Pot Filled Foosball Table
On the same day that officials at the US’s southern border discovered more than 2,400 pounds of cannabis disguised to look like carrots, officials at the nation’s northern border seized a foosball table that was crammed full of weed.
US border officers in Lewiston, New York, said they became suspicious of Canadian citizen Miranda Ferron, age 33 when they began noticing inconsistencies in the reasons she gave for wanting to enter the US.
Ferron initially told authorities she was crossing the border to buy Powerball tickets, but eventually, as her story began to change, customs officers decided to conduct a more thorough search of her vehicle.
That’s when they discovered that the innocent looking foosball table in the back of her truck was in fact filled with 55 pounds of marijuana, all wrapped up in 50 vacuum sealed bags.
Authorities seized the pot and turned Ferron over to the New York State Police.
The street value of the confiscated ganja was estimated at around $60,000, according to local news sources in western New York.
While this bust wasn’t nearly as big as the cannabis carrot chaos in Texas, it still ranks as one of the most creative smuggling attempts we’ve heard about recently.
Of course, the only way we’d ever even hear about efforts like these is when they fail—who knows how many other bizarre and creative smuggling attempts succeed.
Trying to figure out just how much weed is smuggled into the US is a tricky art since it’s always an effort to quantify something that’s explicitly hidden and unknown.
But based on some weed cops confiscate in failed smuggling attempts, the federal government estimates that at least 24.1 million pounds of marijuana are successfully smuggled into the US each year.
“If only 10 percent of illicit drugs are seized in any given year, then, based on the figure of 2,412,365 pounds of marijuana taken in 2002, one could estimate that in 2002 the total amount of marijuana that traffickers succeeded in smuggling into the country was roughly 24 million pounds,” one report concluded.
