100-foot-long narco sub found in Colombia
The Colombian military has seized a 100-foot-long submarine capable of transporting eight tons of cocaine from Colombia to Mexico, news reports say.
The vessel was found in a jungle area in Timbiqui in southwestern Colombia on Sunday, according to a report from RTT News.
Are Colombian drug lords getting their hobby tips from the guys that build airplanes in their basements? Now, I'm guessing that this was on or near a river that would allow access to the ocean, but this should be food for thought. Declaring "war" on drugs is foolish, misguided, and doomed to fail - obviously given the extreme lengths to which drug runners will go (like a homemade submarine) means that all the drug war has done is make millionaires out of petty thugs. Remove the incentive, remove the money, end the violence.
Someone willing to take to the open ocean in a homemade submarine just to get drugs around a border check isn't going to be dissuaded by silly PSAs with frying eggs...
That is all.
12 comments:
If the US had put a fraction of the money spent on the War on Drugs, to bioengineering the death of poppy (to drain all the money out of Afghanistan and Pakistan) and cannabis (to drain the money out of the South American drug trade), we'd be better off.
I know this won't be a popular view, but I think it should all just be legalized and taxed.
Let's give up the idea that we can prevent humans from getting high. Remember the Grand Experiment and the total fail it turned out to be.
How exactly do you take the $ out of it? Do you allow everything? If you allow the open buying & selling of drugs, I'm assuming you tax it (like cigarettes). Here's the problem: if drug runners aren't intimidated/stopped by border patrols, why would they be concerned with IRS folks with clipboards and spreadsheets? I don't know what the solution is but its going to be hard any way you look at it.
I'm with ASM826. Some people want to get high. We're not stopping them. In the 1920s, people wanted to get sozzled. We didn't stop them then.
Back then you had people dying from ba bathtub gin; today they die from bad narcotics. Then we had a massive crime problem because the "businessmen" in the trade couldn't legally enforce contracts, and so used Tommy guns; today we have the same with Glocks.
Keep up the "War on Drugs" and you can expect the push for more gun control. Not for nothing was the National Firearms Act enacted when it was.
And while it's doing on, you'll still have Katherine Johnsons gunned down in their homes in a "no-knock" raid gone bad.
Are you sure that it isn't a rehabbed WWII scout sub?
"if drug runners aren't intimidated/stopped by border patrols, why would they be concerned with IRS folks with clipboards and spreadsheets?"
They won't, but prices will plummet, because most of the popular drugs aren't actually that expensive to make - prohibition massively inflates prices because of the risk to the dealers. When the legal sellers get into the business, they'll sell at a price that's not far above their production cost, because they will have to compete with other legal dealers. If a druggie can get his supply for $5 at the grocery store pharmacy, he's not going to go to Johnny Drug-Dealer in the local alley to get the same amount for $20 - especially when he won't know for sure if Johnny laced his weed with PCP or not until it's too late.
You'll still have some illegal dealers, just like you still have some bootleggers even today, but they'll be few and far between because the profit just won't be worth the risk at that point.
This is your brain at crush depth. Any questions?
Regardless of which way this goes, it's gonna get interesting... We were watching for those things back in the 80s, now they can actually afford them... sigh...
I'm going to guess it's more of a submersible than a true submarine. Either way it's pretty disconcerting that a drug cartel has enough money to pay someone to engineer and build one. Considering how much money they'd lose if one sank due to crappy construction, I'd also guess it's pretty well built.
As far as legalizing it goes, I'm not sure that the combined deaths of all illicit drugs would be any higher than now legal alcohol and tobacco. Regulating the potency and quality of currently illicit drugs might actually reduce the death toll.
Alcohol is a drug. Alcohol is legal. Driving impaired is illegal. Why are other recreational drugs treated differently than the world's favorite drug? Let's legalize everything and address behaviour wrt all the "bad" drugs just as we do now with alcohol. Or am I missing something? Thanks for listening. I need a drink...
TOTWTYTR, I would suspect that the profit margin for the cartels is such that losing a few of those boats, even en route, is little more than a blip in their bottom line.
Some years a go a rahter big operation in columbia got busted. The cartel had about 10 russian submarine engineers working on a sub. And if they had them who knwos what the other guy has.
After the soviet uion collapsed many talented engineers in many interesting fields found them selvs to be out of work...
And on the subject of cannabis. I'd suspect that most of it in the us is homegrown. There is less profit in shipping a kilo brick of bud when it could be highgrade mexican cartel meth.
Meth and coke is where the money is.
The scale is insane, at one point the mexican cartels consumed full one third of worlds supply of epehedrine. They made it by tens of kilos at time! Insane scale and at US retail at 150usd/gram the kilo brick is more than 150000 usd because it gets cut to hell with allkinds of nasty crap by bottomfeeders on the street.
I really dont have a good plan for the meth problem Legalization certainly would not help it. But it would cure the violence in mexico as US based producers would out cook them in both quality and quantity.
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