The subs are powered by ordinary diesel engines and built of simple fiberglass in clandestine shipyards in the Colombian jungle. U.S. officials expect 70 or more to be launched this year with a potential cargo capacity of 380 tons of cocaine, worth billions of dollars in the United States.
Just another reason for legalization.
They’ve gone and done in now. Charles Johnson will be furious.
Why do we care if they scuttle the subs? We have no use for the cargo, or at least that’s the official story.
Here’s how we can combat the cartels: legalize the drugs, then confiscate any black-market cargoes we can, and market them at half of black-market prices.
But if we legalize the stuff, many Americans will become useless dopes.
Wait..
Why do we care if they scuttle the subs?
You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever encountered a coked-up Great White Shark.
OT, but a Caption Contest in the Pub…
So that is where A&R guys come from?
Serr8d, very funny at 2. FYI you are now banned from LGF.
Heh. Joe, I never got formally banned. I did get an account; after three days, I got into arguments with CJ and Fat Bastardess Sharmuta and others on a Saturday morning last December (about religion — imagine that). I left, and never returned.
I’m sure my account was deleted, but won’t give CJ the satisfaction of noting my attempt to log in and check.
It is good to know how the cocaine in your Red Bull comes from.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090602/hl_afp/hongkongaustriacrimedrugsdrinkredbull
serr8d, sharmutta longing for love, since her adoration of Charles goes unrequitted, had a crush on one of these drug subs, mistakenly believing is was a member of her fellow marine mammal species (Sharmutta’s species developed from evolution of course, not from any intelligent design).
What took them so long? This was an obvious path of development over 20 years ago. Maybe it just wasn’t as sexy as airplanes and high speed boats.
These vessels are nothing new. Dope runners have been using them for decades. The Coasties have been looking for and finding them once in a while since the 70’s. They weren’t as sophisticated as these, but they were just as effective. Ah technology!
Hmmm, I wonder how many Mexican roofers those subs can hold…
Another innovation wrought by profit motivation…
Unless, of course, the Columbian government subsidizes this activity or something…
380 tons isn’t enough. We’re just gonna be calling her up at two in the morning and she’s not calling back for like two hours and she’ll say she’ll be here at five but she won’t show up until seven. Get 1000 tons.
Wait.
1000 tons isn’t enough. We’re just gonna be calling her up at five in the morning and she’s not calling back for like three hours and she’ll say she’ll be here at nine but she won’t show up until noon. Get 8000 tons.
Wait.
Comment by Eben on 6/6 @ 7:14 am #
Just another reason for legalization.
These guys are cleverly circumventing our attempts to stop them from importing the death and destruction of our citizens and your response is to just stop fighting them and welcome our own death and destruction?
We spent 50 years developing the technology to tail the very best nuclear subs the Russian navy could offer to every corner of the earth, and we can’t figure out how to locate a bunch of homemade subs? Color me skeptical.
I say we scuttle them before they can scuttle themselves. The crew can either go to the bottom with their cargo or serve as chum for the nearest school of sharks. Drug cartels don’t really have the embassy staff that it would take to launch a formal complaint. Fuck ’em. And fuck the weak assed Americans who need a crutch to get through life who keep this type of scum in business.
The epic failure of the war on drugs would be funny if it wasn’t help to overcrowd our prisons with nonviolent offenders, financing the drug lords that are taking over Mexico, and funding the Taliban that fight our troops in Afghanistan. I mean, seriously, how frigging retarded is this? We’re fighting a war and funding the other side.
Meanwhile drugs in the US are so plentiful that getting high on coke or ecstasy is cheaper than drinking top-shelf martinis in a bar. Beer and pot are comparable in price. The laws of supply and demand say that illegal drug distribution is fulfilling the demand for intoxication as well as or better than the perfectly legal booze business. You don’t get more Epic Fail than that.
And apparently I can’t close out my italics tag properly. No, I’m not on drugs :-)
Sticky B, the way to stop people using drugs and destroying themselves isn’t to make them illegal, it’s to change their lives. Making them illegal does nothing to stop someone who’s in a self-destructive mindset from being in that mindset. If you make drugs legal the crime rate will plummet and you can focus all that time, money and effort on changing people’s lives rather than throwing them in jail.
I’m wondering: the Nanny State is bad, except where drugs are concerned? We didn’t learn any lessons from Prohibition, I guess.
Dude the “War on Drugs” and all of its side effects are killing far more people than the cocaine ever would. If the cure is killing more people than the disease it isn’t much of a cure.
If you make drugs legal the crime rate will plummet and you can focus all that time, money and effort on changing people’s lives rather than throwing them in jail.
Right. People will stop getting high because the gubmint is spending all that money to “care” about them. What’s more intrusive: making a dangerous substance illegal or forcibly changing people’s lives so that they don’t crave drugs anymore?
How’s that working with alcohol, BTW? We’re not funding any more revenuers to bust up stills: did all that money go toward stopping people from being drunkards? How about the people who aren’t alcoholics but still get wasted from time to time and wallop their kids and families just for the helluvit?
Prohibition was a failure because a tiny minority of progressives imposed it on an unwilling populace. People hated the law, and it was flouted by people in all societal levels, so they repealed it. The lesson learned is NOT that “you can’t legislate morality.” You can. All legislation is morality. The very act of legislating is an expression of a moral code.
The war against drugs may be badly waged, but that doesn’t mean that legalization is the better option. Reducing crime? Yeah, if you made everything legal, that would reduce crime, too.
Dude the “War on Drugs” and all of its side effects are killing far more people than the cocaine ever would.
(a) Please show me the math on that.
(b) Death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. Having a large drugged-out segment of the population is pretty destructive, too.
Remember: the problem with illegal aliens isn’t that they’re running around killing people, and lo, they’re still a problem. There are those who say that the best way to remedy the illegal alien problem is blanket amnesty and open borders. Would that really solve the problem?
“Hell, just legalize it” is lazy thinking, but I guess it gives you all those nifty libertarian bona fides. Which, that’s worth it!
Orson Scott Card is more persuasive than I: scroll down to the asterisk and begin reading.
(c) Those drug-runners and mobsters and terrorists who are currently making truckloads of dough are not going to meekly surrender their income when it becomes legal to use harmful drugs. One prominent family of shine-runners went into politics after Prohibition was repealed — the Kennedys — and hasn’t that worked out well?
The narcotraficantes and their fellow travelers will find another way to make money, and it won’t be as law-abiding citizens. Given how clever they’ve been in constructing these submarines, they’ll undoubtedly find another way to make their money, and it will be horrific. As if they were interested in anything else but horror.
The propensity for taking drugs and being an addict is part of the human condition. Yeah, some people can be helped out of that condition, but plenty can’t, because they don’t want to change, or they’re too messed up to succeed.
Those who take drugs regularly are already parasites on society: by all means, let’s enable the creation of even MORE!
I can’t find the numbers right now, but I have seen reports from studies done during the last century that cocaine addiction in the US has fluctuated right around 3% regardless of whether it is legal or illegal or how vigorously it is prosecuted. I have done, know people who do it, very few have died of it. Meanwhile all you have to do is look at the police blotter of any major newspaper and you can see the death tolls gang wars, drive-bys, and the battles with police have wrought. I don’t have any real numbers at the moment, but my experience is it isn’t even close.
It appears that way because the drugs are illegal. People who live a totally clean and sober lifestyle don’t realize how many perfectly productive members of society use drugs recreationally because you only see the fuck ups, the people who function normally go unnoticed and stay in the closet because it is illegal, meanwhile the only people society sees are the minority who can’t handle it and get in trouble. So your conclusion is everybody who does drugs is dysfunctional.
That is just plain wrong. Trust me, I know these people.
Maybe not, but it will likely be something less lucrative than running drugs.
Who Cares If They Scuttle the Subs?
“Damn, sir, I never saw a grey whale get up on plane before!”
But now we know what all that stink about banning the medium-frequency sonar was really about…
Okay, so ending prohibition wasn’t perfect in every way. My Grandad was a bootlegger too. When prohibition ended he got a job as a city cop, so yeah, I can see your point.
Why are you skeptical, Sticky? Remember, this is the Russians you’re talking about. Besides, your agrument doesn’t make sense. First you rail against legalizing drugs, then you say “fuck the weak assed Americans who need a crutch to get through life”. Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to just let them continue to fuck themselves? Just sayin’.
We are losing the war on drugs because it is beyond the ken of government to revoke the laws of supply and demand. It’s the same reason government can’t eliminate handguns or sustainably produce universal health care.
The only reason the war on drugs has managed to not be discarded with the rest of Jim Crow is that there are still many whom believe that at some level, in some aspects, to some degree, the war on drugs “works” somehow.
The war on drugs does not “work” on any level. It doesn’t reduce their availability: drugs are everywhere, including the very prisons we’ve built mostly to house convicted drug criminals, and they’re literally cheaper than ever. Give 50 middle-schoolers $25 and ask them to bring back either a rock of cocaine or a twelve-pack of beer, and we would most likely all be disturbed by the results.
It’s true that the price drop that would occur if we regulated drugs like we currently regulate alcohol and tobacco would produce an increase in consumption initially, but there is no evidence to suggest that such an increase would be permanent, or that the long-run incidence of drug abuse would be greater than the status quo, especially after taking the super-profits and (thus) most of the “cool” out of drug scene.
maybe, but I don’t think that’s how it works with dirty socialists in charge of which our piece of shit president is but one notable exemplar. These ones can’t legalize drugs without taxing the shit out of them. And then taxing the shit out of them a little more. And then homogov Arnold will tax the shit out of them on top of what the dirty socialists in Washington do.
And so the price of these legalo drugs, it is very high. Then one day an enterprising young kid named Lamar has an idea. I can sell these drug thingies but not charge taxes!! If I charge less than the stupid dirty socialists charge then everyone will buy my drug thingies and I will make many monies! The dirty socialists say oh nonononono you don’t, and they put Lamar in a prison to where he can’t sell drug thingies anymore. But now Lamar’s business model has spread. Soon the dirty socialists realize that it’s not enough just to put the Lamars in jail, the people what buy drug thingies from Lamar will have to go to jail too.
Then Spike Lee will make a movie.
*legal drugs* … if I typed more better I wouldn’t have to correct myself all the time.
[…] Protein wisdom, Plying the Pacific, Subs Surface as Key Tool of Drug […]
What’s Lamar’s phone number?
Yeah, the history of government’s involvement in the alcohol and tobacco business is so beneficent that surely we want them in the drug business too, oh yeah
That’s one of the things I like about the Fair Tax, excise taxes bite the dust, and the same sales tax rate is paid for everything, by everybody. Can’t get fairer than that.