Blow up: how half a tonne of cocaine transformed the life of an island

Around midday on 6 June 2001, locals from Pilar da Bretanha, a parish on the northwestern tip of the Atlantic island São Miguel, saw a white yacht, about 40 feet long, drifting aimlessly near the area’s sheer cliffs. The sailor navigated the yacht to a cave near Pilar da Bretanha and began offloading the cocaine, which was bound with plastic and rubber in hundreds of packages the size of building bricks. A police officer told me the story of a man nicknamed Joaninha, or Ladybird, who had hooked himself up to a drip of cocaine and water and sat in his house getting high for days.

Source: www.theguardian.com