Police Use Airport Records To Catch Drug Smugglers

Police in Oregon arrested two Canadian men when they stopped to refuel at Burns Municipal Airport last month, seizing almost a half-ton of marijuana, The Associated Press reported on Monday. The arrest followed an effort by police to more closely monitor remote rural airports in the region, checking self-service fuel records to search for clues to illicit operations. Information from those records is now going into the Oregon Department of Justice’s computerized intelligence network, where it will be available to federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies. But it’s expected that the impact of that effort will last only until the smugglers figure it out, then they will simply circumvent it. All a smuggler would have to do is land in a hayfield or on a remote road and refuel from tanks mounted onto farm pickups, Umatilla County Sheriff John Trumbo told the AP.