What's black cocaine, and where is it coming from?

In yet another wildly innovative attempt to conceal drug shipments, narcos are now apparently mixing cocaine with zinc to disguise the white powder as the black ink material used to reload printer cartridges. This month a one-ton shipment of sacks containing “coca negra” was seized at the Mexico City airport on a flight inbound from Colombia. The haul was allegedly worth more than $18 million.

Colombian authorities made a similar bust earlier that day of a one-ton shipment of black cocaine headed for Sinaloa, Mexico. Authorities believe the two shipments of black cocaine are potentially being trafficked by fugitive drug lord Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán’s Sinaloa Cartel.

After the Mexico City bust, cops arrested a man driving along a Sinaloa state highway possessing documentation to pick up a ton of zinc oxide at the airport. Sinaloa state is considered to be the stronghold of Chapo’s criminal empire.

But black cocaine is actually nothing new; apparently Colombian drug dealers have used this method for years to camouflage the drug.

Busts of coca negra date as far back as the ’90s, according to some reports by British daily The Independent. The mix was allegedly pioneered to make it undetectable for drug-detecting dogs, but the recent bust in the Bogota airport did not pass the canine sniff test.

Raynette Savoy Kornickey, a spokeswoman for the DEA in Miami, told Fusion there are no documented seizures of “black cocaine” entering Miami, one of the biggest drug hubs in the U.S. So far, the busts seem to be happening mostly in Latin America.

However, there have also been reported seizures of black blow in Europe.