BAR-CODED COCAINE???

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Flour and sugar sold in Brazil don't always have
them, but packages of cocaine offered by a notorious Rio de Janeiro drug
gang are now showing up complete with bar codes and price tags.

Police said on Friday they had confiscated 260 packets of cocaine in a
shanty-town near Rio, each with a sticker identifying the product by code
0001 and bearing the name of the merchants and a slogan -- "Now, it's us."

A roll of supermarket-style stickers was also confiscated.

The bags of cocaine bore the initials of the Third Command criminal
organization, notorious for bloody gangland turf wars in Rio's slums, and
were priced at $1.20 for each dose.

Surprised police said they were still guessing whether the identification
was a one-off joke by drug traffickers, a celebration that the gang had
taken over somebody else's business, or a brand-new accounting method now
being adopted by the drug trade.

"We are now investigating whether the bar code serves for anything. We
haven't seen anything like that before," said Capt. Barbosa of the 20th
Military Police Battalion.

Bar codes, which can be read by a laser scanner, are used worldwide for
inventory control on consumer products.