"Roger, in Bangkok" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> asked a question
well outside my pay grade when he inquired thusly:
>Out of all the shipments globally in a year, just how high do you suppose
>the incidents of intentional vs, unintentional law breaking do you suppose
>there might be?
Well, now. If you include the commercial shipments worth
$billions, it's probably close to negligible. But it's certainly not
zero. Otherwise, why would there be 65 Plant Rescue Centers in the US
and its territories?
http://www.fws.gov/international/pdf/prc.pdf
They only cite statistics from 2002, but note that 281 plant
shipments were intercepted, including 10,127 plants- of which 7,702
were orchids. Of those 281 shipments, 280 went to plant rescue
centers; one shipment (consisting of one plant) was returned to the
country of export. One supposes this number has gone up on the basis
of better funding and (hopefully) training on the part of
interdiction personnel. It worked in the War on Drugs, after all; the
Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1970, and we've hardly had a
problem since then. Nixon declared War on Cancer in 1971, so I expect
we'll have a cure for that soon, too.
Whether the individuals purchasing these plants were
intentionally breaking the law when they did so is unknown. When
someone clicks on a dig-em-up in a brown box from Asia, it's tough to
know whether either party has a full understanding of the Byzantine
laws, regulations, and perpetually unwritten rules of order to which
we mere mortals are left to interpret unaided. To borrow some of the
context above and to steal from P.J. O'Rourke, it's tough to tell
what impact the War on Drugs is having on crime because it's tough to
get a urine sample from a crack addict while he's sticking up a 7-11.
Warning: if some of the sarcasm included here went over your
head, do not attempt to reach for it without proper supplementation
with oxygen. No semblance between crack addicts and online purchases
of dig-em-up paphs is implied, but it should be.
Cheers,
-AJHicks
Chandler, AZ
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