British authorities seized 2.4 metric tons of cocaine in a ship arriving in England from Panama, authorities said Saturday, calling it one of the U.K.’s biggest drug busts in years.

The drugs, valued at 96 million pounds ($132 million), were found under containers on a vessel at London Gateway port, east of the British capital. The shipment was discovered after what officials said was an intelligence-led operation.

Britain’s interior ministry, the Home Office, said it was the sixth-largest cocaine seizure on record.

  • Paragone@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    Someone pointed-out to me that when the police declare the value of siezed-drugs,

    it is significantly to their political advantage to misrepresent the value as being MUCH higher than it actually was…

    Therefore I’d legislate, to prevent that corruption from having any home, that police could identify the mass, & the grade, of whatever they’d seized, but not the “value”, so as to make it so that they didn’t even have any motivation to lie ( thereby saving them from some bad karma )…

    However, this valuation looks backwards?

    ( mind you, I’ve no actual idea how much the stuff is worth, on the streets )

    $132_000_000 / 2_400_000g = $55/g

    that doesn’t seem right, if it’s uncut?

    ( ttbomk, it’s nearly-impossible to get clean drugs at the end-purchase: they’re ALWAYS cut with SOMETHING…

    I remember some years ago, the police were warning people out on the West coast of North America, that there was some … perhaps cocaine? … going around that was killing people because it wasn’t cut, so everybody was getting the dosage wrong… )

    Anyways, this is just a public service announcement to say that EVERY time you see such a statement by police, a mass of drugs, for some specific “value”, please do the calculation yourself, & see if what they’re saying even makes any sense…

    In this case I think they were undervaluing the stuff, but that’s just a guess ( as I’ve no actual idea what drugs go-for, to the end-user, or at any stage of the chain, actually ), & maybe my impression that cocaine was a $100/g drug is just some impression I got from 1980’s movies?

    Entirely possible…

    _ /\ _

  • 11111one11111@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Is the UK small enough that large busts like this are actually felt by the end user? I always used to see articles of huge drug busts in America when I survived off cocain, cigarettes and unlimited ambition but never saw any actual bottlenecks or shortages resulting from them. US has 300-400 million people who could be a drug dealer. When you compare that to the UK’s potential drug dealer pool of less than 75 million people, do the UK end user drug users feel the affects of big busts?

    Edit: I also would like to know from any Janet Reno party enthusiasts from the UK, is cocaine the pinnacle of sought after drugs? It seems like it would be the hardest to procure logistically. Unless, do they grow and produce coke in Africa? Serious question, I’ve only ever heard of sources from Central/South America. Opium based drugs you guys get comes from middle east and Asia, right? You guys would have similar obstacles as any 1st world country for manufactured drugs like e, molly, meth, fentanyl, right? Ill get accross the pond to visit someday, its always been on my bucket list but I used to say id never take a vacation there because id never come back so its always been a big desire that was too big to take on. So I apologize for the ignorance.