Obviously this story takes place in Florida because of course it did. Things like this only seem to happen in that wonderfully weird state and the fact that it was the person who is in charge of law-enforcement that found it is probably the only reason why we are hearing about it. If a regular run-of-the-mill Floridian found it, I am quite certain they would have done something crazy with it like throw a massive party in front of everyone in the Wal-Mart parking lot. This is the Florida way and I hope they never change since the news stories are oh so entertaining.
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Tampa mayor Jane Castor, who is pictured above dressed exactly like I would expect a Florida mayor to dress, was on a fishing trip with her family when they discovered something floating in the water and hauled it aboard. Turns out it was a very well-sealed bag of yae-yoh. The estimated street value of this stuff is 1.1 million dollars.
While this is funny and all I wanted to point out that it is not at all rare for drugs, especially cocaine, to be intercepted this way. It kind of sheds light on how absolutely massive the industry is and how the war on drugs probably isn't even making a small dent in global availability of the stuff.
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Back in February, the New Zealand coast guard or police or whatever they are found 3.5 TONS of cocaine just floating around in the ocean. While I am certain that whoever put that there was disappointed that they lost that much of it in one go, it just kind of shows how much white powder is literally floating around on this planet. If the manufacturers are able to simply leave this amount of the stuff lying around, have in confiscated, and it doesn't really affect global availability of it, I think it kind of shows exactly how proliferate this industry actually is.
Imagine if a winery was to all of a sudden lose 3 tons of wine. It would likely be the downfall of that particular company but in the cocaine industry they wheels just keep on turning.
While I do not use the stuff myself, I have in the past and it was the 90's but coke was around $50 a gram. According to people I know that still use it locally, it is roughly the same price now as it was more than 20 years ago. What other product, any product, can you say that this is true about? Hell, milk costs 3 times as much as it did in the 90's.
According to DEA published statistics, which you can look at here if you want to, there was 70,000 lbs (which is approximately 35 tons) of cocaine in 2022. They have nearly seized that much of it in 2023 already and will likely surpass it by the year's end. If that much of the stuff is being found and seized, yet the price on the street remains the same, I can only imagine how much of it makes it through uninterrupted.
Personally, I think the war on drugs is a stupid one that simply puts people in jail - which the public pays for - as well as dedicates huge amounts of money to a government organization that is massively expensive and doesn't, after nearly 50 years of existence, seem to have any real effect on the supply.
I think that if people want to get high, they are going to do it no matter what. Even if the DEA succeeded in getting rid of all the cocaine on planet earth, people would just switch to something else. In the meantime a vast majority of people are not interested in being addicted to something or destroying their lives with it, even if it is a lot of fun in the downward spiral.
I would imagine that the US in particular will keep the "war on drugs" going forever since politicians likely benefit personally by its existence. They will also never have any sort of meaningful impact on the supply. If people want something bad enough they are going to get it and the fact that a mayor in Florida just happened to stumble upon a bunch of this is proof enough to me that there is way too much of it out there for any agency to ever be capable of stopping it.
