Other Uses
The term is also applied to activity associated with controlled substances such as pseudoephedrine In this context the agent will make purchases of small, legal amounts from several drug and grocery stores, with the intent to aggregate the lot for use in the illegal production of methamphetamine. Also, since the monthly pseudoephedrine purchase limits in US are too low for mass meth production, this practice often involves using multiple "smurfs".
As Robert Pennal of the Fresno Meth Task Force explains:
Then we started seeing "smurfing." Remember how the Smurfs were little gatherers? We started getting calls from different retail stores that people were buying two or three packs — that's the most you can buy — and they went to one store, they bought three, they went to another store, bought three. We're seeing blister packs everywhere because they're sitting in the car, they're punching the pills out of the blister packs, they're putting them in the freezer bags and they're turning them over to chemical brokers
Read more about this topic: Structuring