Know your onions: US customs find US$3 million of meth disguised as vegetables

Smugglers disguised US$3 million of methamphetamine as onions and tried to get the drugs into the US in a shipment of vegetables, customs officers said.

A trailer loaded with the pungent bulbs was stopped as it crossed from Mexico when a drug dog was alerted by a strange smell.

In among the tens of thousands of regular onions, border agents found almost 1,200 packages of methampetamine, shaped into small globes with a white covering and apparently intended to look like the vegetable.

“This was not only a clever attempt to try and smuggle in narcotics, one I haven’t seen before, but also time consuming to wrap narcotics into these small packages, designed to look like onions,” said Sidney Aki of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in San Diego.

“While we have certainly seen narcotics in produce before, it’s unusual for us to see this level of detail in the concealment,” he added.

The CBP say the 1,336 pounds (600kg) of methampetamine that they discovered in last week’s operation would have had a street value of US$2.9 million.

News of the onion bust came as the CBP revealed they had intercepted four pounds (2kg) of marijuana hidden inside boxes of Lucky Charms cereals that were headed from Kentucky to Britain.