Drug smugglers can get pretty creative when it comes to sneaking their products into countries. Some build giant catapults or repurpose old bazookas to launch weed into the US, some dress their meth up to look like novelty dick candles, and others just strap a bunch of coke to their bodies and hope no one notices how lumpy they are. But there’s one method that smugglers around the world seem to keep coming back to, time after time—the produce disguise.
In 2016, it was marijuana dressed up like deformed carrots. In 2017, it was limes. And now, European authorities have discovered a massive shipment of cocaine hidden inside a bunch of fresh pineapples.
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According to Reuters, the coke-stuffed pineapples were discovered as part of a collaboration between police in Spain and Portugal that began almost a year ago. The joint investigation led them to search a series of shipping containers, where they discovered that the shipment of pineapples from South America was moving more than just fruit.
Around 745 kg of cocaine—1,642 pounds—were split into packages, coated in pineapple-yellow wax, and hidden inside hollowed-out shells of the spiky fruit. Police seized the fruit stash of blow and raided a lab in Spain where the stuff was allegedly going to be cut and repackaged, making nine arrests in the process, Business Insider reports.
“This organized international group had repeatedly brought large quantities of cocaine to the European continent,” police in Portugal said in a statement about the Colombian group.
This isn’t the first time someone has tried to traffic with a trick pineapple, though. A shipment of cocaine-filled pineapples was intercepted in Costa Rica in 2014 and Spanish police uncovered another batch a year later.
It’s unclear whether all these shipments are connected or if a bunch of smugglers all had the same idea. Either way, someone somewhere is snacking on the insides of a whole lot of pineapples right now.
