They look for new and different ways to transport and distribute their illegal drugs. Their innovative abilities are keys to how successful they will be and how much wealth they accumulate. Therefore, drug trafficking organizations will exploit any means possible to safeguard their drug shipments from law enforcement detection, and they do so without any regard to the wake of destruction that drug use and abuse creates. Drug trafficking organizations have learned to be compartmentalized for security reasons. This is to ensure that no individual member, if arrested, will have knowledge of the entire inner workings of the organization.
Drug traffickers recognize that the transportation of drugs is the weakest link in the drug chain.
Typically, drugs are most vulnerable to detection when they are transported from one location to another. This is largely due to the fact that traffickers utilize couriers who employ a variety of methods in an attempt to avoid detection or suspicion by law enforcement. However, it is just this type of habitual activity that trained law enforcement agents and officers have learned to look for, which ultimately gives rise to suspicion. In addition, though a drug courier s knowledge of the entire drug trafficking organization may be limited, such limited information is vulnerable to a variety of investigative methods used to target and dismantle the entire drug trafficking organization. As a result of aggressive, proactive law enforcement operations, these drug trafficking organizations have resorted to a number of methods and trends in order to minimize their exposure to law enforcement.