[Dramatic music playing]
[Indistinct shouting]
[Dramatic music playing]
News reporter: Smuggled in this delicious fruit was cocaine.
What do watermelons, submarines, and sex toys all have in common?
They've all been used to smuggle drugs.
And that's just the beginning.
In September of 1985,
a smuggler named Andrew Thornton II
was flying hundreds of kilos of cocaine
from Colombia into the United States.
However, Thornton got worried
that the authorities were tracking his flight,
so he dumped hundreds of pounds of blow
down into the forests of Georgia
and jumped out of his plane with a parachute.
News reporter: Andrew Thornton fell to his death,
carrying too heavy of a load of cocaine while parachuting.
Unfortunately for Thornton,
his parachute malfunctioned,
and his body was later discovered along with 75 lbs of cocaine,
a couple of handguns, and thousands of dollars in cash.
Much of the coke he abandoned, however,
ended up being found and eaten by a huge bear.
And this story has now become
the inspiration for a Hollywood movie.
Male voiceover: It’s a tale of drugs, planes, parachutes,
and one unlucky bear.
This is how drug smuggling
has gone from a few guys crossing a desert on mules
to a sophisticated multibillion-dollar industry,
and the most inventive ways traffickers have managed to
move their drugs around the world.
[Dramatic music playing]
Since the very beginning of the war on drugs,
traffickers have faced one big problem:
how to get prohibited drugs from producer to seller to buyer.
Luckily, drug cartels are incredibly innovative.
[Propeller whirring]
But the roots of international drug trafficking
are a lot more basic than recruiting champion paragliders
to fly bricks of coke over the rainforest.
Though the war on drugs goes all the way back to 1914,
the golden age of drug smuggling
really began in the late 1970s and ’80s,
and it was largely driven by one thing—cocaine.
[Funky music playing]
It was the challenge of getting cocaine
from the mountains of South America
to the nostrils and crack pipes of the USA
which transformed drug trafficking
into the most profitable organized criminal enterprise in history.
Reporter: The American illicit drugs market
is the biggest in the world,
worth annually more than $80 billion.
Last year, federal authorities intercepted 7,000 lbs of cocaine,
three times the amount seized the previous year.
This was the era of the so-called cocaine cowboys,
who flooded Florida with drugs from South America
using boats, planes, and often human stomachs.
And, yes, rectums.
Reporter: The drug smuggling operation is highly organized,
and there are plenty of people prepared to risk imprisonment
for the large amounts of money offered by the dealers.
Some will even go through the uncomfortable process
of swallowing plastic bags filled with narcotics,
something that can end in death if the bags burst.
So-called drug mules are most often impoverished people
who are either paid or violently coerced by cartels
to swallow or insert packages of illicit drugs
and smuggle them on commercial flights.
And when this goes wrong, the consequences can be deadly.
If you’re carrying, as a mule, packets of cocaine and one ruptures,
the acute powder of cocaine is rapidly absorbed,
[and] it creates a disaster in your stomach.
The first thing they usually feel is muscle contraction, pain.
Then they complain of chest pain
because now the heart is starting to be affected.
But there’s no way cartels could supply
the endless market for illicit drugs
just through people’s digestive tracts.
The majority of the cocaine cowboys
operated fleets of small planes and boats
going from South America to the US, often through bases in the Bahamas.
Reporter: A $100,000 cruiser with two young men on board
is a classic profile case.
US Coast Guard: You guys got any guns?
OK, we’re going to board to check your papers.
Reporter: A radio link to customs headquarters
indicates the agents’ suspicions are well-founded.
As the authorities began to crack down on boats going over the seas,
traffickers went under the surface.
This was the origin
of one of the most impressive feats of cartel engineering—
the narco-submarine.
[Engine droning]
[Indistinct shouting]
[Muffled shouting]
The first narco-subs were intercepted in the early ’90s,
but they’ve surged in use in recent years.
They're assembled in underground boat yards hidden in the Amazon,
and cartels can spend millions of dollars
on each and every one.
And that investment seems to be worth it.
The largest haul ever seized in a submarine
is a staggering 7.7 tons of cocaine,
and only a tiny fraction of them are ever intercepted.
In 2019, Spanish authorities discovered a narco-sub
that had actually crossed the entire Atlantic
from South America to Europe.
Over the last decade, particularly emerging from Colombia,
there have been a set of semi-submersibles,
a couple of which have been caught by the US Coast Guard,
which don’t fully submerge but just appear above the water.
And they’ve also been used to take cocaine up the coast
and bypass the border.
In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan amped up the war on drugs
with a huge crackdown on the Caribbean smuggling routes.
Obviously, this did not end the drug trade
because all the traffickers did was switch from air and sea to land
and the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border.
This is how the war on drugs created the modern Mexican cartel.
[Gunfire]
How old are you guys?
Mexican cartels have used pretty much every method imaginable
to transport drugs into the US,
from fleets of airplanes to drones and literal slingshots.
News reporter: Border Patrol agents near Douglas, Arizona,
found a catapult attached to the border wall,
made to chuck bundles of marijuana into American territory.
More than 47 lbs of the drug found.
But the crowning technical achievement of the Mexican cartels
is almost certainly the narco-tunnel.
Tunnels underneath the US-Mexico border
began to emerge in the early 1990s
but have exploded in use in the 21st century.
Hundreds have now been discovered,
some of which are thousands of feet long
and equipped with electricity and purpose-built rail tracks.
Drug tunnels have been built
predominantly on the US-Mexican border,
where they've taken drugs from cities like Tijuana to San Diego.
They were developed mostly in the 1990s,
and particularly by a very famous Mexican drug kingpin
called Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán,
who famously escaped a supermax prison in Mexico
by getting mining engineers to build a tunnel
and then escaping through that tunnel on a motorbike.
But the vast majority of the drugs that get smuggled into the US
don’t actually go underground.
They come in the same way as most other consumer products—
over the border.
[Truck engines revving]
[Indistinct talking]
Thirty-five thousand trucks and 200,000 cars
cross the border from Mexico to the US every single day.
And some of them are full of cocaine, heroin, meth,
weed, and fentanyl.
Well, the North American Free Trade Agreement
opened up trade between Mexico and the US,
so there was a real explosion in drug smuggling over the border
between Mexico and the United States during the 1990s.
So it wasn’t so much finding a needle in a haystack
as finding a piece of hay in a haystack—
completely impossible.
Once again, cartels have driven some extreme innovation,
smuggling drugs and just about every product imaginable,
from bananas to hair extensions.
But probably most impressive
is the development of the so-called trap car.
Cartels have custom-built vehicles with hidden compartments
which can often only be accessed by a very specific sequence of actions.
News reporter: In the bottom of the center console,
underneath a fake bottom,
is a switch.
Turn it down, nothing happens.
But turn it up,
and there goes the back seat,
revealing a trap containing a stash of contraband.
These so-called trap cars,
cars with secret departments
in which you can hide fairly large quantities of drugs,
if you know what you’re doing.
And a lot of these cars have been developed
on the US side of the border
to take huge quantities of weapons down south to Mexico,
where they’re then distributed and sold
just as cheaply as you can buy them in a Walmart.
It’s crucial to remember that all this impressive innovation
is also enabled by the fact that cartels are rich enough
to bribe everyone from individual border agents
to national presidents.
And guess what?
Andrew Thornton II,
the original smuggler from the cocaine bear story,
he actually started his career as a cop.
Thornton was on the Lexington police force for nine years.
He was a narcotics officer between 1970 and 1973.
And, of course, there’s no reason that drugs like weed and cocaine
need to be smuggled in these crazily inventive ways—
apart from the fact that they’re against the law.
So maybe the craziest thing about this whole story
isn’t that a bear ended up eating some cocaine.
It’s that governments across the world
thought they could stop people from wanting to take drugs
by making them illegal.
Good luck with that.
Computerized voice: We’d like to congratulate drugs
for winning the war on drugs.