$260,575 worth of weed found in Herbalife meal shake tins
Authorities in the Philippines have seized over 11kg of weed, shipped from California in Herbalife meal replacement shake tins.
Who says criminals don’t have a sense of humor?
Customs became suspicious after noticing labels stuck onto the tins were ‘movable and not permanently attached‘.
This revealed plastic sachets containing leaves suspected to be marijuana.
Inspection made by K9 dogs also indicated the presence of illegal drugs.
The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) then conducted a chemical analysis, affirming the findings of BOC-Clark personnel.
After being seized back on March 30th, the drug shipment was turned over to the Drug Enforcement Agency for disposition on Monday.
No word on who the intended recipient or sender within the US.
Under Philippine law,
the importation, sale, maintenance of a den, dive or resort, manufacture, use, and cultivation of marijuana and marijuana-related products shall be met with life imprisonment and a fine.
I imagine somewhere someone is sleeping with the fishies was reprimanded for not spending a few extra dollars on label glue.
Well it wouldn’t have been wise to label the cans Grass Life now, would it.
All this good weed is lost… real sad.
My one interaction with Herbalife was when I had my tonsils out at 16 and couldn’t eat and then got malaria. I weighed next to nothing.
I got the “lose weight now, ask me how” speech and pointed out that I needed to gain, not lose. I was told Herbalife can fix that too.
Now I know how, a can of that green stuff and I would have eaten every Twinkie in the world.
I don’t “do” Herbalife, but I’m pretty sure they only use plastic jars with screw-on lids for their meal-replacement shake powder. So the smugglers only used Herbalife labels, not tins.
A quarter-million dollars’ worth of weed, and they can’t afford frickin’ GLUE? Wow.
If Herbalife don’t do tins of anything (even internally) that means what, the drug runners custom designed and printed appropriate labels? And sealed the tins?
And then they got caught because they skimped out on a few cents of glue… lulz?
@Oz – It gets stranger the more you look at it. Those were sealed cans, which require special canning equipment to manufacture.
Where did they get their hands on a canning machine? Where did the labels come from? Did one of the gang work at Herbalife and smuggle some out? Did they make their own? Did they steam them off some Herbalife jars? Why not buy some shake mix, dump the contents, put the grass inside, refill with powder, and reseal?
That would have been easier than canning, ffs, and the containers wouldn’t rattle when shaken. A heat-shrink plastic ring and a blow dryer would be the only special equipment needed.
But the biggest mystery of all: glue? For want of GLUE, the cartel fell? Cheap GLUE means the poor mules are facing life in the can?
In the can…ironic.
Small tabletop, hand-operated canning machines are cheap and easy to buy. Designing and printing labels is no problem at all. Using cans is actually a clever choice in this case. The major problem with hiding marijuana is the penetrating smell, canning takes care of that better than anything else.
That they went for Herbalife labels also shows they thought things through. They had a major problem: nobody in their right mind would ship the kind of foodstuffs that normally go into cans from California to the Philippines, it would be more expensive than locally grown products, and immediately arouse suspicions. Overpriced, factory-made products like Herbalife’s were probably the only thing they could think of that would make it seem like a plausible export product.
But going to great lengths to forge something, and then being caught out by just one stupid detail, is a quite common occurrence in the general field of forgery.
To give just one example I read about recently: a fraud involving an impeccably forged document in Germany. The only reason somebody accidentally spotted it had to be a fake was that there was an address of a government agency printed on it. That address was seemingly entirely correct. The one flaw: the document was dated 1992, and the post code in the address had 5 digits. Five-digit postcodes weren’t introduced until 1993, as a result of German reunification.
In this case, even if they’d glued on the labels properly, the thing would have flown up anyway if just one customs officer happened to know that Herbalife doesn’t use cans.
@Amos
That’s what I was getting at. Manually canning is a lot effort for just a few tins, unless this is a ring they’ve busted shipping elsewhere across the world.
@PassingBy
Would a small canning machine be able to deal with cans of this size? They look pretty big.
Its a $1500 tabletop machine, tops #10 cans as shown in that picture.
everythingkitchens.com/wisconsin-aluminum-225-master-hand-crank-can-sealer.html
So we come back to $1500 on a canning machine… but can’t spare a few dollars on glue.
Big brain thinking.
Well, today I learned $1500 will buy a tabletop canner that can handle #10 cans.
Label glue not included. D’Oh!