With drug and narcotic smuggling on the rise, it should definitely not come as a surprise to any of us that a Utah man was recently convicted of trying to smuggle African ‘Khat’ to the United States of America. He was held guilty of conspiring to import hundreds of pounds of this African drug to the mainland and got sentenced to 18 months behind bars for his effort.

Of course, we all think that he is pretty dumb, but that aside, how on earth did he think that we was going to get away with it? He was not even taking the time to smuggle it into the country but had imported it in the guise of ’spices’. Being an import item, it would have been subjected to a myriad number of tests including a visual inspection by the customs officials themselves.

khat is an African plant, whose green leaves, when chewed tend to give one a high and are categorized as a drug. Most of the people in east Africa chew Khat in one form or the other. The Utah man must have thought that there would be a great demand for this amongst the African immigrants in Utah and so decided to import it. The Khat was all chopped up and flown to the United States and from there to Utah by way of a container truck. The customs officials in Utah decided to take a closer look at this huge consignment of Spices and were shocked to discover that it was actually a drug shipment marked to the Holladay residence. It must have been really insulting to the customs officials in Salt lake city to have their intelligence underestimated by a person who thought that he could legally import drugs into this country.