Drug Runners Perfect Long-Range Subs 428
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Authorities have captured a 74-foot camouflaged submarine — nearly twice as long as a city bus — with twin propellers and a 5-foot conning tower that, with a crew of four to six, has a maximum operational range of 6,800 nautical miles on the surface, can go 10 days without refueling and was probably designed to ferry cocaine underwater to Mexico. The vessel carries a payload of 9 tons of cocaine with a street value of about $250 million and uses a GPS chart plotter with side-scan capabilities, a high-frequency radio, an electro-optical periscope and an infrared camera mounted on the conning tower—visual aids that supplement two miniature windows in the makeshift cockpit. "This is the most sophisticated sub we've seen to date," says Jon Wallace who has headed the Personal Submersibles Organization, or Psubs, for 15 years. "It's a very good design in terms of shape and controls." In the meantime jungle shipbuilders continue to perfect their craft."
Re:Technical question (Score:4, Informative)
My guess would be that the writer is clueless and easily impressed by something like this:
http://www.premierfishing.co.uk/humminbird---1198cx-si-combo---side-scan-sonar--gps-436-p.asp [premierfishing.co.uk]
Leave out the world sonar and there you have it... side-scan GPS.
Re:It is all about the money (Score:4, Informative)
I'm curious - do you have a source for the assertion that Kennedy was a rum runner?
Joseph Kennedy [wikimedia.org] was widely reputed to have been in cahoots with the Canadian Bronfman brothers. They made their fortune running rum from Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean up to Canada and then slipping it across the US border from there.
Canadian Club whiskey is a legacy of that trade route. 'Canadian' clubs tended to have the best booze, you see. The families involved in this trade became extremely wealthy. The Bronfmans founded Seagrams distillery and one of their scions actually owned entertainment giant Vivendi/Universasl for a while.
Re:What's funny is (Score:4, Informative)
It is not as simple as you describe it. In the 1980ies Gorbachev more or less introduced alcohol prohibition to the USSR. And while it indeed lead to moonshine contaminated by poisons and alternative drug abuse, it actually lowered criminality somewhat, raised birth rates and boosted life expectancy to the highest value in the whole history of Russia before or after it.
Re:What's funny is (Score:4, Informative)
That's the reply that makes the least sense: If drugs were legal, everyone would use them.
Hello? Would anyone go "hey, it's Tuesday, let's try crack!"? Be serious for a single moment here and think. Yes, protect the kids and make handing drugs to them a crime (not the lala kind of "nono" it is today when it comes to cigs and beer), but if an adult willfully wants to ruin his life, by all means let him!
Re:What's funny is (Score:5, Informative)
Alcohol was made illegal and what happened?
Alcohol consumption dropped to less than one gallon per person per year.
1906-1910 2.60 gal.
1916-1919 1.96 gal.
1934 0.97 gal.
1955 2.0 gal.
1973 2.62 gal.
1980 2.76 gal.
2007 2.31 gal.
Apparent per capita ethanol consumption for the United States, 1850-2007. (Gallons of ethanol, based on population age 15 and older prior to 1970 and on population age 14 and other thereafter). [nih.gov]
Higher addiction rates, instead of lower ones like you might expect
If this were true, you should be seeing higher liver cirrhosis mortality rates.
In fact, the rates between 1920 and 1940 are about half those of 1910. Age-Adjusted Liver Cirrhosis Mortality U.S. 1910-1996 [nih.gov] [chart]
Re:As long as drugs are outlawed ... (Score:4, Informative)
Besides keeping people who have no self control in check, there are safety concerns.. the "illegal" trade already comes up with concoctions that have things like battery acid and all sorts of other things that are unpleasant and deadly.
It sounds like you are saying we need to keep drugs illegal because illegal drugs are less safe than legal drugs. Your argument against medical marijuana is similar. The problems you point out would disappear if marijuana were legalized because there would be no need for people to abuse the medical marijuana system.
Your only potentially viable point is that we need to keep drugs illegal in order to protect some poor souls from themselves. This is a matter of opinion and I strongly disagree with yours even though I'm not a libertarian. The idea that people turn to drugs merely because they lack self control is naive and over simplistic.
If removing the profit motive doesn't reduce drug use to acceptable levels then maybe we can use the $44 billion [wikipedia.org] per year we waste on the war on drugs to instead improve social conditions for the segments of society that are most vulnerable. Or we could use the $33 billion in tax revenues on legalized drugs to fund the program and reduce the budget deficit by $44 billion dollars.
For goodness sake, even the Council on Foreign Relations [cfr.org] (pdf) has admitted that the War on Drugs has been an abysmal failure:
A state-driven, supply-side, and penalty-based approach has failed to curb market production, distribution, and consumption of drugs. The assumption that punishing suppliers and users can effectively combat a large market for illicit drugs has proven to be utterly false. Rather, prohibition bestows enormous profits on traffickers, criminalizes otherwise law-abiding users and addicts, and imposes enormous costs on society. Meanwhile, there has been no real effect on the availability of drugs or their consumption, and three-quarters of U.S. citizens believe that the war on drugs has failed.