As the economy dips and more and more middle and upper middle class white bread breadwinners get laid off, I imagine there would be a number of people financially stressed, and ethically challenged, enough to consider being drug mules if the money was right.
In the news most of the significant highway drug busts I see or read about locally are typically some group of young black or Hispanic males from New Jersey or New York passing through Maryland, who were cruising in the early hours of the morning and were popped by the police for speeding or some other minor infraction.
The legality of profiling aside, if a policeman stops a car filled with any of the groups described above his drug courier radar is probably going to be pinging like crazy.
When reading about these busts where hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars worth of drugs are some times confiscated I do wonder why an enterprising drug lord hasn’t made a deal to entrust his very valuable drugs to some financially stressed Joe Whitebread and his SUV or soccer mom station-wagon. The chances of that demographic getting stopped and searched would be (I’m guessing) orders of magnitude less than the two groups mentioned above.
Why are drugs usually being transported by these groups described above that are (in a real world risk analysis sense) practically begging to be stopped and searched by the police?
Isn’t it possible that some drugs are, in fact, being transported by middle class white people and those are the ones who don’t get caught and thus don’t end up on the news?
If I could hazard a guess it would primarily be because the number of mules interdicted on the roads is significantly less than the number of mules who successfully deliver their cargo.
Marc
I’m sure it’s a question of supply: there are a lot more black and Hispanic young men who are willing to take the risk.
As for why they’re more willing to take the risk, even if economic times are equally hard for whites as well, one reason might be (the impression I have) that culturally, going to jail might not carry as much of a social stigma for certain subsets within those groups. And prison is probably a lot scarier place for whites than for blacks and Hispanics.
Middle-class whites are often used in Thailand. Many get caught and receive long stretches in prison over here. Some end up writing books about the experience afterward.
Very often, the smugglers will select two to four mules for a specific flight, each of them unknown to the others, then secretly turn one of them in to the cops. That way the cops get to show they really are cracking down on drugs, and the other mules get let through. Tough luck if you’re the one who’s been turned in!
I can also recommend a good film called Brokedown Palace (1999). Although fictional, it shows the standard operating procedure in getting young backpackers to act as mules. Set in Thailand, it was filmed in the Philippines and is banned in Thailand, because it portrays the king.
How do you know they don’t? Know any “middle class white people” who don’t seem to have any real source of income, yet have BMWs and sit around and drink all day? A garage full of motorcycles you only *wish * you could own?
Know any pilots, who because of the strict medical requirements to keep a ticket, suddenly find themselves out of a job after *one little * heart attack (after spending thier *whole life * training and yearing to fly), with ***NO OTHER *** job prospects, yet can still fly a plane *DAMN WELL * (say, like 20 feet off the deck over open ocean for hours at a time) and manage to still afford the 48’ yacht? Driven to in the Escalade? With RIMS?
I think we’re overlooking an obvious answer. Many (most?) drug smuggling rings are operated by gangs, which racially-speaking tend to be very homogeneous.
In other words, your typical drug mule is a hispanic or black guy because your typical gang member is a hispanic or black guy.
Well… yeah I grokked that, the part I didn’t get is why they use them at all when much less risky alternatives (potentially) exist. If you’ve got 5 milllion in coke to move why not pay a desperate white soccer mom 20K to take it cross country, vs loading up the posse and making a late night run on the interstate.
I imagine they’d have much less opportunity to ask the soccer mom (unless their kids are in a league together). And if someone is innocent-looking enough not to raise suspicion with the cops – because they’re caucasian, average to attractive – perhaps they also have an advantage when it comes to the (legitimate) job market.
Here’s a caucasian dude who got busted for drug smuggling and went to jail. He reconsidered his ways, though, and underwent a career change. Who would have thunk Santa Claus had a prior life of crime? So anyhow, I guess some white folks in the US do get involved with this stuff.
I worked with a middle-class white woman whose SO was moving drugs using rental trucks. They both got busted. So, yeah, middle-class white folks can be drug-dealin’ drug-movin’ fools.
And wasn’t there a whole tv show dedicated to people who got busted as mules for taking drugs in their luggage on international trips? I seem to remember a couple of middle-class white women who got caught, in particular. They get a “free vacation” for carrying the drugs, which turns into a “free vacation in hell” when they’re caught and sentenced to prison.
Lots of those nice McMansions are used for storing and moving dope since they tend to not have a lot of nosey neighbors and low crime rates so the suspicion level isn’t there. Well not lots, but it’s more than a lot of people would think. No cite, just a lifetime of hanging around questionable dudes.
Hell, if I ever had to move a bunch of dope I’d be in a minivan covered with born again xtian stickers and I’d dress up like some total suburban doofus. I can’t be the first person or the last person with that idea.
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the publicized dollar values of confiscated drugs are often absurdly overstated. I don’t know about cocaine specifically, but I’ve heard that marijuana busts are usually overestimated by several orders of magnitude. Basically, they consider only the final street price on the smallest-volume transaction, at the highest price and purity possible, and any other convenient miscalculations they can make to inflate the price. Because it sounds better that way.
It’d be like confiscating a truck full of $10000 worth of corn on the cob, and reporting it as $6.8 million based on multiplying from the price of a small bag of popcorn at the movie theater.
So whatever economic incentive there may be to avoid capture, it’s probably not nearly as big as it might seem from the reporting.
I’m a middle class white guy from the suburbs and in my 20s, someone asked me to do just what the OP is describing. I was to fly to Florida, pick up a car and drive it up 95 to the suburbs of DC. I was to dress like a college kid, drive a normal speed and stop at truckstops to eat, just a guy coming back from spring break. I got fairly far along in discussions before I had my WTF moment and got my ass back in college and got a degree.
You may have gotten your WTF moment, but my white upper middle class cousin didn’t. He got busted too. Spent a few years in jail, got out, then went right back in. Stupid fuck graduated from Drexel and still wanted to run drugs.
