nowdubnvr6
Bluelighter
http://www.rehabs.com/explore/busted/#bustedig
If all American states were personified as drug dealers, ushered into a holding cell, told to stand in a Usual Suspects-style line-up, then instructed to empty their pockets, what illicit items would spill forth and from whom? Would Mr. Florida produce enough cocaine to be crowned the Scarface of the group? Would Mr. New Mexico's massive meth stash secure his status as a real-life Walter White? Or might there be drug barons in the room whose hauls, pound for pound, far surpass their reputations? Perhaps an effeminate Pablo Escobar hiding in the guise of Ms. Missouri?
This was the somewhat bizarre question that drifted into my mind a month ago while re-watching an episode of Breaking Bad - the addictive story of a high school science teacher, Walter White, turned super meth cook. I already knew that the U.S. is unequivocally the largest consumer of illegal drugs on the planet (accounting for only 5% of the world's population, but a massive 25% of its demand for narcotics1), but I wanted a much more detailed picture of the American drug landscape. I wanted to see it as it exists right now, across every state and all 3,000 counties.
I wanted to know which state is the most awash with amphetamines and heaving with heroin. And where can't you find a brick of cannabis no matter how hard you try?
Clearly there's no way to know the precise amount of each drug present in each state without some kind of omniscient, omnipresent drug-sniffing dog, and the DEA doesn't have one yet, so a less direct approach would be required. I decided to use reported seizures of narcotics to
shine a light on what's going on across our great drug-laden nation. And while only about 10% of illicit drugs being smuggled into the U.S. are intercepted by the authorities, I thought the nearly 41 million pounds a year they do scoop up3 would give a pretty good indication of what's going on. So, where best to get the data?
Government stats offer the most comprehensive overview of drug interdictions and they're great for assessing the country's drug trends in hindsight and on a national scale, but they're only released twice a year or so, and I wanted the most up-to-date figures possible and, moreover, I wanted to see them at the state-, or even county-level. I therefore needed to find a totally up-to-the-minute catalogue of the thousands of daily drug busts being made around the country - preferably one that tracks the exact geographical position they are made. Fortuitously, I found GlobalIncidentMap.com, which does all of the above. It aggregates media reports of drug interdictions (as well as forest fires, human trafficking incidents and a whole host of other unsettling events) from thousands of local media outlets around the country and outputs them as a filterable, constantly-updating news ticker. Every report is tagged with the type of drug seized, the time and date it was intercepted and the exact location (by longitude and latitude).
For drug types, I decided to focus on the 'big four': cannabis, cocaine, heroin and meth (which together account for 69% of the seized drugs analyzed by American forensic labs each year3), and I'd begin by extracting the 5,000 most recently reported busts.
Found this whole report to be very interesting.....
If all American states were personified as drug dealers, ushered into a holding cell, told to stand in a Usual Suspects-style line-up, then instructed to empty their pockets, what illicit items would spill forth and from whom? Would Mr. Florida produce enough cocaine to be crowned the Scarface of the group? Would Mr. New Mexico's massive meth stash secure his status as a real-life Walter White? Or might there be drug barons in the room whose hauls, pound for pound, far surpass their reputations? Perhaps an effeminate Pablo Escobar hiding in the guise of Ms. Missouri?
This was the somewhat bizarre question that drifted into my mind a month ago while re-watching an episode of Breaking Bad - the addictive story of a high school science teacher, Walter White, turned super meth cook. I already knew that the U.S. is unequivocally the largest consumer of illegal drugs on the planet (accounting for only 5% of the world's population, but a massive 25% of its demand for narcotics1), but I wanted a much more detailed picture of the American drug landscape. I wanted to see it as it exists right now, across every state and all 3,000 counties.
I wanted to know which state is the most awash with amphetamines and heaving with heroin. And where can't you find a brick of cannabis no matter how hard you try?
Clearly there's no way to know the precise amount of each drug present in each state without some kind of omniscient, omnipresent drug-sniffing dog, and the DEA doesn't have one yet, so a less direct approach would be required. I decided to use reported seizures of narcotics to
shine a light on what's going on across our great drug-laden nation. And while only about 10% of illicit drugs being smuggled into the U.S. are intercepted by the authorities, I thought the nearly 41 million pounds a year they do scoop up3 would give a pretty good indication of what's going on. So, where best to get the data?
Government stats offer the most comprehensive overview of drug interdictions and they're great for assessing the country's drug trends in hindsight and on a national scale, but they're only released twice a year or so, and I wanted the most up-to-date figures possible and, moreover, I wanted to see them at the state-, or even county-level. I therefore needed to find a totally up-to-the-minute catalogue of the thousands of daily drug busts being made around the country - preferably one that tracks the exact geographical position they are made. Fortuitously, I found GlobalIncidentMap.com, which does all of the above. It aggregates media reports of drug interdictions (as well as forest fires, human trafficking incidents and a whole host of other unsettling events) from thousands of local media outlets around the country and outputs them as a filterable, constantly-updating news ticker. Every report is tagged with the type of drug seized, the time and date it was intercepted and the exact location (by longitude and latitude).
For drug types, I decided to focus on the 'big four': cannabis, cocaine, heroin and meth (which together account for 69% of the seized drugs analyzed by American forensic labs each year3), and I'd begin by extracting the 5,000 most recently reported busts.
Found this whole report to be very interesting.....
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