As Traffic Movie Predicted, Cocaine is Now a Popular Molding Material

Remember the scene in Traffic in which Catherine Zeta-Jones, playing the wife of an imprisoned dealer, negotiates an exclusive deal to provide a Mexican druglord with seeming toys manufactured from cocaine? As the druglord watches, she dissolves a toy and sets up a line of coke, but refuses to partake because she's pregnant.

Such drug-dealing might have seemed a bit fantastic when the critically acclaimed movie was released in 2000. But it was based on reality then, according to the Los Angeles Times. And it's apparently becoming commonplace now, according to the London Times.

Spanish authorities recently seized a 44-pound dinner service in which all 42 of the plates, bowls, cups, saucers and other pieces were made of compressed cocaine, the British newspaper reports.

Another enterprising drug-smuggling effort foiled by Spanish police several weeks ago involved a 66-year-old Chilean man wearing a "cast" made of cocaine, the Times writes. His leg was in fact broken, X-rays showed, and, a police spokesman says, “investigators are examining the possibility that these injuries were brought about voluntarily ... to facilitate trafficking through security checks.”