Gargamel's Private stash

Crafty meth cooks have discovered a way around the 2005 bill that criminalized Sudafed and other cold medicines that actually work. It's called "smurfing."

It was simple, really. They started organizing road trips up and down I-90 and recruiting an army of buyers to pick up small quantities of drugs along the way. It was a tactic of money launderers first—the trick of disguising big money movements through a series of identical small deposits. Switch out "deposits" for "insufferable blue creatures from your childhood" to crack the code.

The media and investigators are on to this smurfing business—and the term is uttered often ("anti-smurfing" "smurfing epidemic"), most recently in a South Dakota newspaper report on the tri-state "pharmacy pipeline." Drug enforcement officials, the report says, are on the hunt for "a new generation of smurfers."

Papa Smurf couldn't be reached for comment. A spokesperson for Meth-Mouth Smurf denies any wrongdoing.