Creepy, Crawly Things Turn Up in Drug Searches

Cocaine and marijuana are still the major targets, but spiders and snakes are showing up in some contraband searches.

So are iguanas, desert tortoises and just about anything else that creeps or crawls, officials say.

Federal and state officials who patrol Arizona’s borders don’t keep tabs on their living hauls the way they keep a count of kilos and bales they seize, but consider the numbers in two recent cases:

* On July 28, 1987, the Border Patrol seized 3,000 iguanas and several hundred tarantulas that were being smuggled into the United States through Nogales, Mexico.

* On March 23, the Customs Service confiscated 1,600 tarantulas and 500 iguanas from a pickup truck as it tried to cross the border.

Found in Standard Checks

“We’re not seeing a vast amount cross the border,” says Tom McDermott, agent in charge for the customs office in Tucson. “It’s just in the course of our normal customs-type of exams.”

But Assistant U.S. Atty. Reese Bostwick, who is prosecuting Jorge Manuel Martinez-Quintero in the March 23 incident, says there is “a real market” out there for almost anything that is rare, even when it would make most people’s flesh crawl.

Bostwick, who handled wildlife cases for the Pima County attorney’s office before switching to the federal prosecutor’s office, recalls trailer home bedrooms where walls were lined with reptile cases and closets that held “canvas bags full of poisonous snakes.”

“To me, it’s not normal to sleep in your bedroom with all kinds of reptiles,” he says.

“There’s big bucks involved,” Bostwick added, saying tarantulas go for $1.25 each while Gila monsters can sell for $50 to $75 apiece and the endangered twin-spotted rattlesnake fetches $100 to $150.

Although traffic in endangered or protected species such as 18 types of iguanas is a special focus of such agencies as the Fish and Wildlife Service, even a common species can draw the attention of customs agents. That’s because federal smuggling laws require importers to declare their goods and pay tax, even if the goods are legal.

“Anytime you conceal something and bring it across the border and don’t declare it, you are violating a general smuggling statute,” McDermott says.

That’s true even when the item is duty free, he added, citing laws on declaring currency and jewels.

Smuggling of endangered species and their pelts was a bigger concern in the 1970s, but drugs provide a bigger margin of profit, and “it’s going to take you just as much room to smuggle in a tarantula” as a more-profitable amount of cocaine, he adds.

Over the years, customs agents “run across every type of commodity conceivable,” from pre-Columbian artifacts to bull semen, McDermott says.

Surprise Boa Constrictors

Still, officers tend to “jump back a few feet” when they open a box that looks as though it could contain drugs but find a boa constrictor, says Assistant Chief Ron Moser of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector.

Hunting a protected species not only devastates the population but often also ruins the only habitat in which the species can live, Bostwick says.

And while the squeamish may think of a world with fewer spiders and snakes as a better place to live, other animals have provided useful medicines as scientists learned more about them, he adds.

“What if they find out venom from the two-spotted rattler is the only known cure for AIDS?” he asks.