Beach fans along Florida’s Panhandle have been warned not to touch “suspecting packages” that will see them coming out of the water.
Last Sunday, Walton County beach visitors discovered 25 such packages and after careful inspections revealed that they were about $500,000 in cocaine bricks, the Walton County Sheriff’s Office said.
Photos shared by the agency on social media show that the package was vacuum packed and equipped with images of the cartoon outlaw Yosemite Sam.
The bricks were confiscated by the sheriff’s office and “logged in to the evidence,” officials said.
![These are cocaine bricks washed down on the beaches of the Panhandle in Florida.](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 620 388"/%3E "These are cocaine bricks washed down on the beaches of the Panhandle in Florida.")
“If you come across any square figure while enjoying our beautiful beach, call us immediately and don’t touch any suspicious packages. The contents can be extremely harmful,” the Sheriff’s Office said.
Details of who discovered that the bricks had not been released did not speculate on how the package was in the water.
“Given Florida’s long history as a gateway to drug smuggling, it is likely that the drug was abandoned while being transported to the US from the Caribbean or Cuba.”
While the crew may have fired out to avoid arrest, it is also known that drug gangs drop cocaine into the ocean “who are picked up by small boats and taken to the coast.”
Walton County is about 130 miles by car west of Tallahassee.
