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25 packages of cocaine worth more than $1 million were found washed up on a beach in the Florida Keys after being blown there by Tropical Storm Debby.
Debby, a Category 1 hurricane when it made landfall, used its sustained winds of at least 74 miles per hour to reveal the around 70 pounds of cocaine to a “good Samaritan” who ended up reporting the drugs to authorities.
The packages of cocaine were wrapped in plastic and marked with a red arrow-shaped symbol on a black background.
According to an email reply from Jeffrey Quiñones, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, to the New York Times, the drugs were found in Islamorada, a village in Monroe County.
Earlier this year, scuba divers found 25 similar packages of cocaine during a dive in 100 feet of water off the coast of Key Largo in Monroe County in Florida.
The 25 individually wrapped and sealed packages each weighed a kilogram and were marked with a blue “Nike SB” logo.
Cocaine washing up on Florida beaches is far from uncommon.
Last year, Tampa mayor Kelly Castor was on a family fishing trip in the Florida Keys when she caught 70 pounds of cocaine worth around $1.1 million.
That was the fifth time in the month of July alone that a large shipment of drugs was found floating in the ocean off the Florida Keys.
So much cocaine washes up on Florida shores, it has led researchers to begin investigating so called “Cocaine Sharks.”
To see if sharks would be affected by the cocaine that’s constantly floating in the waters off the coast of Florida, researchers rigged up some fake bales of cocaine to test how the sharks react last year.
What they discovered was that not only did the sharks take bites out of the bales, one of them dragged a bale off with it.