guinea is well worth your time. The piece does an excellent job of conveying the chaos of Moussa Dadis Camara‘s brief reign, which was marred by one of the great atrocities of recent vintage. Suffice to say that Dadis and his cronies come […]
Tags:brown-brown·cocaine·dictatorship·drugs·Guinea·Sierra Leone·The New Yorker·urban legends·weapons
A debate over the best-ever Coca-Cola slogan recently led us to this useful list, which contains some ad-speak that likely wouldn’t pass muster on today’s Madison Avenue. Our favorite archaic slogan is the one from 1906: “The great national temperance beverage.” This struck us as more than a little humorous, given Coca-Cola’s roots as a […]
Tags:addiction·Canada·Coca-Cola·cocaine·drugs·John Stith Pemberton·morphine·opium
One of our favorite slept-on tracks of recent years is “Cali Hustle”, off the criminally hard-to-find Bay Bury-Ya compilation. In the song’s final verse, Mac Mall kicks off his bars with this clever line: Colombian neckties for small fries We’ve always taken it for granted that such a grisly fate has befallen many a criminal […]
Tags:cocaine·Colombia·Colombian necktie·crime·urban legends·War on Drugs
When Latin percussion god Tito Puente died some years back, The New York Post speculated that a 40-year cocaine addiction had finally caught up with the man. This piece of gossip turned out to be of (to say the least) dubious veracity, but it stuck with us nonetheless. That’s because it got us thinking about […]
Tags:cocaine·drugs·public health·Tito Puente·War on Drugs·World Health Organization
Microkhan never tires of reading about the semi-ingenious concealment methods employed by drug smugglers. In today’s installment, an American college student allegedly attempts to shimmy her way out of Guyana while carrying gobs of cocaine. Her defense upon being caught, as explained by her lawyer to a Guyanese magistrate, is somewhat less-than-convincing: “It was quite […]
