A Brief History of Cocaine Washing Up on Beaches

1. Galveston, Texas (August 2011)

Weight and local value: 55 pounds, $2 million
Country of origin: “We’ll never know,” one local authority concluded, “unless a body washes up behind it.”

2. Bluefields, Nicaragua

Weight: 75 to 100 pounds a week; traffickers routinely forced to dump product to elude capture.
Fun fact: Cocaine reportedly available at the grocery store!

3. Mayaro, Trinidad (August 2003)

Weight and local value: 200 pounds, $15 million
Also found nearby: A corpse.

4. Floating in Dunlough Bay, West Cork, Ireland (July 2007)

Weight and local value: 3,300 pounds, $610 million
Mind-fuck: Imagining what happened to the guy who lost it.

5. Cornwall, England (February 2008)

Weight and local value: 330 pounds, $14 million
Upright citizen award: A local government employee rolled fifty-five pounds of it home in a wheelbarrow. “I thought if I didn’t take it, someone who might not go to the police would.”

6. Mossel Bay, South Africa (December 2013)

Weight and local value: 220 pounds, nearly $10 million
Ad hoc flotation devices: Four blue oil drums.

7. Yokosuka, Japan (November 2013)

Weight and local value: 176 pounds, $48 million
Drug runner’s packing challenge: Cramming nearly 200 pounds of coke into four backpacks.