Fiction, Smuggling, and Research
I'm gonna be on a list. I'm gonna be on such a list.
Looks around. I'm a writer! Really, this is for writing.
Sigh. Do you think they heard that bit? Well, ok...
We were having a conversation at work the other day, and it came up that one of us, who formerly worked for a detergent company, had smuggled 'white powder' across the border at one point. It was totally innocuous, but... He'd been asked by his boss to bring back from Mexico a few samples of ingredients that were being used to produce their product. My now-colleague looked at his boss and asked 'are you really asking me to bring white powder back across the border in my luggage?' After some thought, what they came up with were the little boxes of detergent like you'd get at the laundromat. My colleague emptied those, filled them with detergent components rather than the original detergent, and safely got them home again without any questions asked.
I thought of that this morning when I came across an article about a DEA raid on a drug company. The details are a bit murky, but it seems they had been importing more than standards and reagents into the country. What isn't clear is if they were, er, selling to other than laboratories, or if they simply hadn't filled out the proper paperwork in order to import and sell controlled substance. They had, evidently, been conducting business like this for at least five years. Talk about a cast-iron way to smuggle things across borders. Simply mix it in with all the normal oddities you would find in most laboratories.
A while back I'd been watching, as part of my research for Tanager's Fledglings, a show on Australian customs and how they operate in an airport setting (I found this on Netflix, but can't recall the title at the moment). It was fascinating to see how they look for illicit goods, how much they find, how stupid people are, and then you start to wonder what they are missing. I was interested as I was writing about space stations, and plotting how customs might work on a restricted station far from another planet. Also, technology changes, so I was trying to extrapolate from what we do now, to what we might do then. Some things, though, don't change at all. Human nature is going to remain much the same then, as it is now. Watching the people is almost as revealing as using 'sniffers' be they dog or futuristic cyborgs.
It's not difficult to do this research, really. Due to the 'War on Drugs' it's been a cultural fascination for nearly a hundred years now. Yes, that predates the term, but reality is that we've been fearing the effects of illicit substances for at least that long. There are tv shows, books, articles... there's no excuse for writing about this dark aspect of our society, and the criminals who dwell there, without having done a modicum of research on it. And yet, you'll find fiction that incorporates the concept of drugs and smuggling, without having done that research, and it's glaringly obvious and bad. I know there are a lot of writers out there churning schlock out just to make a quick buck, but really. It's incredibly easy to spend a few hours and get as much as you'd need for, say, a romance with crime/mystery subplot. If you want to write an actual procedural, it would take longer, of course.
Me, I have a vanilla, law-abiding mind. If I want to write effective mysteries, or incorporate smuggling into my subplots, I have to research methods. For that matter, I like to research cases and criminology, not only for my amusement, but because no matter how improbable it might seem, there's probably been some idiot who has actually done it. For the stupider versions, check out Peter Grant's blog and his Doofuses (Doofi? not sure what that plural should be). I find I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts at work. It's all fodder for the mill.
So, in short, do your research. Don't make your reader hurl your book in disgust. Take some time to get it right! But don't actually try to smuggle drugs. That would be stupider than writing a idiotic book.