Drug Smuggling Submarines
In another sign that maybe our “war on drugs” isn’t exactly working:
U.S. law enforcement officials say that more than a third of the cocaine smuggled into the United States from Colombia travels in submersibles.
An experimental oddity just two years ago, these strange semi-submarines are the cutting edge of drug trafficking today. They ferry hundreds of tons of cocaine for powerful Mexican cartels that are taking over the Pacific Ocean route for most northbound shipments, according to the Colombian navy.
Officials estimate that the subs cost about $1 million to manufacture in Colombia. Colombian officials say some former military personnel might be helping to design, construct and direct the vessels.
Ok, so we’ve been at this for pretty much my entire life(40 years) and the drug runners are still making enough money to build million dollar submarines. Not only that, but enough to expect to lose enough of them that they’re built with a self destruct button:
“The vessels are built to sink. When they open the valves, tons of water come in, and in a minute, or a minute and a half, they sink,” Barrera said. “There is no evidence, and what starts as a counterdrug operation becomes a rescue operation.”
So, they can’t prosecute these guys when they sink one of their own boats so they’ve created a law that has nothing to do with drug smuggling just to be able to prosecute these guys:
last fall the U.S. Congress passed the Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act of 2008, which makes it a crime to ply international waters in stateless vessels with the intent of evading detection. The maximum sentence is 15 years.
IANAL but it doesn’t make sense to me that the US could write a law saying that people who are not in US waters have to make their presence known or the US can throw them in jail. I hate these kinds of laws. Laws written with a particular scenario in mind but nothing keeping the law from being used in other scenarios.
I don’t have a solution to America’s drug problem, but by now I think we know what the solution isn’t. It’s time to try something else. As is normal however, our leaders are too spineless to even mention a different option.
