Word: contrabanding
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...inspection systems made by American Science and Engineering, Inc., in Billerica, Mass. Using a technique in which images are made from X rays scattered back from objects (rather than passing through them), AS&E's systems can spot--with extraordinary clarity--guns, drugs, plastic explosives and other contraband, even when hidden, say, in the middle of a fully packed banana truck. One of the company's products, called BodySearch, reveals ghostly images of weapons and whatever else--including genitals--might be hidden underneath your clothes...
...grocer beams in to tell me there's a special shipment of organic beef. It's contraband, but I'll take it! Ever since the Mad Cow Plague finding real beef has been impossible...
...triads run a virtual drug superhighway from Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle via China to Hong Kong?and then to anywhere in the world. In mid-April, Vancouver customs officials found 42 kg of heroin with a street value of $64 million stuffed inside cans of pineapple chunks. (The contraband had been canned in Guangdong and shipped through Hong Kong.) Every weekend night, tens of thousands of Hong Kong nightclubbers rip through an ever-expanding number of Shenzhen dance halls where ecstasy, ketamine and ice are freely available and thrillingly cheap. E sells for $10 and tranquilizer pills, which cost...
...Thailand, for example. "After the collapse of military dictatorship in 1973," says Sungsidh Pirayarangsan, a professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and a specialist on the issue, "local godfathers, drug traffickers, traders of war weapons and others involved in illegal trade laundered themselves through the election process. Today, the contraband arms trade is able to survive because of political influence...
...particular gambling and narcotics," says Yeshua Moser Puangsuwan, regional director for the Geneva-based Nonviolence International. But those two highly profitable illegal activities - which earn billions of dollars annually worldwide - are so entwined with arms smuggling they cannot be separated. "If you trade in narcotics, human beings or contraband, you must have access to arms," says Puangsuwan. "It ties them all together...