i saw this in the news today, and had also the other bust a few days ago:
“An Alameda-based Coast Guard unit intercepted $196 million in cocaine at the high seas.
The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Midgett and a U.S. Navy maritime patrol aircraft teamed up to interdict a stateless, self-propelled, semi-submersible vessel Wednesday with 7 tons of cocaine aboard approximately 400 miles south of the Mexico-Guatemala border.
The Coast Guard quickly boarded the ship and found 295 bales of cocaine, valued at more than $196 million, in a huge forward compartment, the Coast Guard said.
The submarine became unstable and began to sink during the transfer of the bales of cocaine from to the Coast Guard ship, the Coast Guard said.
The condition of the vessel made it unsafe to tow and Midgett’s crew sank the vessel as a hazard to navigation, the Coast Guard said.
Wednesday’s interdiction follows a daring nighttime boarding and seizure of another ship on Saturday in which the Coast Guard seized cocaine as well
‘I’m proud to tell you that over the past five days, Pacific Area Coast Guard units, with the help of our U.S. Navy and interagency partners, seized more than 14 tons of cocaine with a street value of more than $383 million from two self-propelled, semi-submersible vessels in the Eastern Pacific Ocean,’ said Adm. Thad Allen, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard.”
-nbc11.com
it strikes me that the admiral was “proud” about over $383 million in cocaine attempting to be smuggled into the U.S. all that really means to me, and i think that this is the logical conclusion, that this is just another blow to the catastrophe that is the “war on drugs.” if the busts were getting progressively smaller, then i would say that’s fair evidence that the war on drugs was succeeding. are the people in charge really that dense, or do they think we are for gobbling up their propaganda? there is much more informed literature on the internet about the fallacies of the drug war, but i thought this was a pretty basic observation that anyone could make from reading this story. it scares me how many people will read that and not even grasp the real meaning. whatever your feelings on the war on drugs, the much more terrifying thing is people that can’t or don’t want to think for themselves.
yeah. if they are just catching those vessels now, that probably means that many MANY more of those shipments probably made it through to the states.
war on drugs…fucking ridiculous. ha. oh the conversations we used to have on the subject back at the apartment. good ol’ #4.