Out of two issues

I am confronted with 2 issues. The first one passed my eyes a few days ago. It came from Arab News (at https://arab.news/946db) where we are given ‘Saudi authorities seize 3.8 million amphetamine tablets in Riyadh’. This is the second event in a year and my doubts are increasing. Not on the Saudi government. What drug dealer ships in one go enough tablets to make over 10% of a population an addict? Weirdly apart from having no knowledge in this, the little knowledge I have comes from a video game named Elite. There we could ‘smuggle’ decently safe 2% of the cargo as narcotics. As such you could ‘decently’ safe smuggle up to 500Kg in a 20 ton carbo haul. There is another matter. This is either done by a really stupid Saudi (with a lot more money than common sense) or this is something else. I personally belief that this is something else. We see the ‘market’ value, but the people with other interests will merely have the manufacturing costs as an expense. 

You see, if this was a real exercise, it would have made sense to merely smuggle 0.1% of that haul per shipping and it would most likely go right, as such I personally feel that these people were always going to get caught, especially in a nation like Saudi Arabia, a nation with zero tolerance towards narcotics. 

Then the quote “Eleven defendants involved in these activities were arrested. They include seven residents of Syrian nationality, one resident of Nepalese nationality, and three citizens in Makkah, Riyadh, Qassim, Hail and Al-Jawf.” My personal belief is that a government hostile to Saudi Arabia is trying to make Saudi Arabia look bad. This might account for the 7 Syrians and one Nepalese. At that point I wonder how the remaining three were EXACTLY involved. Consider that this is a highly volatile situation. Would YOU trust foreigners to make you run such a risk on you? This is not about foreigners, but lets face it, Saudi’s are for all the right reasons not the most trusting in the world and I expect that the Nepalese person might not be Islamic. Too many red flags are going up and I cannot shake them. 

I wonder what deep investigations with something like Palantir Gotham (if it is still called that) would uncover. My thoughts go towards the manufacturer, 3.8 million tablets is (according to some) set to a manufacturing cost of $3 per tablet. So someone handed over $12 million with a 99% certainty to get caught. It does not make sense, $12,000,000 leaves a trail. There is close to no way that it remains invisible, as such Palantir Gotham is one solution to get somewhere. The reason for thinking in this direction is that this is the second catch within a year. Someone has too much money and someone else acquired a lot of money, way more than some hauls. The largest bust in America was a year ago and involved a little over 650,000 pills. That in a nation with over 300,000,000 people makes ‘sense’, still it was a lot, so to see over 600% in a nation with only 10% of that population makes absolutely no sense at all to me. So, I am in a setting where I believe that someone is out there making Saudi Arabia look bad. I have no idea who, or why. My blinkers make me think the only direct (former) enemy is Iran, but that has no foundation in evidence of any kind, merely a gut feeling. But someone was willing to spend well over 10 million twice over to get that done, it is more than I will ever make in a lifetime (unless Amazon, Kingdom Holdings or Tencent Technologies buys my IP). And all this is based on the purity being average, if these pills were more pure, the price tag changes a lot. 

Enjoy the day before Halloween.