Ireland has become the latest country to find cocaine soaked in wood, following seizures this year in Australia, Chile and Spain, according to Wood Central.
Irish customs officers and police seized 74 kilograms of cocaine soaked into plywood shipped from Colombia. The plywood was found next to a mobile extraction lab set up in a truck trailer in County Kildare. Investigators say the sheets were saturated with liquid cocaine before shipping, and the drug was extracted after arrival.
Earlier this year in Chile, authorities detected drug-soaked wood in 45 containers of Bolivian timber at the ports of Arica, San Antonio and Valparaíso. The two hardwoods in the seized packs are known in Bolivia as tajibo and almendrillo, but are sold internationally as ipe and cumaru and regulated under CITES Appendix II. Prosecutors traced the cargo to 15 legally registered Bolivian timber companies. Bolivia has called the findings a false positive, but Chilean officials say 44 of 50 containers tested positive. In Brazil, Federal Police lab tests found no cocaine in samples from 260 metric tons of Bolivian timber held at the border in June. Part of that load is being held for a second analysis.
In Australia, New South Wales and Queensland police seized six metric tons of timber planks in January. They estimated that four tons of it held about 100 kilograms of cocaine. Five men have been charged. "This concealment methodology of impregnating cocaine into timber planks had not been detected in Queensland previously," said Queensland Police Acting Detective Superintendent Brad Phelps. Separately, Spain's national police said in August that they had dismantled four labs used to extract cocaine from wood and other goods shipped into Europe through Belgian ports.
In the U.S., the Justice Department has embedded its first two dedicated timber-trafficking intelligence analysts, and the U.S. Forest Service has added a timber crime unit. "Timber trafficking is not a victimless crime," Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said at a Justice Department roundtable in April.
