Tracking the Pacific Drug Highway

Newlines Magazine

Longreads

View article

Reposted by

Longreads

Lean Left

Factuality

Ownership

Tracking the Pacific Drug Highway

In February 2023, New Zealand authorities discovered a strange pink-and-black pontoon bobbing back and forth in international waters near the Cook Islands. On closer inspection, they saw that the jetsam was 81 bales of cocaine, held together with fishing nets and floating on a bed of yellow buoys. Andrew Coster, New Zealand’s police commissioner at the time, said that the 3.5-ton cache, worth $290 million, was his force’s largest illicit drug se…