A smelly solution to smuggling - not!

I was amused to read that drug smugglers in Peru have turned to a new technique in an (unsuccessful) attempt to outsmart the law.

Traffickers hid 2.8 tonnes of cocaine in thousands of pounds of smelly bird droppings, Peruvian police said on Monday after uncovering the latest ruse to conceal drug shipments.

Cocaine exporters in Peru, the world's No. 2 producer after neighboring Colombia, counted on the stench of the dung, which is sold as a high-end organic fertilizer, tricking dogs trained to find drugs at ports of entry.

Guano, as the dung is known in Spanish, is rich in nitrates and phosphorous and has a strong ammonia smell. The cocaine was hidden in 400 bags of guano that together weighed 20 tonnes and was bound for Europe.

"The organic products camouflaged the cocaine by neutralizing it to avoid detection," police said after a five-month investigation that led to the seizure at a warehouse in Lima about 10 days ago.

I understand that a colloquial expression indicating approval of the quality of a drug is, "This is good s**t!" Perhaps the language of the street is more literally correct than we've previously imagined . . .



Peter