What was supposed to be a day of sport for a Florida diver partaking in the annual two-day lobster mini-season, turned into a visit to the local sheriff's office as he found a package of cocaine floating in the water.
Each year, residents of Florida enjoy what they call a "lobster mini-season," where thousands of spiny lobster flood the waters. For two days, lobster lovers can catch the crustaceans all around Florida.
According to the Monroe County Sheriff's Office, the diver was in the ocean about a mile off shore near the Upper Keys, when he found the package.
The photo released by the sheriff's office shows the cocaine wrapped and labeled with a Psycho Bunny logo. Andrew Linhardt, a sheriff's office spokesman said that they turned over the contraband found by the diver to U.S. Border Patrol.
This is the latest of many such discoveries that have taken place so far in 2024. In June, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that it had seized more than 14,153 pounds of cocaine—worth more than $186 million—from waters spanning between southern Florida and the Caribbean.
In May, a Florida Keys beachgoer discovered a suspicious package along the beach and notified the authorities. U.S. Border Patrol agents recovered the package which was believed to contain 65 pounds of cocaine valued at approximately $1 million.
Early in 2024, the U.S. Coast Guard seized over a ton of cocaine worth close to $32 million near Florida waters. Due to the state's proximity to South America and the Caribbean and its status as a high-intensity drug trafficking area, so much cocaine has been found in waters near Florida that experts say that "cocaine sharks" may be consuming the drugs underwater.
"If these cocaine bales are a point source of pollution, it's very plausible [sharks] can be affected by this chemical. Cocaine is so soluble that any of those packages open just a little, the structural integrity is destroyed and the drug is in the water," Tracy Fanara, a Florida-based environmental engineer told The Guardian last year.
To find out more about how the illegal dumping of drugs into the oceans could potentially affect wildlife, British scientist Tom Hird teamed up with Fanara to conduct experiments over the course of six days in an attempt to observe the sharks' behavior.
Hird said that more studies are needed for a definitive overview of how cocaine may have affected sharks. "What we've done here is really scratched the surface on this incredibly unique phenomenon that can only really happen to the Florida Keys," he said. "It can only really happen in this area of the world because of the topography and all the drug smuggling that's going on," Hird added.
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