Crafty, but not quite crafty enough—44 pounds (roughly 20 kilograms) of cocaine have been seized by US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) in Cincinnati from South America, disguised as sweetly sugar frosted corn flakes, according to a CBP news release. A Chicago Police Department detector dog named Bico was the very good boy who sniffed out the not-so-cereal-ish shipment that was intended on reaching a private residence in Hong Kong.

Bico flagged the suspicious boxes, and they were opened up by the officers for a closer inspection, obviously. What was revealed inside was a little more sugar frosting that one might imagine a typical box of corn flakes would have, and the flakes themselves were coated in a “grayish substance,” which was then tested, and a schedule II substance under the Controlled Substances Act was found, that being cocaine.

According to CNN, on “a typical day in fiscal year 2020, CBP said it seized 3,677 pounds (that’s around 1,668 kilograms) of drugs at ports of entry across the nation.” Cincinnati Port Director Richard Gillespie emphasised in the CBP release that smugglers will hide narcotics in anything imaginable. “The men and women at the Port of Cincinnati are committed to stopping the flow of dangerous drugs, and they continue to use their training, intuition, and strategic skills to prevent these kinds of illegitimate shipments from reaching the public.”

Just because I was curious, and thought you might be too—I wanted to have a read up on more creative ways that drugs are (attempted) to be smuggled through borders. You’ve got to give it to criminals, they really know how to think outside of the box. In some cases, around the box.

Drugs have been smuggled inside the foreskin of penises, which as one would imagine could be tricky to find without officers performing a complete cavity search. One man was caught in Kentucky trafficking drugs into a prison this way—his record was double guilty as charged.

Another way to avoid blame is to just pass it on to someone else, right? Pigeons are trained to fly back and forth from the dealers to the buyer wearing neat little backpacks stuffed with bad stuff on their backs, because who could arrest a bird?

Shocking images: Traffickers use pigeon to smuggle drugs into #Kuwait https://t.co/yl1Ri2xVHk pic.twitter.com/oFGWwX07N5

— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) May 23, 2017

Opium smuggling seems to have a thing for nuts, because twice, in 2018 and 2019, the Quebec border control services found ‘nuts’ entirely made out of opium. Such craftsmanship! But how does the saying go, something about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

2.4 kilograms of suspected opium resin were seized last week by border services officers at the Montreal mail processing centre. By protecting the border, our officers are working to prevent illegal drugs from hitting our streets. pic.twitter.com/sf3QtDrImW

— Border Services QUE (@CanBorderQUE) May 21, 2019

Another opium error, worth £16,000, was being sent from Iran and addressed to a property in the North East of England, intercepted by officials at Heathrow Airport on Christmas day 2016, was disguised as mechanical steel cogs. The artistry goes out and beyond when it comes to hiding drugs, but sometimes an intended double bluff is taken much too far. For example, a man was caught with cocaine estimated to be worth around £27,000, nestled under his ill-fitting toupee.

Detenido en #Barcelona con droga en su peluquín.... ¡¡se le va a caer el pelo!! 🧓👮‍♂👴🤷‍♀https://t.co/IUjl9l63Du pic.twitter.com/wLxIBBB9Ff

— Policía Nacional (@policia) July 16, 2019

A Brazilian man was also caught in an outlandish bid to bluff by smuggling cocaine into Portugal in 2018, inside a pair of fake buttocks. As the BBC stated, “The two cushion-like implants, which were attached to swimming trunks, contained at least 5,000 individual portions of cocaine.” As you can imagine, the smuggler did not have as soft of a landing as he had intended.

In the last but by no means least attempt at a bluff smuggle, nuns, or rather, women wearing nun outfits, who are not typically associated with drugs due to their commitment to other duties, are being wholly taken advantage of. Three women from Colombia dressed as nuns and were ultimately arrested with 2 kilograms of cocaine strapped to their bodies. Where is the limit? It doesn’t seem that there is one. Financial hardship, force and manipulation all come to play when in the pit of drug trafficking, and it’s really quite serious.

Forget street corners, dodgy cars, or the dark web. According to the trailblazing report DM for Details: Selling Drugs in the Age of Social Media published over the weekend by the think-tank Volteface, social media platforms are the new marketplace for selling and buying drugs, particularly among young people.

Drugs being sold on the internet is not necessarily news, but the report reveals how the phenomenon came a long way since drugs were bought with Bitcoins on Silk Road. The proliferation of drug dealing accounts on the most common platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook speaks of a grand-scale hashtag-driven trend, one that regulators are evidently struggling to keep up with.

Through evidence-based policy and reform, Volteface aims to reduce the harm drugs pose to individuals and society. When the organisation began the study, it was not expecting the issue of online drug dealing to be this extensive. Scarlett Furlong, the policy advisor at Volteface and co-author of the report, told Screen Shot, “When we started this research, we weren’t really sure about how big of an issue this was, particularly in the U.K. context. When finding that 1 in 4 young people have seen drugs advertised for sale we realised the range was quite abnormal,” adding that, “We were meant to publish this report last February, but after seeing how relevant all data were, we realised it was necessary to publish all our findings.” Alongside interviews and focus groups with children, the police, and youth workers, the report’s results are mainly based on polls of 2,006 young people, aged 16 to 24 years old, as well as observational trawls of Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, where the researchers went undercover to observe the ways online drug dealings operate.

According to the report, it seems that social media is not only a place for customers to find and purchase drugs, but also an arena for targeting different demographics to become new customers, including new dealers. Young people who otherwise might have never ended up within an environment where drugs are sold and bought offline, could now find themselves just a few hashtags and scrolls away from online communities of drug dealers. One of the main concerns raised by the report is the role that social media platforms are playing in normalising drug use. During its study, Volteface interviewed an anonymous young person who admitted that, “it romanticises it. People think that nothing can go wrong. It really overshadows any drug education people had in the past, like in PSHE lessons or anything like that.”

Personal relationships between dealers and customers have always existed, but social media has tightened the gap between the two parties, creating a close relationship before any transactions take place. It creates the same feeling of familiarity we might have with strangers we follow on Instagram. As quoted in the report, potential buyers “stumble upon numerous dealers showing what young people perceive to be their ‘authentic’ self, or, as is the case with all social media, a side of themselves that the dealer wants the social media user to see. Drug dealers posting about going to college, talking about their family and going to comedy shows.” Dealers are suddenly like everyone else, and with that dispelling any connotations of dangerous and illicit activities that previously existed.

The design of our favourite online platforms, as well as their algorithms, plays a crucial role in the spreading of online drug dealing. Via features such as the ‘suggested friends’ bar and by looking at other people’s ‘following’, ‘follower’ or ‘friends’ list, young persons could find dealers extremely easily. Compared to the dark web, for instance, social media platforms are more user-friendly and way less complicated to navigate, and features such as screenshots, hashtags, swipe-ups, and saved Instagram stories are allowing dealers to be as creative as they want when advertising their products.

Drug dealing has always had specific codes attached to it, including slang that develops with time. Within this context, emojis have become the ultimate alphabet to communicate prices and offers. With an entire visual vocabulary at their disposal, dealers found the perfect way to describe their products clearly without using explicit descriptions nor posting graphic images of actual drugs—although this happens quite frequently too. Eventually, like every digital phenomenon, drug dealing too has picked up the dynamics that are intrinsic to social media platforms: with dealers doing shout-outs to other dealers, calling out scammers, and even growing a considerable amount of followers.

The report goes beyond revealing the shift from offline to online dealing, as it’s shedding light on current drug trends more broadly. “One of the things I was most surprised by was the prescription medications that were sold online. Xanax is the fourth most seen drug that young people have seen online,” Furlong said. The rise of prescribed drugs and their success on social media is an indication of today’s tendencies when it comes to drug consumption. Xanax is the fourth most seen drugs on social media, just after weed, cocaine, and ecstasy—a finding that hasn’t yet been properly acknowledged by institutions, schools, and experts.

The relentless proliferation of online drug dealing and the explicitness through which dealers are using social media platforms clearly speak of a delay in regulations and effective controls. Like with most digital phenomenons, regulators are struggling to keep up with the pace and the codes of online drug dealing. “We want to share all the information we have collected with legislators and companies alike to make sure we all work together to prevent this to grow exponentially,” Furlong adds.

According to Volteface, the government should introduce a regulatory requirement for social media companies to monitor activity on their platforms and to ensure that they are aware of how language, emojis, and design features are used to facilitate drug dealing. Moreover, the report recommends that this research is used to inform already existing algorithms that monitor and remove dealers’ accounts and that “Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram should be included within the scope of the Government’s Online Harms regulatory framework”. Staying coherent with its belief, Volteface is confident that even in this context, cannabis legalisation would be the most effective policy to alleviate the problems outlined in the study.

This phenomenon isn’t simply the migration of drug dealing from real life to the Internet, but also seems to be a brand new way of dealing illegal substances altogether; it is a way of selling and purchasing drugs that is infused with the same social media dynamic young people relate to on a daily basis.