US Fishermen landed an interesting catch of the day at the weekend – a $1 million dollar bundle of cocaine floating in the water off the Charleston coast.
The US coastguard has reported that two recreational fishermen found the bundle whilst fishing late on Sunday afternoon. The drugs were wrapped in black plastic and the package was held together by rope.
The fishermen dragged the 30 to 40 Kg package onto the boat. Once they started to realise what they had potentially found, the fishermen contacted the coastguard for help.
As you can imagine, it’s not a normal occurrence to find this amount of drugs floating in US coastal waters like this. This kind of thing does happen though, but is more likely to seen in parts of the Pacific and the Caribbean, when goods have been jettisoned by traffickers.
The coastguard contacted the local authorities and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and custody of the drugs was taken by the DEA when they arrived at Charleston.
The street value of the drugs is thought to be between $750,000 and $1 million.
DEA chiefs suggested that it could take up to a month to work out where the drugs came from. A “needle in a haystack” was how they described the ease with which they might find the source of the abandoned drugs. If the find was something that they could feed into a larger picture, they might have a chance. Special agents from the DEA would be looking to try and connect the find to other drug stops in that area.
An initial field screening of the drugs, using a presumptive drug test for cocaine, confirmed that the substance was actually cocaine. This was later confirmed by a laboratory drug test.
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