How much hits our shores??

Everytime i hear about another ecstacy bust in the news of substantial size. The most recent being that the one a few days ago where the pills were in packages marked pencils.
How much do you think makes it into the country?
Do busts like this really make that much of a dint in the trade? Might sound like a stupid question but i was curious to hear your opinions.

i'll try and find a proper quote but i seem to remember hearing customs official say that for every shipment they seize, another 20 get thru... and thats their own, conservative estimate...
prices wouldn't be dropping if they were scarce, now would they?

On tv an officer of the law remarked that they only get about 15% of what gets thru

What i wanna know is how do they know how much they get of how much they dont catch that get through, err yeah

Ha! A simple empirical calculation based on statistics in the public record (and a few that aren't) demonstrates that hardly any imports are busted.
Think of it this way: what's the mean number of imported packages between jail sentences?
Some of us know the answer to this one... now work backwards to get the proportion of imports busted, assuming equal incompetence of traffickers.
The percentage I get is tiny. Sorry, not telling.
DSF

a lil OT, but when you see on the news that the police busted a domestic drug lab inc a pill presser
does anyone else go " YESS more shit pills off the streets!" ? or is that just me?

I say "oh shit dad, looks like your going to jail again!"

lol at superspeed!!!

busting an import usually just means more dodgy-pills full of imitations sold in the place of what was seized, as there is a gap between the supply and demand in the market. i mean i couldnt prove this.. but i doubt that the big dealers / importers are gonna go.. "sorry, no pills. they got seized. maybe in a few months down the track". isnt it more likely that they sell a dodgy replacement? and if not them, then someone else sees a gap in the market and has a shot at making a bit of money by selling dodgy stuff..
i dunno, thats the way i see it.
very interesting topic though - i would love to know what really goes on out there.
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I'll hide you..away from..a world you..rejected..I'll hide you.

umm MikeySammy, i think what MunkeMC meant was that the majority of domestic pills are crappy speed bombs(or whatever) SO, therefore, if another domestic lab has been busted it means less crappy speed bombs (or whatever) around and more demand for alternatives (meaning nice imports)...
back OT, umm.. I heard that customs gets about 5% of what comes through. My theory is that it all gets re-distributed anyway. If you think about it, busts come in waves. Almost like they're planned. The govt. thinks, "shit aye, haven't done a bust in a while, lets get busy" so they bust, they distribute the findings nice and evenly between the police force and other govt agencies that have a hand in such matters, who then kindly put the pills back onto the streets for us I mean, you'd think we'd notice SOME sort if decrease in pillage around these times of busts aplenty.. but no. In my opinion, the govt. doesn't REALLY care how many drugs get through, so long as they get their cut and the drug trade is accounted for when they work out their budget surplus (or deficit)then everyone's happy. Busts are just big scare tactics, and they're made so public exactly for that reason. I'm sure customs could seize alot more if they really wanted to, but the plain truth is, that the drug trade generates large amounts of money which is eventually re-distributed and circulated as part of the national economy. They don't need to legalise drugs (not even to scam a few more of our tax dollars) NO! they make enough money of it already...
It's all working out perfectly. The parents think our streets are getting safer (with all the busts going on and people being jailed), the coppers are making a few extra bucks and the big time drug dealers are injecting large amounts of cash into a struggling economy (and lordy knows our small business owners are feeling the crappy GST).
Then again.. I could be wrong.

are you saying the government is corrupt mona? - well i never, not the government
Tell you what though - a parliament full of rolling politicians couldn't do any worse than they are now.....mmmmm just imagine little johnny howard on a gold cK..hehehe
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"Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cozy, doesn't try it on" - Billy Connolly

Hmmm not sure about your economic rationalism there Mona. I would be thinking of increased wealth only of Australia was large exporter. As it is, all the imports means money going overseas which is bad for the Australian economy

Uhh yes, but the dealers also make and spend and generate alot of cash flow 'within' australia too. They live here too, some of them lead pretty luxurious existences...

----my whacked theory for today----
by XSI11V
Wannaget High
Class A
Importers deliberately drop small amounts in the laps of customs by sending it through the most dodgy obvious route eg. Sydney Airport
These busts create the illusion that customs is doing a great job, which keeps the the police force, general public and media happy But more importantly it also serves to divert attention to major shipments similtaneously underway which involve an intricate network of unidentifiable remote controlled helicopters (like in that old BP ad). Refuelling of the helicopters is done by the mothership... is my theory losing credibilty yet?
And they all lived happily ever after.
[This message has been edited by XSI11V (edited 03 August 2000).]

I'm with XSI11V on this one (except for the bit about the tiny helicopters), in assuming that a large importer would not bring all their eggs in one basket (so to speak ).
I gather that if they wanted to stay in the business for any length of time, they would have to be fairly cunning about their import methods, including decoys, splitting the payloads and obviously many and varied concealment methods. Therefore for every single bust, my assumption would be that only a part of the import batch was found, and other parts of the payload came through customs unnoticed. Therefore the public suffers no great loss or pill drought, because some still 'made it'.

Yeah, good point BT, a friend of a friend (you know how these things go.. I'M INNOCENT!)
used to live with a guy who was heavily into the trade but also belonged to a syndicate. In so many words, they didn't keep all their eggs in one basket and used an array of tricks and decoys in order to acheive the desired affect.
Hey, maybe there's a website where you can place orders through to these remote control helicopters and they can do home deliveries.
Who knows, maybe BP is in on the act and those storage tanks aren't holding fuel...
Getting back..
Even though the amounts seized might be a drop in the ocean, what do the police or customs do with it exactly? I mean, do they store it somewhere or is it destroyed immediately or is it thrown back out onto the streets.

you foolz...
there is a hole from one side of the world to the other, from a mdma lab on the other side of the world straight through the core of the earth to a little pot hole in kings cross...
they just drop em through..
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..dangermouse..
.you've gotta lose it.
.to find it.

I think I'm right in saying that most pills that get imported come via our sea ports and not out airports.
It's a lot easier to hide them in a shipping container than a suitcase.