Emma Guinness
A Florida resident has proven themselves to be a good Samaritan after handing over 11 pounds of cocaine they found washed up on a beach.
The unidentified individual found the whopping sum of drugs on Daytona Beach, Florida, which has an estimated street value of more than $150,000.
The cocaine was found inside a suspicious looking package, as revealed on Twitter on 15 October by US Customs and Border Protection Miami Sector Chief Patrol Agent Walter N. Slosar.
He explained that on discovery, the large quantity of the drug was seized by border control.
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This is not the first time that large quantities of cocaine have recently washed up on the shoes of Florida.
Back in on August 2, the New York Post reported that 126 pounds worth of cocaine washed up the previous weekend in three separate Florida locations.
The Monroe County Sheriff's Office reported that one of the packages alone weighed 72 pounds, having been discovered in Tavernier.
Authorities were once again saved from having to get the drugs off the streets as local residents alerted them to the finds before they could make their way into the illegal drug trade.
"The large package contained multiple smaller packages tightly packed with black tape," spokesman Adam Linhardt said.
"Its contents field-tested positive for cocaine."
The other packages of cocaine were discovered in the Lower Keys and the Middle Keys.
The drugs in these discoveries had an estimated street value of $2 million.
But while these discoveries are shocking individually, they are just the tip of a much larger iceberg, with Newsweek reporting that 60,000 pounds of drugs were confiscated across the US in June alone.
There has been a long-standing problem with cocaine in Florida, in particular, and the National Drug Intelligence Center revealed that between 1997 and 2000, it was the leading cause of hospital admissions compared to any other illegal drug.
While this eventually changed to marijuana, there were 155 hospitalisations from cocaine for every 100K people in Florida in 2003 compared to 104 admissions for the same number nationwide.