Why Buy Just the Survival Kits?

[MIflyer]

One of my high school teachers was a USN aviator in WWII and before.

He said that after WWII they were selling surplus USN airplanes at Corpus Christi. The airplanes were all out on the ramp and one guy said he wanted to bid on just the survival kits. Everyone else wanted to buy the airplanes for flying purposes or for scrap or to get the engines and he won with a low bid.

The other bidders then realized that the survival kits had a large, nice inflatable raft that probably would be of great interest to hunters and fishermen and figured the guy probably owned a sporting goods store. No one else had thought of that as a business opportunity and they had to admit the guy had gotten a good deal .

But then the winning bidder went down the row of airplanes, pulled the survival kits out, opened them, removed the tubes of morphine, and left the life raft and rest of the kit right there on the ramp.

"Holy cow! The guy is a drug dealer! Grab him!"

If he had just walked off with the whole survival kits no one would have been the wiser, but I guess he would have needed a sizeable truck to carry them.

 

[airminded88]

Pretty interesting story.
Was it confirmed he wanted the morphine solely for drug dealing purposes?

 

[MIflyer]

Well, if the bidder was licensed to buy and sell morphine he would not have had to get it by buying survival kits.

I would imagine that after the war ended the production requirements for morphine dropped off quite a bit and I doubt very much there would have been a shortage requiring it be salvaged from survival kits. And I imagine that they would have realized there was a problem with selling surplus that had morphine included.

I recall that back in the 1980's when the first Mig-15's were imported into the US from the PRC, the buyer was shocked to see that they had come with the 23MMM and 37MM cannon installed, thereby violating both restrictions on the importation of arms from communist countries and the unlicensed possession of automatic weapons. They did manage to both get the cannon to a museum and stay out of jail.

Just as the War Assets Disposal Administration plumb forgot about all that morphine in those surplus airplanes, the people in the PRC never thought to remove the cannon from the airplanes they were selling.