Cocaine

Federal investigators are piecing together details of an audacious new trend in drug smuggling: South American traffickers are buying old jets, stuffing them full of cocaine and flying them across the Atlantic to feed Europe's growing coke habit. "The sky's the limit," one Sierra Leone trafficker boasted to a Drug Enforcement Administration informant. In some ways it is a throwback to the 1970s and '80s, when pilots flew drugs freely between Colombia and staging areas near the U.S. border.

Drug prohibition isn't stopping Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). The Australian Crime Commission says highly sophisticated Mexican DTOs are having a significant impact on the Australian cocaine market. The surge is linked to one of the most powerful and brutal syndicates involved in the drug war in Mexico, the Sinaloa organization.

According to federal Health Department data, across the U.S., cocaine and marijuana use have been static since 2002. But New York is a hot-bed for drugs, and Manhattanites are particularly heavy users. A review of drug-test data compiled by drug testing firm Sterling Infosystems shows that cocaine is losing its favor among investment professionals, and is being replaced by marijuana.

Are your stimulus dollars really being wasted on an Obama administration plot to get monkeys high on crack and cocaine as select Republicans and conservatives have been saying recently? No. The money is actually being spent on research into how to treat drug addiction in humans.

The drug prohibition tactic of interdiction on sea vessels fails to stop cocaine from being trafficked -- somewhere between 10 and 20 percent is seized, but the traffickers simply send more to make up for what is confiscated. In Honduras -- and many other places across the globe -- locals help traffickers recover cocaine thrown overboard to avoid detection. These Honduran locals call the tightly sealed packages of cocaine "square grouper", and they hope to find all they can.