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A comment on Inside Job: How a Hacker Helped Cocaine Traffickers Infiltrate Europe's Ports. Parent comment

Re:Inside Job: How a Hacker Helped Cocaine Traffickers Infil... by Scoundreller on Monday December 04, 2023 @10:55AM (#38518805)
It’s almost all from sugarcane in Canada, crude juice is extracted in places like Brazil and refined in Canada.

You can chew out the sugar or cocaine if you like.

(I think coca needs an acid base extraction to get a crystalline form, but that’s straightforward chemistry at scale)

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Re:Inside Job: How a Hacker Helped Cocaine Traffickers Infil... by OfSanguineFire on Monday December 04, 2023 @12:17PM (#38520019)
Most sugar in my own backyard originates from beets, but I see I was wrong about it being most sugar worldwide. Wikipedia[0] gives a figure of 30% of world sugar for 2013.

If crude juice is extracted in Brazil and refined in Canada, I’m surprised that it is viewed as cost-effective to transport so much unneeded liquid by sea.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet

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Re:Inside Job: How a Hacker Helped Cocaine Traffickers Infil... by Scoundreller on Monday December 04, 2023 @01:56PM (#38521435)
I could be mistaken on the form of sea transit. I just know it gets refined in Canada (which also seems like a waste: why not refine at source?).

Sea transit is cheap, sugarcane grows better in the tropics than beets in cooler places. Harder to harvest below-ground stuff.

Canada used to subsidize/protect sugar beet producers (to keep them competitive), but largely got out of it.

Maybe that’s why we still refine it: because the plants still exist.

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