There's another doping scandal brewing at the Rio Olympics and this time it has nothing to do with Russia.
Drug dealers in the city have started peddling cocaine in Olympic packaging, HuffPost Brasil reports. The package features the Rio Olympic logo, the five Olympic rings and some helpful instructions: "Keepaway from children."
Police discovered the Olympic-branded cocaine baggies on Monday night among a cache of 93 bags of the stuff that they seized earlier that evening in the tourist-friendly neighborhood of Lapa, according to Brazil's Globo newspaper.
It's easy to make light of the entrepreneurial spirit of the person whose idea it was to use the city's upcoming Olympics to sell more drugs, but drug crime in Rio is no laughing matter. Homicides in Rio were up 15 percent in the first four months of 2016, compared to the same period in 2015.
"Brazil is one of the most violent countries in the world with a national homicide rate of 27.1 per 100,000 inhabitants," Paula Miraglia wrote in a recent report for the Brookings Institute. "A large part of this violence and criminality can be linked to arms and drug trafficking operations by organised crime groups."
Olympic organisers recently upped the number of security officers set to patrol the Games to 88,000 individuals. That total includes 21,000 soldiers and 47,000 police officers to patrol the streets of Rio, and another 20,000 soldiers to secure the five cities set to host the Olympic soccer tournaments. Those cities are Belo Horizonte, Brasilia, Manaus, Salvador and Sao Paulo.
