smuggling

So with UNESCO, what I do is sift through all these google news alerts that are sent our trafficking email. We have alerts for certain keywords like prostitution, migration+asia, beggars, smuggling, etc.

Anyway, under the smuggling alerts, I always find it interesting what people smuggle into different countries.

For example, today’s news articles included cigarettes being smuggled into Singapore, heroine into the United States, precious minerals like gold into China, arms into Lebanon, and humans into Bulgaria.

Some other articles from the past that have stuck in my memory are articles about endangered owls into Europe, diet pills into Malaysia, exotic flowers into the states…

I don’t know. I wonder how many of these smuggling cases result in the characteristics we attribute to certain countries or if it’s the already established characteristics of the countries that result in these smuggling cases.

Do smuggling cases of heroine into the United States result because Americans are a bunch of heroine addicts or are we heroine addicts because it’s illegal and it has to be smuggled in?

Eh.