Smugglers will try anything won’t they? The latest interesting smuggling attempt involves bugs as mules.

Fortunately the smugglers attempt wasn’t successful.

A customs officer in the Netherlands too a close look at a consignment of more than 100 larger dead beetles that had been send from Peru and discovered that cocaine had been stashed inside them.

“We see a lot of things, but this was a first for us,” customs spokesman Kees Nanninga said.

“It looked like they were cut open, the drugs hidden in their backs and then they were glued back together again,” he said.

In total the insects held about 10 ounces of cocaine said to be worth about $11,000.

An interesting police chase took place last week near the town of Dussen Amsterdam last week. A Dutch farmer couldn’t believe his eyes as he watched a car drive through his corn fields only to be joined by two police vehicles in hot pursuit. A helicopter also joined in the chase.

The drive of the car was under the influence of cocaine as he drove wildly through the field.

The 35 year old man was eventually cornered after his vehicle careened into a neighboring orchard and crashed into a ditch.

“Shoot out two tyres… then the problem is solved,” irate farmer Ad Van Schendel told police, according to the Brabants Dagblad newspaper.

Damage to the cornfield was estimated at 7,000-8,000 euros (4,700-5,380 pounds).

At the beginning of March a van carrying illicit cargo in Amsterdam crashed and scattered it across the road. Three tonnes of hashish went up in smoke when the Dutch authorities incinerated the illicit cargo from the crashed van.

Detectives hunted for the van’s driver and passenger who fled the scene after the accident. It’s unknown if the occupants were injured. It’s estimated that the pair left behind about $23.5 million dollars worth of goods including the van. Police were busy tracing the van’s ownership but feared that it might have been stolen or leased.

The accident happened during the morning rush hour on a highway outside of the town of Avenhorn, about 30 kilometres north of Amsterdam.

The driver lost control of the vehicle as he or she was heading towards Amsterdam. Witnesses watched the van hit a barrier, flip and crash into another car before coming to a rest. Packages of hash were strewn over the area, and hundreds more were found stacked on wooden pallets in the van.

Marijuana and hash are technically illegal in the Netherlands, but under the country’s tolerance policy, police do not arrest anybody for possession of small amounts. It is sold openly in licensed shops, which, paradoxically, have no way of legally acquiring their chief product.

Last Friday a dutch journalist asked an Amsterdam court to convict him for eating chocolate. He believes that by eating chocolate he was benefiting from child slavery on cocoa farms on the Ivory Coast.

Teun Van de Keuken, 35, is seeking a jail sentence to raise consumer awareness and force the cocoa and chocolate industry to take tougher measures to stamp out child labor.

“If I am found guilty of this crime, any chocolate consumer can be prosecuted after that. I hope that people would stop buying chocolate and thus hurt the sales of big corporations and make them do something about the problem,” van de Keuken said.

Ivory Coast, the world’s No. 1 cocoa producer which has been racked by instability since a brief 2002 civil war, is the target of allegations by international rights groups that children are working as slaves on its cocoa plantations.

The man began his attempt to be charged for eating chocolate two years ago, when the Dutch public prosecutor ruled that it was not a case for the courts and that the journalist was not directly involved with the cocoa business.

On Friday, he appealed against the prosecutor’s decision before a court which is expected to rule in April.