Record Cocaine Year for Coast Guard

[unhappycamper]

Record Cocaine Year for Coast Guard
Associated Press | December 06, 2007
WASHINGTON - The Coast Guard has reeled in a record 355,000 pounds of cocaine over the past year, results that officials say have forced smugglers to transport their drugs through costlier methods like semi-submersible vessels and liquefied drugs.

Coast Guard officials are set to announce Dec. 6 that they seized cocaine with a street value of roughly $4.7 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The previous Coast Guard record for cocaine seizures, set two years ago, was 303,000 pounds. In fiscal 2006, the Coast Guard seized 287,000 pounds of cocaine.

By comparison, the street value of the drugs seized or removed last year by the Coast Guard equals roughly half the agency's total annual budget, said Commandant Adm. Thad Allen.

Officials say smugglers are increasingly turning to more difficult means of moving the contraband from South America. Often that involves so-called "go-fast" boats, which travel far out into the Pacific Ocean hoping to avoid detection, before dropping the cargo in Mexico, and from there it is brought into the United States. Colombia supplies 90 percent of America's cocaine, officials estimate.

"We have forced them to adapt to routes that are dangerous and are expensive. Right now we're seeing guys get in go-fasts and running 1,000 miles into the Pacific and rounding the Galapagos Islands to come in," said Coast Guard Commander Bob Watts. "The fact that we're forcing them to do that is causing them angst, it's causing them pain. That's as much of a win to me on the strategy side as getting the dope."


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,157672,00.html

[shenmue]

1. Thanks, drug users, for continuing the demand for this crap!

:dunce:

Life of the party, my ass. If you get high, *you are* "the drug problem." You create it, you fund it, you are the reason drug dealers compete for turf (money!) and you are ultimately the reason they gun each other down. I don't think the highest legal priority in this country should be to rearrange everything so that you can get high. I don't think it's harmless and inconsequential. It may be fun for you, but it is shitting on the rest of the country.

Can't you bored morons read a book or something? Scratch yourself? Hello?

Knock it off already.