The Mexican Cartel's Hi-Tech Drug Tunnels 448
In the past five years, more than 100 drug tunnels between Mexico and the U.S. have been discovered. This is double the number found over the previous 15 years. Not only are they growing in number, but the tunnels are becoming much more sophisticated, including electric rail systems, hydraulic elevators, and secret entrances (one opened via a fake water tap). From the article: "When architect Felipe de Jesus Corona built Mexico's most powerful drug lord a 200-foot-long tunnel under the U.S.-Mexican border with a hydraulic lift entrance opened by a fake water tap, the kingpin was impressed. The architect 'made me one f---ing cool tunnel' Joaquin 'Shorty' Guzman said, according to court testimony that helped sentence Corona to 18 years in prison in 2006. Built below a pool table in his lawyer's home, the tunnel was among the first of an increasingly sophisticated drug transport system used by Guzman's Sinaloa cartel. U.S. customs agents seized more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine which had allegedly been smuggled along the underground route."
Re:Ah, the war on drugs... (Score:3, Interesting)
You'd think... (Score:5, Interesting)
...that they could detect the activity required to build a tunnel.
I've never used marijuana, but at this point I don't see its' continued illegality being beneficial. Legalize it for those of-age, require standards for safety, and regulate it in a fashion similar to tobacco and alcohol, where one can't smoke it in public generally outside of the marijuana-equivalent of a beer garden similar to how tobacco consumption is prohibited in many places, where one can't drive after consuming it like a DUI, but where some businesses could get licenses to allow consumption on the property, and where people could consume it in their homes, provided that it doesn't impact their neighbors and if they're renting, that it's permitted by their landlord, similar to cigarettes. Allow employers to dismiss employees who show up high in the same fashion as dismissing employees who show up drunk.
Do that and you just gutted much of the business of the cartels, put many of the street gangs and lowlife dealers out of business, and would prevent it from being cut with dangerous chemicals.
Re:Geek In Us All (Score:5, Interesting)
This kind of thing speaks to the geek in me.
I think of it just like building a model railroad, except its a model subway. And its about half scale instead of "N" or "HO" scale.
It would be fun to have your own subway, just for the sake of having your own subway.
And you get to build an electric car, well, a electric railroad car, without having to hear an infinity of people whining about how it only has a 300 mile range per charge and is therefore useless under all conditions.
If I ever have enough rural property to build a railroad, I'm going to way outdo the live steamers have a subway instead of an aboveground railroad.
Perfect spot for underground explosives tests... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not bore holes along the US/Mex border, about 50 ft deep, drop in some TNT and break up the rock?
You can't dig a tunnel through sand.
Seems some seismic listening devices could be used, as well, to identify tunneling activity.
Re:You'd think... (Score:5, Interesting)
I am with you but...on some things I have to ask why?
Why should we assume that the exact same regulatory scheme is correct for pot as it is alcohol? In fact, there is ample evidence that they are wildly different, and should be treated as such.
Should prohibition on driving, for example, be based on actual evidence of risk? Sadly, only one study has ever been done that wasn't tained by bad process. I hope we can all agree that pulling non-smokers off the street, to experience it for their first time, for driving tests is not an accurate measurement of impairment. Secondly, I hope we can agree that looking at "marijuana related accidents" without any attempt to seperate out those on marijuana from those drunk who also smoked (which accounted for the majority of cases btw)...is also suboptimal.
Only one study (of which I am aware), by the UK Highway Safety Administration, saw these errors, commented on them, and did a better study, using actual smokers in actual impairment tests. What did they find? They found little to no impairment. In fact, they found that what little decreases in reaction time were measured were more than made up for by an abundance of caution on the part of drivers.
So... shouldn't we.... actually attempt to get some unbiased studies around the issue BEFORE we decide how to regulate it? Maybe, I don't know, take the ability to approve or disapprove studies away from the NIDA who has no interest in anything but proving their existing conclusion?
Re:It's working (Score:5, Interesting)
I love the way people blame the War on Drugs for all of the related problems.
It is responsible for all the related problems.
If people would, you know, just stop buying the damn stuff then the cartel's main income would dry up within a month
Yeah, and if the cat would stop puking on the floor I wouldn't have to clean it up. The same was said about alcohol in the 1920s, but guess what? Alcohol consumption doubled during prohibition. People have been intoxicating themselves since before they were people, and they're not going to stop just because some idiot writes a law against it.
The only way you're going to stop the violence, graft, corruption, and all the other ills caused by the drug laws is how we stopped it in 1933 -- legalize, tax, and regulate. You'd have far fewer heroin overdoses if purity was standardized.
If crack was legal and crackheads could buy the stuff for a dollat an ounce they wouldn't have to break into my house to support their habits. The drug laws are counterproductive and insane.
Re:It's working (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, the original point is still valid in the general case and possibly in Corona's too, assuming that he didn't enter into the deal willingly. How might an honest Mexican safely decline a job once they have ascertained that their employer's trade typically has a very literal implementation of "head count reduction" with regards to terminating employment? Given the alledged levels of corruption within Mexican law enforcement, I doubt their Witness Protection Program is going to be seen as a particularly safe option...
Re:It's working (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry, but legalization isn't going to work any better than saying "buy American" is going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. Today marijuana is essentially legal in California and it is not taxed. So what would you expect the price for marijuana to be at California dispensaries? Well, it turns out that it is almost exactly the same price as illegal, imported marijuana is on the street in Chicago. Check it out. [norml.org]
Based on this, legal drugs are likely to always have strong competition from imported illegal drugs. The production costs are going to be much lower for the imports, even with payoffs to local officials. Should cities, states and the federal government start taxing drug sales imports will be significantly cheaper. And how will law enforcement be able to tell the difference between legal, taxed drugs and imported untaxed illegal drugs?
It is very unlikely that we are going to see prices plummet should there legalization. What you are going to see is a gradual eroding of enforcement as has happened over the last 10 years or so. The side effects of programs like California's and Arizona's (if it ever gets off the ground) is that it will be very, very difficult to implement any sort of drug testing for employment. You really can't test for and ban employment because of a legal substance. For example, it is not legal to exclude someone from a job based on alchohol use, although you can fire them later for being drunk on the job.
When does it stop being practical to do drug testing the results should be very interesting on city streets. Imagine the outcry when it is only possible to fire school bus drivers after an accident or two - it is not possible to deny employment to alchoholic candidates today.
Re:It's working (Score:5, Interesting)
"Essentially legal" and "actually legal" are very different.
The "legal" dispensaries have essentially the same supply issues as the street dealers and in some cases are competing with them for the same product and have to match street dealers for supplies. And the whole supply chain is still considered illegal.
In some cases, dispensaries may have a supply advantage (grow operation) but they also have to supply a high quality product that its more expensive to produce and also seem to provide a lot of high quality variety which, again, comses from a constrained and illicit supply.
In short, the dispensaries have high supply costs, just like street dealers, and they also have to supply high quality -- no brown Mexican crap.
Even if the dispensaries had lower supply costs, they are selling something else -- high quality and more importantly, the convenience and safety of a retail purchase.
If marijuana was ACTUALLY legal, the supply constraints go away -- what does it do to prices when farmers figure out how to grow high quality marijuana measured in the millions of bushels? When 'elite' brands can setup hydroponic grow operations in half-million square foot warehouses?
At this point retail competition will push the price down since there's little incentive or need to keep it at parity with street prices.
junkie-geek sezs.... (Score:3, Interesting)
... (Hi, my name is Yuropian Stonah and I'm an addict!) a few things.
First, I cannot believe how many uninformed, apologetic postings in favor of current US / EU drug policy are gathered here. Come on, isn't this a hub of scientists, bright minds and people who know their empirics from mere belief? Every scientific evaluation of man's natural tendency to get high - and it's just that, a natural tendency ranging from apes in Africa eating moldy fruit to get their groove on to Professor Shulgin making crazy new synthetical enthegoens - has shown just how futile a totally abstinence oriented lawmaking ethos is. I mean, we can probably all agree on the fact that humankind is flawed in some aspects, for example I doubt anyone here would say there's any way to get rid of our general egocentrism, so any man-made system is probably subject to corruption. Why not just once and for all accept that people are going to do drugs, no matter what? The most popular ones, caffeine, alcohol and nicotine for our Western world and current time period, are usually just seperated from most of the other narcotics in their status in most people's thoughts. That doesn't make them, and here is the part where I really think the scientists in you should have no problem understanding, NOT DRUGS. Yeah, a lot of functioning people punch down a liter or two of red a night. Every other TV series has that male, older character with the complete bar in his office gulping down Scotch while handing down jovial advice to other characters. I for one, mid twenties German addicted to morphine and some other pharms with a rich history of drug abuse, state that alcoholism is worse and more devastating than any opiate addiction could ever be - 72 hours in hell and you're off smack for good whereas I remember people withdrawing from as little as a bottle of wine a day in their third week of detox still having seizures and crying for help at night. I guess what bothers me is, like everywhere else, the hypocrisy of advocating abstinence without admitting to the fact that a great, great majority of society IS in fact suffering from some kind of addiction. If you are telling people to not use drugs, why use made up arguments?
Heroin, for example, will shorten your life by not a single day IF administered in pure form. Of course, that also calls for sterile equipment and firm background knowledge on the topic. So why is it banned? I mean, seriously? Maintenance treatment with methadone, buprenorphine, morphine or heroin itself has shown how people on those drugs for decades have little to no tendency to crime or other life-shortening hobbies if given the chance to take part in social life without stigma. Cocaine and methamphetamine etc. are all quite strainous on the heart, yeah. But lots of the negative effects of black market usage are due to the life style forced onto people with a taste for these kinds of yummies. Switzerland research on Cocaine addict maintenance on pharmaceutical stimulant drugs has pretty much shown how unnecessary that is, though.
I for one am getting my daily dosage of morphine from the nice guy at the pharmacy with whom I often chat about recent developments in his scientific field. I then go about my academic/social/professional life which I will not, for obvious reasons, further depict. But I can tell you, my not-12-stepping-kinda-NA-group consists of two thirds academics, a lot of medical doctors and even people in administrative, political positions. You'd be surprised. I for one have pretty much recovered from the blows my life got delivered from the struggle that is illegal drug addiction and have been focused on my academic work ever since. I'm on enough morphine to kill an elephant (900 milligrams/day over 24 hour slow release) and 80 milligrams of methylphenidate for ADHD treatment, but neither prevents me from getting good grades. Or having a social life. Hell, I even get along with my family again since admitting to my addiction, seeking and getting help. But it's my personal luck that I have found both a very
Re:It's working (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, like the kidnappings of telecom workers in NE Mexico. Unlike all other kidnappings, there has never been a demand for ransom, just dead bodies of those who chose the "I won't do it" option. There have been mass kidnappings at conferences. The cartels are building their own communications infrastructure.
Re:It's working (Score:4, Interesting)
...or they take the prison sentence and be given a comfortable retirement by the mob when they are released (as their reward for serving a sentence in silence)...
I can't offer a source (sorry), but I was listening to this podcast on criminal justice a few years ago, and they talked about it being semi-common in Japan for the Yakuza to assassinate their own members in prison. It wasn't because they were afraid the guy would rat them out, it was because he was just a low level employee that they didn't feel like they owed very much to, and it was cheaper to pay for him to be killed then to be obligated to pay his retirement when he got out.
I wonder if that ever happens stateside.
Re:It's working (Score:4, Interesting)
I've often said that organized crime is simply the government for things the main government refuses to deal with. They create rackets (departments) to handle their various operations, and when they don't get their way, they break out the guns.
Re:Ah, the war on drugs... (Score:3, Interesting)
More than that, the right to only be searched under a court order, the right of freedom of movement, the right to work, the right to live (trigger happy cops), the right to not be discriminated, the right to enjoy equal protection under law. Now, the war on terror is part of the slippery slope. "We are searching you because we are fighting those evil terrorists, also, we are fighting those evil drug smugglers. Do you resist? Are you in favor of terrorists and stoners?"