Busted! Drug smuggling pigeon caught with Ecstasy Pills
A drug smuggling pigeon was apprehended by Kuwaiti customs with 178 ecstasy pills strapped to its back.
Details of how exactly they managed to track the drug smuggling pigeon are sketchy but the idea to use a homing pigeon seems like another inventive way to get contraband across borders.
The real problem comes with the fact that the very nature of the bird – ‘homing pigeon’ – means that all they’d now have to do is place a tracking device on said bird and see where if flies to when let loose.
If it returns to the owner the drug smuggling pigeon may well end up back in a country where Kuwaiti authorities can do very little. However if it actually heads off to a final destination inside Kuwait, whoever the recipient is, they had better scram and quickly!
Currently drug trafficking is punishable by death in Kuwait so if they can’t find the owner will the drug smuggling pigeon face the firing squad?
Jokes aside, drug traffickers will always look for inventive ways to smuggle narcotics, but this one seems to have failed.
Not the first drug smuggling pigeon
This isn’t the first pigeon to be busted for drug smuggling. In 2015 in Costa Rica prison guards discovered a bird flying drugs into the jail.
The bird was carrying 14 grams of cocaine and cannabis and was spotted flying close to the jail, thus alerting observant guards on duty. The San Jose police captured the bird before it made it inside the medium security prison so it is unclear if they ever discovered who it was delivering to.
That’s not the first incident of a drug smuggling pigeon being used though. Back in 2006 one such bird was caught near a prison camp in Astrakhan, Russia. In fact it was a widely used practice whereby smugglers would put the pigeon inside a plastic bottle and throw it over the wall into the jail. Inmates would then take the drugs and attach payment to the bird which would then return to sender.
With this latest incident the drug smuggling pigeon had a tiny pouch taped or sewed onto its back with the 178 pills inside.
A pigeon can fly up to 150 kms without stopping and it can carry about 10% of its body weight which is around 300-500 grams of drugs.
