Henrique Dornelles Forni, 25, was among those arrested and that he was a principal distributor of synthetic drugs in Rio
"Local authorities need to pay attention to the emergence of synthetic drugs, they are the drug of the future," said Vitor Cesar Carvalho dos Santos, head of the narcotics department in the Rio police department. "This is a health problem."
Brazilian police said Thursday that it arrested 55 people in nationwide operations to crack two crime rings that were smuggling ecstasy, LSD and other synthetic drugs into the country from Europe.The police nabbed the suspects in eight Brazilian states, 47 of them in Rio de Janeiro, said Chief Enrico Zambrotti, the Federal Police coordinator of Operation Knockout, one of the two police operations.
Most of those arrested were people in their twenties from middle-class families with no prior criminal histories, Zambrotti said.
The trafficking rings earned several hundred thousand dollars a month in a scheme that involved using drug "mules" to smuggle cocaine to Europe and then return to Brazil with synthetic drugs, the police said.
Investigators said that Henrique Dornelles Forni, 25, was among those arrested and that he was a principal distributor of synthetic drugs in Rio, the newspaper O Globo reported. He was captured while trying to escape from the penthouse where he lived in the Lagoa area of Rio, the paper said.
The operations began 10 months ago, investigators have arrested some two dozen drug mules that were suspected of carrying the drugs in from Europe and seized more than 100,000 ecstasy pills, the police said.
