Watching news reports sometimes provides a glimpse into worlds far away that I’ll never visit. Such reports give some hint of what that world is like. There are lots of posts on my blog about such worlds. I wrote lots of posts about Silk Road, the on-line drug/ weapon/ body parts/ hacking tools/ contract murder web site.
An article in the Daily Bulletin on 2/29/20 provides another from a telescope of a distant planet: Authorities seize 2,669 pounds of meth from San Bernardino County stash house and storage facility.
DEA led several raids on February 20 and 21 with the only explicitly mentioned assistance being San Bernardino County Sheriff deputies.
What they found:
- 76 pounds of meth in a house.
- 1 kilogram of black tar heroin at the same house.
- 1,043 pounds of crystal meth in a storage unit. (Yeah, you read that right, a thousand pounds.)
- 170 gallons of liquid meth in 34 buckets at another storage unit which was a production lab.
Found at a third storage unit:
- 350 pounds of crystal meth.
- 2 kilos of cocaine (that’s 2 pounds).
- 6 rifles.
- 1 pistol.
- 2,800 rounds of ammunition.
No mention of how much currency was seized. The DEA specifically refused to mention how many people were taken into custody.
One comment in the article suggests all of the above locations belonged to one group.
My emotional brain can’t grasp that volume of drugs, neither can I comprehend how much human destruction that could create.
My businessman brain tries to figure out how a high level distribution system would work. One production facility, two storage locations, and a house probably used for shipping starts to give a vague hint. How would all that stuff be moved around? How would operational security be maintained? (Hint: it wasn’t.) How would physical security be maintained? Only 6 rifles and 1 pistol available?
My accountant brain can’t stretch far enough to figure out how to keep track of all the activity that represents. The first few questions that come to mind: How does one keep track of the inventory? How much cash is where? How is all the cash moved upstream from customers? How does cash get moved further upstream to drug providers or vendors of industrial quantities of raw material?
An amazing view into a quite alien world that will remain light years away from me.