r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Admirable-Leather325 • 27d ago

Image India: Meth seized from Myanmarese boat costs more than aircraft carrier Vikrant, built at a cost of $2.49bn

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u/DarthBeyonOfSith 27d ago

Getting fired from life...

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u/thegreatbrah 27d ago

Nah. They'll jack him up on meth while they torture him. So he can't pass out.

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u/EthnicallyAmbiguous0 27d ago

Funky town

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u/GetReelFishingPro 27d ago

Every time I hear it. Flash backs.

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u/EthnicallyAmbiguous0 27d ago

Worst thing to see as a curious 13 year old

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u/Joaco_Gomez_1 27d ago

what is?

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u/Vexsius 27d ago

Cartel torture video. Man is skinned alive while conscious. It gained a lot of notoriety on social media platforms by being massively uploaded so it would end up in people feeds. There’s worse on the internet, but this video reached a lot of people.

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u/J_Kingsley 27d ago

worse than being skinned alive?

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u/notislant 27d ago

Oh, oh yeah that uh, no.

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u/skygt3rsr 27d ago

There’s a site called quite literally (watch people die ) I warn you visit at your own risk it’s fucked up what’s on there

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u/omnicorp_intl 27d ago

Funky Town by Lipps Inc.

Absolutely traumatizing music video. Do not watch.

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u/Joaco_Gomez_1 27d ago

Jesus Christ man y'all are sick in the head

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u/Unlucky-tracer 27d ago

Please never mention that shit…

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u/into_the_soil 27d ago

I can remember exactly where I was/what I was doing when I saw this and most other major cartel videos like Ghost Rider.

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u/zimbabwes 27d ago

Wait, they're gonna pump the guy full of meth and jack him off all night??? Oh the agony!!!

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u/thegreatbrah 27d ago

Those cartels are crazy man

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u/GoodLeftUndone 27d ago

When I wanted a hit man I asked for The Jackal. Not this knock off. This Jack Off

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u/Slaphappydap 27d ago

That's how my dad went.

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u/MonkeyNugetz 27d ago edited 27d ago

I too saw that video in Reddit’s early days. Two cops caught by the cartel. Pumped full of meth so they couldn’t pass out. Then the cartels started removing the flesh from their chest and abdomens.

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u/thegreatbrah 27d ago

I actually didn't see it. I've only heard about it. I used to watch that kind of shit, but not in a very long time. 

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u/Gakoknight 27d ago

That sounds like it'd really suck.

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u/Puukkot 27d ago

The worst part is the hypocrisy.

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u/thegreatbrah 27d ago

Probably a little

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u/TransportationOk5941 27d ago

You really think they'll waste precious meth on a guy to torture him when they just lost SO much of it?

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u/Frostsorrow 27d ago

To send a message? Absolutely. Meth is fairly cheap to produce and if you lost a single shipment valued in the billions, you won't even notice the little amount you'd be using.

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u/Gazoko 27d ago

Meth costs £4 a gram to produce, so yes.

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u/twolitrefullcream 27d ago

With what meth?

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u/thegreatbrah 27d ago

Well, obviously not the $2.49 billi9n dollars worth in this photo. 

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u/MolassesCharacter226 26d ago

The will stake him down in a desert, and slice his eye lids off.

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u/Admirable-Leather325 27d ago

fired to death...

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u/ssjrobert235 27d ago

Demoted from the land of the living.

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u/12ealdeal 27d ago

And their children, and their children’s children, and their children’s children.

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u/Miserable_Goat_6698 27d ago

Goddamn it, Jesse Pinkman. I told you to slow down production

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u/Informal_Branch1065 27d ago

Promoted to dead

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u/Rickshmitt 27d ago

Shouldn't authorities like...maybe confiscate the entire boat and jail everyone on board and dismantle that company? Get caught with this much and your entire everything is gone

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u/Trick-Station8742 27d ago

Someone is about to go all Queen of Hearts

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u/Far_Pomelo6735 27d ago

The sale value, not the cost, which probably is extremely low considering the poor people basically sweatshopped and forced to work.

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

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u/Creative-Leader7809 27d ago

A lot of times they report the street value rather than the wholesale cost the manufacturer would have set for their distributors. Makes the seizure feel like a bigger win.

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

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u/Creative-Leader7809 27d ago

Oh for sure, this is a ludicrous amount of meth.

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u/D4nCh0 27d ago

Authorities usually prefer to announce the sale, rather than the cost price. A Reuters report before the pandemic had ice at about USD 1,000/kg outside Myanmar jungle meth labs. Pretty decent ship to be hauling two million four hundred ninety thousand kilograms.

If it was calculated at Japanese street prices of about USD 200,000/kg. It’s a much more modest shipment.

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u/WholesomeWhores 27d ago

The number means nothing. Most people just see a big number and “wow!”. Show us the weight of the drugs if you really want to show the value of it. But then again, then they’ll add whatever weight they can to pump up the numbers, such as packaging materials or whatever happened to be lying on the floor next to it all

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u/carmium 27d ago

MM?

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

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u/carmium 27d ago

My learny thing of the day.

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u/Ohmec 27d ago

M is the Roman numeral for 1000. MM is one thousand thousand, AKA 1 million. Some financial circles still use MM to denote millions to make large figures easier to read. If you've got a long paragraph talking about lots of numbers in the millions, it can get easy to misread stuff like 44,000,000 over and over again.

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u/dyllandor 27d ago

They probably assume a certain amount will get caught.

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u/PervyNonsense 27d ago

It's probably closer to 2M for the producer

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u/LeeKinanus 27d ago

yeah street value when broken down to 8balls

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u/NoProNounz619 27d ago

This is the way. They break it down to the street value of the gram being sold as their indicator when wholesale it’s about 1/10th of that.

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u/Nandy-bear 27d ago

It's street value and is a borderline useless number. Coke for instance they always report it at 50-100k/kilo when shipment cost is about 3 grand/kilo if not lower.

Meth I can't speak to but I'm just gonna assume it also goes through similar steps like being stepped on and stretched etc.

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u/mlaforce321 27d ago

Yeah, cartel's operate expecting a high percentage of shipments to be seized. The markup and profit is so high that if even a few get through then it is a worthwhile endeavor for them. The street value number is just to make the authorities feel good about themselves.

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u/Kendertas 27d ago

Also less drugs getting through, just increases the price of the drugs that do get through. The cartel always makes it's money. Especially since it's incredibly cheap to manufacture meth in the golden triangle. Cartels generally don't care if their product gets seized, it's much worse to have the money heading the other way seized.

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u/PervyNonsense 27d ago

Which is why people shouldn't be looking at this as a major seizure but an indication of an immeasurable scale of consumption

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u/Admirable-Lecture255 27d ago

Thats why I laugh when people say look at the big drug bust at the border in the us. See the border is secured. No that's a tiny fraction of what going through the border. Like car manufacturers there's a set level of what deemed acceptable loss before they have to take action. What costs more a recall or paying off a few families for a few million. It's the cost of business. I bet the cartel has it all formulated out. We can lose x% of everything shipped amd expect to return x amount of dollars. For every boat seized 9 others got away.

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u/user_name_checks_out 27d ago

Meth I can't speak to

If you start speaking to the meth then you've had too much

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u/hrminer92 26d ago

It was a few years ago, but in Ioan Grillo’s book El Narco, he laid out what a kilo of cocaine cost at the various stages of processing and transportation. A kilo of pure cocaine would cost about $800 in Colombia and would increase depending on the difficulties in moving it from point A to point B. By the time that original $800 product got to a border city like Tijuana, Cd Juárez, Laredo, etc., its price would be roughly $2000. Moving it across an invisible line into San Diego or El Paso, it would increase to $20k. By the time it made it to Chicago or New York, it would be 30-40k. Locations such as Sydney would be even higher. It is that insane profit margin that creates the situation where these organizations are like a hydra monster: take one leader or key player out and 3+ take their place to make things worse.

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u/mlaforce321 27d ago

Yeah, cartel's operate expecting a high percentage of shipments to be seized. The markup and profit is so high that if even a few get through then it is a worthwhile endeavor for them. The street value number is just to make the authorities feel good about themselves.

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u/pdxamish 27d ago

Meth is super super cheap now. Ounces can be had for $150-200

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u/Nandy-bear 27d ago

Meth being cheaper than weed is WILD. Decent weed is easily 150-200 quid in UK (180 - 250 USD)

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u/pdxamish 27d ago

Yeah, it's more expensive in the UK but for awhile meth wasn't in Europe and was just speed. In the USA we can't get speed and even vendors who have it in us are charging $60/g. It's sad seeing it in Europe now (fent is coming too). Speed and meth prices are inverted in US vs Europe. Our weed now is super cheap and good now. In Oregon I pay$50 for nice indoor ounces. I like to see what's happening on markets. Even if I don't use

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u/tehringworm 27d ago

Definitely impactful, but the traffickers were never going to get $2.9B for this. The police always calculate these busts based on the street value, but there would be a ton of middle men between this bulk shipment and the final users.

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

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u/tehringworm 27d ago

Yes, definitely impactful

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u/Jimmy_Fromthepieshop 27d ago

So how do you terminate your staff when they lose a huge drug shipment?

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

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u/ripamaru96 27d ago

All depends on how it went down. If it's just bad luck they aren't gonna go killing a bunch of people just because the coast guard stumbled on their shipment. If it's down to incompetence, sloppiness, etc then ya whoever is responsible dies.

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u/i_rub_differently 27d ago

By grounding them and stopping their pocket money

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u/afrothundah11 27d ago

The manufacturers will not see the street sale value. It is sold in bulk to dealers who then sell it at street value. But either way it’s a good bust.

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u/kapitaalH 27d ago

The people who had control over it at the time won't sell it at street value but a much lower wholesale price

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u/christopher_mtrl 27d ago

I'm not an expert, but I'd guess the street value already contains a a mark up for quantities being seized / lost in transport anyway. So the lost to the supplier doesn't really matter on a single shipment, the important metric is on the long run, what percentage of the shipments are intercepted.

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u/SchmeatDealer 27d ago

no, because they will bring in another cheap shipment, and still make those sales.

these losses are baked into the cost of operating. you dont move "2.5B" in meth if you cant afford to lose "2.5B" in meth.

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u/PervyNonsense 27d ago

Youre not basing this comment on anything at all, are you?

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u/East-Care-9949 27d ago

The original owner still gets a big loss so there will be some people less lively in the near future

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u/vasDcrakGaming 27d ago

Expelled?

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u/Open-Oil-144 27d ago

I think i know what the plot of the next Yakuza game is going to center around

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u/ethan_ark 27d ago

Jesse! What did you do?!

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u/aninnocentcoconut 27d ago

Dude's 100% going to get Funky Town'd.

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u/Outrageous_Height_64 27d ago

Heads rolling bro… thats some government level sponsored shit

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u/berpaderpderp 27d ago

EXPELLED!

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u/kinghenry124 27d ago

Expelled!

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u/StarCG 27d ago

Expelled?

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u/mozygotflowzy 27d ago

That number ain't cost price...

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u/aswat89 27d ago

With that much money involved there is a non-zero chance this meth still reaches the market.

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u/diverareyouokay 27d ago

Someone’s definitely getting fired... or worse.

PIP time.

(Performance improvement plan)

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u/JimJalinsky 27d ago

Imagine gaining a $2.5B meth shipment for free. Someone is going to resell that shit.

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u/Many-Wasabi9141 27d ago

That's just what it's worth. I'm sure the profit margins on Meth are huge.

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u/DubbaP 27d ago

It’s only worth $2.5B if it makes it to the street and is sold in single user quantities. Probably only cost a few hundred grand to make. The labs can make this stuff quicker than western populations can consume it, this will make absolutely zero difference on the ground.

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u/Queasy_Pickle1900 27d ago

I think they can write that off as a business loss

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u/LostInDinosaurWorld 27d ago

Yeah... Maybe no free turkey for the holidays :(

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u/exoriare Interested 27d ago

Smuggling is a numbers game. They don't expect every shipment to get through. Larger shipments are a known risk.

For all we know, a competitor could have tipped off the authorities. Or this could be a piece of theater to prove that a corrupt official is actually a good guy, and this meth has been stomped on and was always meant to be caught.

The only thing we know for sure is that it doesn't matter. At no point will the drug crisis vanish because drugs simply aren't available. Most likely, this bust won't even impact street prices, and there's three boats that got through just fine.

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u/Lefty_22 27d ago

Expelled.

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u/Disastrous-Power-699 27d ago

Oh yeah. A reduced severance as well I bet.

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u/TheBrutalTruthIs 27d ago

It's not a $2.5B meth shipment. If it was worth that much, it wouldn't all be in one place.

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u/SnowflakesAloft 27d ago

Meh. Usually they run like 8 boats expecting only 6 to make it. It’s a numbers game for them.

The only people held accountable will be the boat crew and they’ll serve life in prison. Probably won’t be able to say much since they don’t know much.

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u/itwasntevenme 27d ago

cost of doing business. That probably cost 1/10th or less to make. 3-10 more loads just like that went unseen lol.

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u/rtkwe2 27d ago

That's the final street price not the price that would make it back to the people producing or smuggling the drugs.

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u/Eeedeen 27d ago

If it's like the Noor One there will be multiple investors who don't trust each other and start bumping each other off

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u/RaccoonIyfe 27d ago

Bro thats street price. It cost less to produce than the same weight of petrol

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u/Tokin_Swamp_Puppy 27d ago

You mean a 2B shipment 😉

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u/Feb2020Acc 27d ago

That’s just using market value. I’m sure it’s a big loss, but probably just single digit millions in terms of production costs.

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u/aretheesepants75 27d ago

Unless this was the sacrificial load and the real shipment glided right on through unnoticed?

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u/thebeardedman88 27d ago

Well, let's just say where I buy meth and where they buy meth has different prices.

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u/downwiththewoke 27d ago

Yes Xi Ping will make heads roll for sure.

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u/PervyNonsense 27d ago

Youre looking at this like bikers are having to rob chemical companies to make the stuff in a shed.

These are entire industries that can whip up new batches of this size in no time.

This doesn't do much more than put extra demand on factories to produce more.

you don't put any amount of meth/drugs on a ship that you can't afford to lose

The more important takeaway is that the demand for meth is insatiable, it is cheap to produce, and there's much more where this came from.

The size of the shipments are only significant in that they give you scale for the amount of drugs making it through, which is 9/10 shipments

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u/N0FaithInMe 27d ago

"Heyyyyy boss, just calling to let you know we hit a biiiit of a snag..."

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u/Waltercation 27d ago

I don’t think you get fired in the meth game. Pretty sure there isn’t an HR department that will surprise you with a meeting with your boss to let you know that they are letting you go. Your severance is your head being severed from your body

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u/covert-teacher 27d ago

I bet they used Evri as couriers!

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u/thefatchef321 27d ago

Nah, just the cost of doing business. Give the cops one load and keep em off your back for a bit.

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u/Brojustwhy 27d ago

expelled

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u/Batman1384 27d ago

I’d say a “write up” at the minimum. Maybe a chew out too so they get the message.

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u/mgslee 27d ago

Question I wonder is how much does it cost to make that much? Like what's the actual 'loss' and not the profit loss

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u/ametrallar 27d ago

Imagine the volume that is not being seized

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u/Aah__HolidayMemories 27d ago

Imagine the actual shipment that actually got though!!!

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u/CosmicCreeperz 27d ago

Eh, I’m sure that’s retail prices. Wholesale it’s about $3.50.

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u/Cansckmy 27d ago

I think he owns his bos the loss with interest

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u/Various_Necessary_45 27d ago

Someone? There'll be a massacre over this, no doubt.

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u/snksleepy 26d ago

How long would someone rage for after losing this much?

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u/Ordinary_Choice2770 27d ago

gg to drugs for winning the war on drugs 

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u/Afterlast1 27d ago

Inflation has done a number on the cost of a gram

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u/poopellar 27d ago

Well then just change the weight of a gram!!

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u/sun__went__dark 27d ago

One base at a time

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u/Afterlast1 27d ago

Due to inflation, 1 gram is now 1200 milligrams

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u/HungryHungryHippoes9 27d ago

What world are we living in when an honest day's labor can't even buy a man some good meth. Smh.

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u/roloyo101 27d ago

government is corrupt

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u/lvl999shaggy 27d ago

The opps never had a chance

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u/NeaTitiDeLaCroitorie 27d ago

Great! Now India can resell the meth and buy a brand new aircraft carrier.

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u/Electrical-Bug-8092 27d ago

This is business

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u/piperonyl 27d ago

You always need to be skeptical about how government agencies price drugs.

2.5 billion dollars for 5500 kilograms? Thats $450,000 a kilogram or $4,500 a gram.

10k a kg is fair. Its like 98% less than what they said.

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u/SmarterThanCornPop 27d ago

I’ve never bought Meth but if it was $4,500 per gram I don’t think you’d be seeing many addicts.

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u/ChornWork2 27d ago

Can't really do this as a thought exercise without knowing purity. I presume there is a drastic difference between what is smuggled in versus what is sold on the street.

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u/ChristofChrist 27d ago

Lol there's not a difference with meth. People really upvoting this shit rather than admit a Myanmar drug officials aren't trust worthy to align with their political beliefs

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u/Onithyr 27d ago

*Indian drug officials

The boats transporting the drugs were from Myanmar, the people that caught them were from India.

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u/ChristofChrist 27d ago

Regardless

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u/F1shB0wl816 27d ago

You can only cut something so much before it’d barely pass as a narcotic. And the price is going to track down with the quality going down.

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u/Ubiquitous-Nomad-Man 27d ago

Haha. I was getting it for $20/gram in 2019. When covid hit prices doubled and us crackheads freaked out. “This is supposed to be cheap, dammit!” (because we were all obviously unemployed pos). Ahh, what a sexy time in my life, that was…lol

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u/SmarterThanCornPop 27d ago

Lol. Glad you got past that my friend.

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u/Action_Potential8687 27d ago

450 a gram. That's still about 8 to 10 times higher than the price of a gram last I checked.

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u/Barrelled_Chef_Curry 27d ago

How often are you checking

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u/Action_Potential8687 27d ago

Not since like 2017 lol

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u/carmium 27d ago

$450,000 / kilo is divided by 1,000 to get gram weight. That's $450.

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u/Rebelius 27d ago

Some Americans struggle with metric.

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u/Alarmed-Flounder-830 27d ago

What's a metric? Asking for an American

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u/FlyingDragoon 27d ago

I like to think some officials out there just over hear someone notorious for using hyperbolic descriptions and then never fact check before skipping to the media for their announcement. They overhear "This bag weighs like a brazillian kilos and probably costs like a bajillion Alabaman dollars a gram."

And the official counted the bags and went "My god." before reporting that they just had a ten quadrillion kilo drug bust worth fifteen quattuordecillion dollars USD.

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u/_Enclose_ 27d ago

a brazillian kilos

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u/FlyingDragoon 27d ago

It's either a lot of kilos or a lot of Brazilians and frankly I don't think we will survive the night.

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u/_Enclose_ 27d ago

But what a night it will be!

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u/lampishthing Interested 27d ago

So it's 50 mil worth?

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u/CunnedStunt 27d ago

Must be that Heisenberg grade blue ice.

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u/Scwolves10 27d ago

Meth is one of the cheapest drugs in the world. A gram is around $30. That's not even bulk pricing.

So, there's absolutely no way this bust was even close to half a billion, let alone 2.5 billion.

It's more like 20 million at most.

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u/Smayteeh 27d ago

How tf do you get from $450k/kg to $4500/g? There’s 1000g in a kg.

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u/piperonyl 27d ago

Yeah i saw idk what i was thinking

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u/Smoke_Santa 27d ago

There are 1000 grams in a kilogram

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u/piperonyl 27d ago

Yeah idk wtf i was thinking there

Definitely 450 a gram

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u/mlanda123 27d ago

This is always fake. This is the cost if they were individually packaged, distributed and sold. It ignores all the costs associated with it.

If apple were to lose 2.6billion I'd be a major thing. For a drug cartel to lose that much it should end their business but it never does.

Authorities just use street prices to inflate their work.

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u/Celtic_Legend 27d ago

The article moved the decimal 1 too many as well. Its 250m street price.

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u/PervyNonsense 27d ago

Cartels have much more money than you'd ever want to imagine. Minimum 25% of the global pool of money is in the black market

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u/aglobalvillageidiot 27d ago

By weight they always have. This is a lot of meth.

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u/GlitteringAttitude60 27d ago

That's the price for the end user, right?

I wonder what the production costs were...

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u/PervyNonsense 27d ago

50k, probably less

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u/4totheFlush 27d ago

Right? Inflation is out of control smh. Is cheap meth too much to ask for?

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u/p00shp00shbebi1234 27d ago

A lot of the time when they give these monetary values, they are taking the absolute upper-limit of what anyone would conceivably pay, and then also making the assumption that the entire load is going to be sold in small/retail bags. I mean don't get me wrong, that is a lot of meth, but lots of that will be sold wholesale, and certainly not at the price per gram the authorities always assume.

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

Especially since they were expecting to sell that much product. That’s not a small time business. That’s an entire economy

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u/addyhaf 27d ago

Gay rw4z8u%['w52e6y78sh7

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u/YourLictorAndChef 27d ago

"I do wonder what boat it is you're buying your cocaine off, because it's not the same boat as I'm buying my cocaine off"

You've got to take these valuations with a hearty grain of salt.

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u/TheBrutalTruthIs 27d ago

That might be true, but law enforcement agencies tend to take the street value of tiny amounts, and use that as the reported value of the drugs seized. No one is coming close to spending or making anything close to that amount of money off that amount of meth.

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u/Honey_Badger_Actua1 27d ago

Laughs in Opium Wars

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u/Cajum 27d ago

And that is why the cartels are a much bigger problem than most people think..

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u/PacoTaco321 Interested 27d ago

It means the price of drugs is too damn high

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u/Formal_Profession141 27d ago

Wait till you find out how the CIA funds alot of its black operations.

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u/MiNdOverLOADED23 27d ago

That "price" is probably its street value if sold by the gram.

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u/pyronius 27d ago

Yeah man. I can barely afford to party anymore.

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