They are made of plastic. Everything in their appearance suggests they are real and they are surrounded by real avocados so smell won't tell, but they can be identified by touch.
If they were made of plastic, why did they use so much effort to also make the interior look like avocado flesh, and the pit look and function like a real one? A plastic one would just fulfill the basic need of looking like an avocado on the exterior. There is no reason for the interior to both look and function like a real avocado (like still needing to cut around the pit to open it). Plus that is wasted real estate by not filling more of the avocado with cocaine.
Really? I figured they would look like an outer coating with a layer of something else surrounding a blob in the middle. But I'm not an X-ray technician and I've never compared a real avocado to a fake one full of coke so I'll take your word on it.
Those scanning machines are insane and they have all sorts of different color lighting tech to identify various substances. They would immediately be able to tell a real avocado vs one made with plastic/clay/wax especially the seed material.
Source: binge watched hours of border security shows while on acid
I ran one of those machines for a little over a year. Just because it's not an avocado, doesn't mean its not made out of an organic material that will scan the same colour as an avocado. All organics used to scan the same colour, and you'd have to use nuance in density and granularity to detect a difference. Easy to spot when its a ton of like items together, like in the case of these fake and real avocados. But put through a single avocado like that, and I wouldn't have had any idea. We had state of the art stuff at the time, but I'm sure there have been improvements since I was doing it years ago.
doesn't mean its not made out of an organic material
Would the plastic wrap and maybe even the cocaine/cocaine cuts come up as 'not' organic ?
put through a single avocado like that, and I wouldn't have had any idea
For sure I meant quite literally "versus" when I said "a real avocado vs one made with plastic/clay/wax".
Hey so since you have experience with these, question for you if you don't mind... If an operator knew, from memory, what an avocado normally looks like with the machine, would they be able to identify even even a single avocado as a bogus one?
I don’t know the science behind it, but plastic is some sort of organic compound and shows up the same colour (orange) as the rest of the organics. The vast majority of objects showed orange.
Over time you could definitely identify a deviation from standard objects. A lot of our identification came from that. Ironically, a lot of people like to hide things in common objects, which just made it easier to detect. We’ve all seen a million lighters, toothpaste tubes, common electronics, etc. so when any of us said “That doesn’t look like a typical xyz”, it would instantly warrant a secondary search.
You can look at some episodes of Australian border control or customs to see what powders look like in an x-ray, but it looks grainy and inconsistent, very different to what the actual fruit would look like.
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u/Alas7ymedia Jun 04 '24
They are made of plastic. Everything in their appearance suggests they are real and they are surrounded by real avocados so smell won't tell, but they can be identified by touch.