A plane went down in a sugarcane field in the coastal Brazilian town of Coruripe. When authorities arrived, they found the wreckage and a deceased pilot, 46-year-old Australian businessman Timothy James Clark. They also found a stash of cocaine wrapped in plastic bricks, all stamped with the SpaceX logo.
Clark, a mining industry vet and registered pilot, somehow ended up dead in a plane registered to Zambia, full of designer cocaine in Brazil. The street value of the seized shipment was roughly $250,000, if you go by regional prices.
Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the first time drug dealers have used tech logos for street cred. Back in 2017, a Forbes report laid out how brands like Skype, TripAdvisor, and Tesla had their logos jacked to stamp ecstasy pills and powders. All a part of the grand tradition of shaping or marketing illicit drugs in the logos and designs of well-known brands.
Brazilian Authorities Seize 180 Kilos Of ‘SpaceX’ Cocaine
It seems unlikely that the Elon Musk-owned rocket and space flight company SpaceX is now suddenly in the cocaine business, thou1gh I wouldn’t put it past him. The much more likely explanation aligns with the same reason why some tabs of ecstasy come shaped like well-known pop cultural figures like Homer Simpson: because it’s dumb.
You see it a lot with ecstasy. Whatever technology that brought us children’s vitamins shaped like Fred Flintstone also brought us ecstasy shaped like, oh, say, Homer Simpson or a Minion.
Here’s an article from August 2023 warning parents in the Westlake, Ohio, area of narcotics shaped like cartoon characters and popular brands, including Homer Simpson, Bart Simpson, and the Netflix logo.
SpaceX is the latest in a long line of brands to reach the honorable heights of being co-opted by drug cartels to be used as unofficial branding. This one, at least, makes some kind of sense. You can almost hear the jittery dealer holding a little baggie of coke between their index and middle finger as they assure you that “this s**t is rocket fuel, baby! It’ll launch you into space!”
And then you’ll buy it on the promise that it will blast your brain deeper into the cosmos than anything before it. Still, all it’ll do is make false promises about colonizing Mars and immediately follow up with a series of disastrous rocket launches.
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