why do drug mules keep tryin to get thru customs?
 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/01/world/...html?hpt=hp_t3

i just don't get it. there are thousands of miles of unfenced border. you could buy a 50 dollar raft at the mall & float over the border in some spots.

but dumbasses still try to walk into an airport, into a customs kiosk, & try to pass 4 keys through an xray machine.

seriously are people really that dumb?

:helpme

no, so the question is how often are they successful

Well, it's pretty obvious that enough of them are getting through. ;-)

When you have nothing to lose, like most of these people, what does it matter?

Yes. And Desperate.

probably 1% get caught, when they do, it's big news... :1orglaugh

why even try? i know if i am transporting 5 figures in blow, i don't want anyone checking anything, ever. Do these mules think there is no other option?

product is virtually free, mules are dispensable, and considering only few get caught, why not?

They are poor and/or have family trouble of some sort, have the cartel breathing down their back, and risk deportation.

Again, what does it matter? Are they really losing? Sure they might, might, serve a little time, but will most likely just be deported after a brief stint.

i guess that some are able to get thru the net.

But why take the chance? u couldnt be bothered to take the extra step to get over the border without the scrutiny of a customs agent?

it's not "some", it's probably like 95%+... I bet you they successfully smuggled dozens of these pumpkins before someone asked: "what's up with all these pumpkins?"... and decided to look into it closer... :2 cents:

its simply a matter of odds. The odds of getting thru an airport vs the odds of hiking over a desolate area & getting pinched. i guess i cant relate to the desperation of people & they may not know better.

but there are 2 hundred channels of TV & some of them are just about border wars or drugs inc & they show you the tech that goes into these searches. The days of wiring in 2 functions to magicically open up the dashboard are long gone.

At this point they are growing pot inside of the US. Seems they find a patch of forest near a river and set up a small farm where no one can see them.

depends. if they have a family, there is much to lose. & i dont buy into the poverty = nothing to lose idea. Once you have a rap sheet, the only job your getting is wendys drive thru (or a govt job if your the proper color)

hiking is hard and dangerous work, you are risking not only jail time but your own life too... it's not like it's some few hour hike, it's more like 7 days with little water/food/etc... something goes wrong = you are dead...

if your life works one day at a time, you plan for one day at a time

if you're smuggling drugs for cartels, your life definitely is a one day at a time event.

Excellent movie on this very topic. Must see movie!

Teenage girl from Colombia. Shows how they have several of them on the planes and how it's a numbers game...Had my heart pounding each time she went threw customs.

Maria Full Of Grace

Why would a Nicaraguan farmer care about working at an American Wendy's drive-through or getting a rap sheet?

i think my problem is...i am a 6 foot 3 male with some brains, so a hike like that is not a serious problem to me. But if your a 5 foot female of limited means, maybe the equation is different.

mostly i just wonder how people still roll the dice on a customs search when there are other options. i dont relate to the needs of a poor drug mule with limited educations.

there were 3 american girls, young women, who were busted in peru recent, smuggling some keys. i guess walking from peru to the USA is not really an option.

good point. But mostly i am flummoxed at the intelligent design. i think the answer is i do not relate to the desperation & lack of education of some of the mules.

maybe drug smuggling is not so easy as i think it is.

Sometimes they are forced. Cartels kidnap family members or children and give them a choice, carry our drugs or we kill them. Other times they are just poor people, often in trouble or under a huge financial burden, and they take the risk. Most of the time it pans out, but for the few who get caught, game over.

Some of them are also tricked, and paid well to transport make-up or gourmet coffee to a potential client. What they don't know is the luggage, or box walls, or inside the bag, has drugs in it. They are getting very clever about it to, like building entire make-up kit boxes out of cocaine or heroin. The girl usually doesn't know better and thinks she found a great new job. Six months later, she's facing a firing squad in Vietnam.

very low % get caught.

yay its Halloween let bring the pumpkins through customs.

You often provide a lot of real-world clarity in your posts.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/loca...-death-penalty

I once heard a DEA spokesman say they stop about 2% of the drugs so 98% get through...of course that is 2% of all the methods that are used. I thought that it was not very bright to announce that on a national TV. Hell with those kind of odds of not being caught compared to the pay off...I was almost ready to give it a shot.

To me the real concern is not getting caught...but is dealing with the people that you have to deal with.

Living over here has really opened my eyes to some grim realities taking place. Plus, I've come to know a few girls who have been trafficked themselves, escaped sex slaves, and other extremely shady characters I've met through this business and through general mischievousness.

Drug mules being arrested hits the news over here all the time. Doesn't always make the English news here, but at least every few days on the local language outlets some girl is caught and is usually going to get the death penalty. It's heart breaking, because most of them (from here) are clueless. However, some are guilty and know the risks, but it's the true innocent ones that are tragic. On the flip side, they are always arresting Africans coming into or going out of Bangkok, sometimes males, so it goes both ways.

Many SE Asian nations give the death penalty, so it's always curtains when they are caught. The first time I flew into Taiwan many years ago there was a big red warning paper they handed out saying they execute drug traffickers. Not knowing the ins and out of their system, and having a bunch of Ambien sleeping pills and a few Xanax, I went to the bathroom and flushed them all, just to be safe.

My girlfriend witnessed a Japanese mule from her flight get caught in Malaysia (mandatory death penalty) once on her way to Bali to meet up with me. They drug her off kicking and screaming, as you can imagine, it caused quite a scene. I assume she's dead by now or awaiting her day.

I'm assuming they are still up, but in some Colombian international airports they have signs warning girls to not be drug mules. I doubt many listen, but they can't say they were not warned. IMHO, that sort of warning should be at every airport in the world with a message giving the girl a chance to at the very least have her luggage inspected if it is not hers, and no harm would come to her if she goes this route first. A last chance out for anyone taking a risk or carrying ANYTHING that doesn't belong to them.

New business idea for anyone looking..... You can purchase drones for personal use that will carry up to 10 kilos and travel several hundred miles completely undetected.... Could you imagine being in the transportation business now???? ha ha ha

It's a fucked up world in which we live. Life is precious until it's not.

I think I want to buy you a pair of google glasses and just live vicariously through you in real time. Just, like, if you have some secret hobby where you sometimes suck a lot of dick, turn them off at that time please. Thank you.

there are better methods :2 cents: these are the greedy asshole that want the purest drugs

exactly. why walk thru customs when there are technology solutions to the drug transport problem?

Great movie. I'd fuck that chick til she drops the condoms.

i will add this post for law enforcement.

joshgirls does not transport drugs, nor condone transporting drugs, across national borders. i exist on this earth only to entice well endowed women to bounce their boobs as hard as they can. i have no desire to interfere with this dream with ideations of smuggling drugs. i simply find it inexplicable that after 30 years of drug wars, people still bet their lives on a customs search when there are thousands of miles of open border.

cartels pay well
laziness
cartels probably tell them they get free ticket to citizenship. considering current state of US - people probably believe that is true.

DWB is dead on the money but theres a lot more to it as well some of the ones who get caught are absolutely meant to get caught it creates a needed diversion.

And walking it across the border isnt nearly as simple as you think drones with IR cameras are constantly watching for you.....tunnels are the way to go and theres lots of those too....

Is there perhaps an extra charge (or set of charges) that comes when one is caught trying to enter the country by circumventing customs the way you're describing in addition to drug charges? (I don't know, I'm asking)

Seems like getting caught the way you're describing would come with a lot of extra incarceration grief not to mention having to navigate untold miles of unsafe travel in fugitive mode on foot over any and all manner of unkown terrain possibly with very little provisions, as opposed to just taking one's chances the far easier and more convenient way via the through-customs route.

They get deported. I suppose one could get deported on a bus, and one could get deported in a shipping container. You might be onto it.

i believe there is no incarceration bonus from being pinched hiking vs the airport. if you got a lot of drogas, you are going to do time.

seems simply that driving thru a customs agent is faster & more convenient than making the arrangements to walk or raft across the border.

But that's assuming that all of these mules are illegal foreigners. As I understand it a lot of them are US citizens returning from other countries who try and make an extra buck by muling. It was they that I had most in mind in asking this.

If I tried coming back into Canada from the States by sneaking over the border at night I'm quite certain there'd be some sort of extra charge for doing so (in addition to any other 'muling' charges etc). So I was wondering the same about it in this case.

Overseas containers pull more in then any of the thousand mules combined. Like someone mentioned earlier, most of the small carriers are distraction to take away suspicion to what may have already been checked in......my guess.
Either way, they will never stop it. The whole crusade that started to fight the war on drugs, is just some over budget, over privileged, assembly of idiots.

i disagree. the drug war is a way-of-living for thousands of law enforcement officials. to legalize drugs is to take food out of the mouths of young babies of the cops that participate in the drug wars. trust me the quest against legalization has little to do with social merits vs the jobs it creates fighting it.

:2 cents:

Our country shouldn't be depending on jobs based on Richard Nixon's "War On Drugs"

It also provides jobs for thousands of prison guards in the multi-billion dollar prison industry.

To me it's disgusting. We are putting people in prison for getting high. People have found a way to get high since cavemen first chewed on peyote.

The govt.'s of the world are so busy trying to stop people from getting high that they are causing death and misery worldwide.

Oh well...like you pointed out: at least lots of U.S. DEA and border patrol officers can make a living.
Meanwhile the U.S. has more of it's own citizens imprisoned than any country on Earth in history.
And Mexico (which I love to visit...beautiful beaches), has become a killing ground for drug cartels that wouldn't even exist if not for the "War On Drugs".

Just my opinion. So don't anybody go ballistic.

We are causing all this trouble world-wide. Meanwhile millions of Americans are hooked on legal prescription drugs (which kill more people every year than ALL "illegal" drugs combined).

Please tell me me you are only playing devils advocate? And if this your justification, Wow just Wow .........

Stop it , to much truth and their heads explode!!!:1orglaugh

You speak the truth. It is all about MONEY and the USA makes too much of it with the "war on drugs" to ever stop it! It's just profitable for so many!

From 1999-2010, the total U.S. prison population rose 18 percent, an increase largely reflected by the "drug war" and stringent sentencing guidelines, such as three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentences.

However, total private prison populations exploded fivefold during this same time period, with federal private prison populations rising by 784 percent (as seen in the chart below complied by The Sentencing Project):


This stark rise in private prison populations is partially due to increased contracts granted at the state and federal levels to behemoth prison companies such as Correction Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group. These companies claim - against available data - that they can run corrections facilities at lower costs.

However, whether such companies can save governments money is not the central issue. What's at issue here is the corrupt, immoral dynamic that fuels such contracts: the concept of treating inmates as commodities that must be grown for profit.

Take, for example, the offer CCA made in 2012 to 48 states:

We'll purchase and manage your jails, and in return you [the state] must promise to keep the jails at least 90 percent full.

Such contracts provide incentives for local law enforcement to increase incarceration rates, rather than decrease them. In some instances, private prisons are grown not because crime increases, but because police harvest criminals as though they are a crop that must be stocked on the local shelves.

Additionally, for-profit prison companies engage in intense lobbying efforts that have been tied to many of our nation's most stringent sentencing guidelines, and lobby hard against the decriminalization of things such as marijuana.

The financial motive to engage in such lobbying was clearly detailed in CCA's 2010 Annual Report (as prepared by The Sentencing Project):




Such financial incentives to stock corrections facilities naturally leads to widespread corruption. Evidence of such corruption surfaced when two Pennsylvania judges were found guilty of selling juveniles to private detention facilities for millions of dollars. The "kids for cash" scandal, in which innocent children who should not have been locked up were sold for set amounts to the detention facilities, is shocking and harrowing.

However, even more shocking and harrowing is the fact that we have allowed free market pursuits to infiltrate our system of justice, making such scandals possible. When prisoners become products, we no longer have a justice system. We have an illicit marketplace. We have a corral.

America has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. And the private prison industry is a central driving force behind this. Add to this the staggering number of African-Americans locked up, and the private prison industry has essentially created a modern-day slave trade.

A trade that should never have been allowed to enter our criminal justice system in the first place.

http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/ti...ns-grew-784-10

link

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh No worries, no slurping cock over here.

That is the truth. And what's worse than that is, EVERY CUSTOMS AND NARCOTIC AGENT IN THE WORLD KNOWS THIS!!! Yet, when they get a tip for a single mule, all effort goes on them and they allow all the others to pass. IMHO, the drug network reaches far and deep and is corrupt to the core with government officials and narcotics agents involved. There simply isn't any other way it could work.

why exactly do you think the war on drugs goes on?

do you think it goes on because jonny law is breaking thru & soon there will not be a drug problem?

no. sober people know there is no end-game. the drug war has not died primarily because it has become an economic engine onto itself.

it has become a JOBS program & a source of unlimited funding for jonny law, very similar to the military industrial complex. who fights against spending for national security, or the scourge of drugs?

i simply question why people continue to roll the dice on a customs search when you can cross the border in places with no encumbrances.

There is a book called Killing Pablo which is about the hunt and ultimate killing of Pablo Escobar. Part of the book talks about him building up his empire. At the height of his power he was sending multiple jets full of drugs into the US. They didn't even care if one got caught because the other 10 didn't.

The same can be said with mules. The risk of sending them through the airport is actually less than having them try to cross the border and hike. There are a few reason. First, carrying that amount of drugs in your system is dangerous. The more you move around the more chance there is that something will break and kill the carried. Rafting across a river and hiking through the desert takes a good amount of physical activity. Second, unless they can get someone to meet up with the mule pretty quickly they are left on their own. Mexican border towns are often not safe and any number of things could happen to a person walking through the desert. You could fall and hurt yourself, get lost, get bit by a snake, get picked up by the police etc.

It is a much more streamlined process to just send them through the airport knowing a few might get caught, but most will not than to risk having them wandering all over the desert and hoping they make it to their destination.

And the "funny" thing is...it's all over coke and pot.

Shit that grows in the ground.
We could all be growing our own coca leaves and marijuana plants and there wouldn't be any "drug cartels" and violence.

Instead of buying a "5 hour energy" drink...I could just do what the Peruvian peasants do and chew on a coca leaf. lol

But with the policies we've been using so aggressively for the past 40 years? Cocaine and pot are fucking expensive as hell. Which make it a giant business. And a deadly one too.

I wonder how many people have actually overdosed and died on cocaine in a year as opposed to the number of people who were murdered over it (thanks to it being illegal).

Reminds me of "Alcohol Prohibition". That turned Chicago into a killing field and made the Mafia rich.

At least our politicians back then finally came to their senses and ended that prohibition after 14 long bloody years.
Our current crop of idiots are still going at it after decades.

What's that old definition of "insanity":
Doing the same thing over and over & expecting a different outcome.

Like you, I too believe the money being made and the profit of capitalizing off of a concept that was born in some closed door meeting along time ago, will never be put back into the bottle.
Here is where the rubber meets the street. Pool all the resources spent on keeping the "jobs" active , only this time, have them be the ones to help with the transportation and distribution of the once evil substance they swore to fight. A market would form over night, and it will take an army of individuals, on payroll, to make this sort of reborn market place to exist. So instead of wasting the tax payers money to shadow box the apocalypse, they would be generating more jobs with more avenues to bank from the proceeds generated. Win, Win for all sides. The black market would fall, human traffickers would no longer be needed, jails would close, people would finally be free to do what was once a natural born right, and the politicians would get the proceeds to keep funding what ever agenda flavor they may taste that night........But alas, you are correct, they are so simple and self absorbed, anything that has merit and understanding will never work, Cheers!

If we legalized all drugs and allowed them to be sold just like booze and cigarettes it would end most of the violence in this country immediately.

I think if we just took a fraction of what we spent on the drug war and applied it towards education and treatment for those who need or want it we would end up with fewer addicts, less violence and since we could grow and manufacture those drugs here and then tax them it would be good for the economy. We would actually have money coming in instead of going out.