Cheap and They Don't Snitch: Drones Are the New Drug Mules
Drones are on the rise in the drug world with smugglers using them to shift product across borders, into prisons - and soon to a street near you.
Last week border officials in the Punjab region of India revealed they intercepted 107 drug-carrying drones sent by smuggling gangs last year over the border from Pakistan, the highest number on record.
Most were carrying heroin or opium from Pakistan to be dropped and received by collaborators in the Punjab, notorious for having India’s worst levels of opiate addiction.
Last year the head of a police narcotics unit in Lahore, a city in Pakistan which borders the Punjab, was dismissed after he was suspected of running a drug trafficking gang sending drones over to India.
But the use of cheap flying robots instead of humans to smuggle drugs across borders is a worldwide phenomenon.
In September the Jordanian air force shot down two drones carrying crystal meth coming from Syria. It was the ninth such drone in 2023, according to Caroline Rose, a director at the New Lines Institute in Washington DC.
Drug smugglers from Syria, the world’s largest producer of the black market amphetamine pill, captagon, often use Jordan as a transit point to the wider Gulf Arab kingdoms and the global market. Rose thinks Syrian smugglers have increased the use of drones to smuggle captagon and meth due to a security clampdown at the Jordanian border which has made trafficking by land harder.
Drones sent by Mexican cartels carrying drugs such as cocaine, meth, and heroin regularly cross the U.S. border.
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