Check Your Roses for Cocaine This Valentine’s Day
Ah, the sweet smell of roses on Valentine’s Day. For most people, however, that smell doesn’t usually reek of narcotics. In Amsterdam, Dutch customs officials caught a shipment of cocaine that was being sent to the Netherlands from Colombia in time for Valentine’s Day weekend. Now there’s a way to express your true love.
According to Fox News, the Dutch customs officials found four kilograms of cocaine that had been divided into small packages, wrapped in cellophane and hidden in the cardboard boxes that were being used to ship the drugs. Good thing that shipment had been intercepted. I can imagine how unhappy those roses would have been, had their flower food been mixed up.
As a result of the shipment interception, two Dutch suspects were arrested. Police then found another five kilograms of cocaine doing home searches of those involved. The highly purified cocaine has an estimated street value of $1.8 million. That could by a whole lot of Valentine’s Day roses.
With all the romantic flurrying that’s going on around Valentine’s Day, a cocaine shipment amidst roses to the Netherlands seems like the perfect way to ship narcotics. The drug itself can easily be mistaken for the flower food that often comes in tiny packets with a bouquet of flowers. And who would think twice about digging through roses for narcotics during the Valentine’s Day holiday?
I guess the sweet smell of the roses did little to cover up the stentch of cocaine, as the shipment was uncovered. Such a big drug bust in its association with Valentine’s Day really makes you think about the products we associate with certain holidays. Not many more details have been released about the drug and its shipping cover. So while it’s unlikely that the cocaine would accidentally make its way into the hands of consumers, it does still raise issues about the ability to take advantage of such a shipment for this type of illegal behavior.
Hopefully the scary shipping mishap won’t deter you and your friends from enjoying Valentine’s Day. The holiday is one of the few people feel quite strongly about one way or another, with a growing level of cynicism around its commercialization anyway. Well, here’s some more fodder for that cynicism, as the commercial shipment of romantic roses has now been used as a cover-up for some hefty drug transport. Wouldn’t that make Al Capone proud?
Thankfully there were no massacres involved, but maybe now we can add this story to the list of black-market trade that will forever plague the name of St. Valentine himself. His day of love has not only been commercialized to the max, but it tends to attract highly dangerous plots for black-market trade.
