Junkie ‘Cocaine Sharks’ are strung out and ‘tweaked’ in Florida: expert

nypost.com:

nose candy dumped into the waterway via the area’s illicit drug trafficking trade.“I firmly believe, and it’s not just a chance of probability, that a shark will come across a floating bale [of cocaine] and take a bite,” Tom “The Blowfish” Hird, who hosts the show as part of Discovery’s annual Shark Week, told The Post. “What’s interesting is that the sharks we saw … weren’t right, they weren’t just so, they seemed a little bit off — now that was very interesting,” said Hird, a renowned marine biologist. “One thing is for sure — we had a couple of sharks behaving strangely, and while it may not be cocaine … nothing suggests that it wasn’t.”In the special, premiering July 26 at 10 p.m., Hird and scientist Dr.

Tracy Fanara dive into the waters off the Florida coast, attracting tiger sharks, hammerheads and lemon sharks — some of which exhibit unusually aggressive behavior.

Others, as Hird says on-air, appear to “have the spins,” are “slightly twisted” or are “tweaked” as a “junkie shark” might be if it ingested cocaine.To see if sharks will attack bales of cocaine dropped into the water from above, which is how the Florida Keys coke ends up there, Hird and Fanara toss bales filled with fish powder — akin to the stimulant Dopamine found in coke, into the water — then watch as “super-feisty” sharks of all shapes and sizes greedily grab the bales and swim away, ignoring decoy [fake] swans.

It is, as Hird told The Post, a “siren call” for the beasts, who would rather grab a foreign object than feast on a living creature.“We know that cocaine acts as an analgesic and anesthetic to some extent, so certainly, if a shark got a hold of a big lump of coke, just like a human I think the first thing that would happen is that its gills.