Perhaps because they watched it long enough to know that it is not going to rendezvous with anyone, and if they wait longer it may turn around and they will lose sight of it?
I wonder how much of this is just a publicity stunt. Last time I dove deep into studying corruption in Latin America at University, Colombia was pretty much captive to the cartels. Hope it has gotten better now but I’m not sure if that’s the case given the massive Colombian diaspora that keeps increasing.
I just came across this podcast in the last week after wondering what ever happened to the FARC and AUC (right wing death squads) after the peace deal. How did things end up playing out relative compared to what was expected and feared at the time.
It’s a pretty batshit story that focuses on what became of the right wing death squads (they run the start of the cocaine supply chain it turns out among many other things) that’s extremely well researched and has amazing access. A strong recommendation from me https://insightcrime.org/audio-from-the-ground-up/the-shadow...
I'm kind of curious how much this matters to Colombia now. For this who haven't been following the drug wars, most of the action, and money, has moved to Mexico. If you only know this stuff through pop culture, Mexico today is what Colombia was in the 80's and 90's: the violence, level of corruption, money flowing through, etc.
Cocaine is still produced overwhelmingly in South America. Yes, it does have to go through Mexico. But the start of the trade route is Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru.
Cartels are already diversifying, thanks to bullish gold market they are going full tilt on gold. "In Colombia and Peru gangs are now thought to make more money from gold than from the sale of narcotics."[1]
Coffee, avocados, and oil aren't illegal. But I'm pretty sure if you banned coffee it would spawn criminal gangs that made 1920s prohibition look tame.
There's no substitute for the margins you can get in the illegal drug trade. Take away the primary source of funding and you make it much easier to break the gangs. We've already gone through this. Just legalize it already.
They already extortion every single producer. Any coffee and avocado coming from South America has an extortion tax somewhere in the supply chain whether it’s to the farmers, shipping companies, distribution center warehouses at port or whatever you imagine.
The extortion comes as placing gang members as part of security, real threats or just bribes to unlock to keep moving towards the consumer.
Illegal goods have better margins but extortions provide a platform for power and money with less effort.
They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced, if they can consolidate control. Latin America is 50% of the world coffee production. What will Starbucks / Nestle do? They will just pay up. They can even go against the families of the execs to make their case about the new price.
They tried this before with fruit. The US companies just sold their interest in production and have plenty of other options for acquisition if they try to tax beyond the relative ease of South America verse anywhere else in the global south.
I would agree that letting black market bs continue will eventually lead to groups that could threaten global control on random other commodities but that's no reason kick the can further down this road.
Part of the reason such a large percentage of coffee is grown there is because it's cheap. The cartels can (and do) make profit on legitimate crops, but they can't magically rewrite the rules of capitalism.
Coffee beans are notoriously picky about their environment. But with modern technology, it wouldn't surprise me if large companies would resort to growing it in artificial greenhouses, or putting more stock in breeding plants that can be grown elsewhere.
They'll probably move onto mass producing weaponry, which, depending on the sophistication and scale, could be big issues for the rest of the world. They already partner with terrorist groups and other unsavory orgs as-is. Any group worth mentioning these days interfaces with the cartels
I don’t think weapon production is in their wheelhouse. Arms dealing maybe but not manufacturing. Facilities like those are permanent locations. Permanent locations tend to get raided and attacked.
I think controlling municipalities like they are is working fine for them. No need to mass produce weapons when you can just buy them.
They do have expertise in manufacturing and managing manufacturing facilities and logistics though. Likely the production equipment is not very sophisticated/ hard to reproduce if destroyed. I don’t expect them to produce state of the art F35s anyway.
Applies to corporations as well but they do it legally and we consider part of our 'economy'. Heck we even subsidize them and give them the power to lobby and legally be a 'person'.
- Problem? What Problem? I don't see no stinkin' Problem!
Not really, the competition with the existing governments will significantly limit the amount of replacement cash they can demand, so they won't be able to sustain the same scale of man/firepower
That would be the humane and sensible thing to do, so obviously we are not going to do that. Let’s double down on enforcement so violence, corruption and profits increase.
We really did not learn anything from the alcohol prohibition.
It's not a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption. Sure, the way the US cracked down on drugs did more harm than good. But that doesn't mean there should be no regulation for drugs whatsoever.
Take the opioid epidemic for example. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people per day. Do you think "humane and sensible" people were responsible for that?
The opioid epidemic is not a great example, as it began by overprescription of legal, regulated medicinal drugs. The problem blew up when authorities started cracking down on those prescriptions, and the newly dependent started seeking drugs from illegal sources. Those sources included clandestinely produced heroin and fentanyl, leading to massive numbers of overdose deaths.
In other words, it was the enforcement of prohibition that ultimately caused more societal and health issues than the quasi-legal sales of hard drugs. It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies!
So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption.
The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal.
Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people.
How could violence not result, when it is an integral part of the alleged ”solution”?
Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.
Of course, "the powers that be" can want things to change, but not want to pay the cost required to truly change it.
As hyperbole, you can stop all court cases, assume everyone is guilty if they're arrested, and give everyone capital punishment. That would most likely end cartel issues rather quickly, but it would absolutely mess with society to a dangerous level. El Salvador took a (less hyperbolic) extreme approach, and it dramatically reduced crime, but it's not clear that citizens are actually happy with this outcome as.
Of course, it could be possible that leaders are corrupt, but it could simply be that the cost to fixing things is very high.
We don't do that precisely because that's how you end up with this situation. We wonder how history repeats itself, but we can't be bothered to know history from over 40 years ago.
60 years actually but for the recent criminality you need to look to Venezuela’s attempt of revolution in the late 10’s which generated the expansion of the Tren de Aragua which evolved extortion from random events to an enterprise level kind of thing.
Cocaine, I could maybe see the argument. But the article also said there was another submarine seized with 4.5BN worth of meth aboard. And I really hope you aren't suggesting legalising meth. I could see the argument that if other amphetamines were legal no one would use meth, but.....I don't think that's necessarily true. All the illegal meth would have to do to keep existing is to be cheaper than legal speed.
Everyone agrees that no-one should do meth. But the solutions presented so far by prohibition are not just conceptually flawed - they demonstrably don’t work. We literally have 50+ years of data that shows it.
We need to
a) legalize drugs,
b) provide proper treatment to addicts, and
c) get unsafe drugs off the streets.
I’m speaking as someone who lost a close family member to an overdose. What we’re doing now is not working.
I know we have data that shows just how harmful the war on drugs has been, but I'm curious if we have data showing that legalization in a modern society, with global supply chains and marketing campaigns, does not result in a bunch of people who previously wouldn't have done drugs - for fear of legal consequences, or just because they're hard to obtain - suddenly doing drugs. I'm genuinely interested to know, this isn't something I've made up my mind about.
I finally managed to quit vaping a year ago after starting as a teen. To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time or umpteenth time. Speaking only for myself, I suspect I would be a happier and more productive member of society if it continued to be the case that these chemicals were inaccessible to me. I'm interested to know if there's data suggesting that I'm mistaken or just an outlier.
Just given what I know about the issue (which, admittedly, isn't a lot), I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice. I want people to be able to test their drugs for fentanyl without fear of legal consequences, but I'm reluctant to trust corporations or individuals not to push addictive poison into the hands of the vulnerable when there are profit incentives and no legal boundaries.
Most places that focus on treatment rather than punishment see drops in all the relevant stats for deaths, crime, health issues, etc. related to drugs usage. And even drops in drug abuse itself. The one thing that has never really worked and continues to create endless amounts of misery is the war on drugs and all the collateral damage it causes.
I have the feeling they are easier to obtain than if they were only sold at dedicated stores and teenagers had to show an ID, or similar to casinos addict trying to get out could ask to be put on ban list.
Having said that, legalizing would not get rid of cartels, who are very diversified and also operate illegally on legal products by taxing producers and controlling transport and distribution. It would merely allow us to spend the same amount of money on health care and prevention so that less people get addicted and those who are have more chances of rehab.
If war on drug worked, you would see addicts accross the country in the news complaining that their dealers are all in jail and they can't find a new one. Or saying that their dealers do not have any stock so they have to travel to get their fix. Has this ever happened?
In most countries alcohol and tobacco are legal and widely available. They are both highly addictive and hazardous to health. And yet society mostly carries on, though we do lose some quantity of people to both of them.
> To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time
When people discuss "legalizing drugs" in the context of ending the war on drugs, they don't necessarily mean it should be sold at corner stores. Generally the exception to this is Cannabis which has its own legalization movement, but not hard drugs.
> I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice
This is usually what legalization means in most practical policy discussions. They want to make possession legal or "de-criminalized", not distribution. Because they want addicts to feel safe seeking help.
Portugal had a big "legalization" push around 2000 which saw a huge uptick in rehab and addiction treatment cases, and it's often the program advocates point to. Oregon tried this in 2020, but didn't couple it with strong social support (recovery programs) and rolled it back a few years later. Oregon is often what detractors point to.
Decriminalising without legalising manufacturing and distribution is a pretty shitty compromise, because it leaves lack of control of the safety of the drugs, and the violence and other criminality through the entire chain.
I see. I understood "legalization" to mean the same thing in this context that it means for cannabis, e.g. legal to distribute/purchase for recreational use. I should have clarified, thank you.
making drugs legal doesn’t mean it will be available at your local corner store. I’m all for keeping certain volumes of distribution illegal but no good has come from the war on drugs.
Yep I misunderstood "legal" to mean "regulated like alcohol/tobacco" or "unscheduled" in this context and "decriminalized" to be the colloquial term meaning "legal to own and use but illegal to sell." My mistake!
Addicts need help, if we want to reduce drug use we can do it through education and support. That's how tobacco use has dropped in western countries, not by banning it and using violence.
We already have legal meth, it's branded Adderall® and we regularly prescribe it to children, grad students, and hedge fund managers. You just have to be rich enough to afford the 'scrip.
Isn't Dexedrine just slow release dextroamphetamine?
There isn't really a whole lot of difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine. Meth is, weight for weight, stronger due to the methyl- group enabling the molecule to pass through cell membranes / the blood-brain barrier easier, and at the effect-equivalent dose most people wouldn't notice any difference.
I do think Adderall should be available OTC to everybody. It's an open secret that rich kids with no legitimate mental issues buy prescriptions for adderall to boost their school and job performance. The popular talk of "ADHD brains" for which Adderall works differently is pseudoscience tacitly endorsed by the medical community to make people feel okay about using these drugs. They don't just boost the school performance of people who have ADHD, they do that for everybody. It's a relatively harmless drug in the vein of caffeine, almost everybody would benifit from using it, not just the people with diagnosed attention disorders. Broad legalization would level the playing field.
Meth is different, even though it's basically the same if you look at it reductively. Meth hits you fast, it's not slow release. It gives you mind melting sex and gives you psychosis if you use it a lot. In a world where Adderall is easily and legally accessible to everybody, meth will remain desirable and ruinous.
It's not a submarine and I wish news outlets would stop saying "narco sub". It's a surface vessel designed to have only a very small part above water. Building an actual submarine capable of submerged travel for lengthy periods is quite difficult.
Semi-submersible wild be a more accurate description. Most of the boat is under water, usually only an inch or so down so it’s hard to see from a boat.
That’s some level of confidence on the part of the Colombian military. I thought it was still customary to declare at least half otherwise nobody would believe you.
I am wondering why they used the link so much that it was able to be used against them. Submersible loses benefits if it requires an external service.
Launch. Submerge. Drunkenly move in the direction of the destination. If N days since last check-in and/or uncertainty in location, ping mothership. Repeat. Only lean on communication channel for final handoff stage.
To that end I suspect that tracking starlink used in an unmanned narco sub would be trivial for an insider at the company. My first thought was “I wonder if the movement and activity pattern would be unique. Yes probably. If unique could a script be run to pinpoint them? Yes probably.” If law enforcement has tasked someone with doing this (likely and legal) there’s high likelihood that any future narcosub using starlink will be intercepted.
So to anyone on either side of this arms race: “you’re welcome”
This strikes me as not a very good technique. With minimal help from starlink law enforcement could find every sub out there. Anyhow, what does this buy you that an offline gps connected controller does not?
If you have direct control you need far less automation and can potentially solve more problems at sea or change destination as needed or retrieve it faster if it breaks down by telling you exactly what is wrong, and it requires less skills to build all the hardware. Your entire radio communications setup is as close to plug-and-play as it gets and it both looks like "legitimate" radio signals and is far less likely to detected on the ground as a remote control link since it is using phased array antennas pointed at the sky rather than at the horizon.
You also have to remember its not like they are building tons of identical subs and moved an entire fleet over to starlink. They could have a dozen very different setups running with just a few guys tinkering around with whatever devices are easy to obtain under the radar, and it prevents single design vulnerabilities from collapsing your entire sub delivery supply line at once. Even if it only evades enforcement a single time by being novel, the cocaine it delivers out values whatever hardware and work it took to setup in the first place.
This seems difficult. Even with two Starlinks: one to control it in Colombia, and one to control it at the destination coast, killing power to each. And make it autonomous on the way. This leaves the problem that there is a sudden (dis-)appearance of the link at sea, which might still make you light up like a lighthouse in analysis.
However, it would seem cartels could use a cubesat and make their own links?
GPS is only a confirmation of positioning. It doesn't free you from having a pilot in the vehicle.
Starlink opens the possibility for remote command & control. It opens up the possibility to fully remote drone capabilities.
Starlink should probably be disabled except to rarely report sensor data and accept new routing commands, so law enforcement can’t use EM scanning to find the source.
Because the cargo is high value and illegal, real time connectivity is needed. If it was on autopilot, how could they verify delivery? What if a third party was tipped by an insider and intercepted the shipment? What if it simply sank along the route?
I just imagine being a techie working for the cartel. In case you do not receive the ping, would you want to tell this to your violence prone boss: “Hey boss! Sooo. According to my calculations the significant investment you made in my idea should have pinged back by now. Maybe it is there, just there is something wrong with the SIM, or the antenna, or the network. Or maybe it is a few miles left or right on the coast and not getting cell signal. Or maybe the snorkel got swamped out on the sea and it stalled the engine and it is drifting somewhere. Or maybe our rivals nabbed it. Or maybe a random ship colided with it and it sunk. I hope this uncertainty is fine with you and won’t affect adversely our relationship, or how you treat my family.”
Don't ask me how a criminal operation holds together without either someone defecting and getting everyone killed, or someone killing someone else because they thought they were defecting. Presuming that it does, in fact, somehow maintain cohesion, I think they're all aware the submarine stuff is risky.
They're earning however many tens of millions of dollars per successful shipment and it's way higher than what it actually cost them to produce. And I'd guess they send perhaps ten to fifty shipments per year. Having 50% shrinkage is balanced by a 9999% profit margin.
This one, if it truly had no drugs in it, might have been a test run (risk-reducing).
At the cost of it being really obvious where you are.
However the bigger draw is probably high bandwidth two way communication globally. No need for an obvious route as you can use GPS to get near US waters before turning it on, while still being in control of location of delivery or even meet up with it on the open ocean.
Sending the position only requires a few bits, let's say 48. A position update requires even less, depending on how far it could have travelled since the last known position. At such low data rates you could hide the transmission quite effectively.
As a once off it’s not going to be investigated, start making regular trips and people are going to start looking for such signals. Short bursts strong enough to detected many hundreds of miles away inherently need to be fairly strong making them standout from the background noise for close receivers. You can similarly triangulate based on signal strength given some ocean ships or even cheap buoys.
Starlink needs to be detectable by satellites, but you can almost completely block the signal going in other directions.
SpaceX might already be sharing it’s data with coastguards though.
I also wonder if you could have a visible surface vessel (e.g. fishing boat) which acts as a navigation beacon for the sub. Sub can just follow the beacon without any active communication of its own. If enforcement appears, sub will destructively sink to avoid revealing the operation.
Wikipedia says unmanned underwater vehicles fall in the drone category as do unmanned surface vehicles.
Speaking of which does Ukraine use weaponized RC vehicles and roaming unmanned anti-ship subs? I would think you would get a larger payload and better damage from the undercarriage.
I think you are making mental assumptions that aren’t justified.
Narco drone subs are delivery vehicles, just not for the “last mile” to the end user. They are more like self-driving long haul trucks that don’t care about international borders.
But you could theoretically build a drone that would guide itself to a destination with just GPS right? It would potentially be even easier with water?
In the future millions of kilometers of cartel owned fiber optic will be laid from Columbia to the United States
I wonder what it's like being a developer / systems engineer for the cartel.
The definitive source for this stuff - he literally wrote the book on it - is H I Sutton http://www.hisutton.com/
He does videos on youtube too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO-VQllYIZo
Its very likely the mainstream media pick up this stuff because they follow him :D
"The vessel was not carrying drugs"
Why wouldn't they track it and wait until it rendezvoused with people they could arrest?
Also, today I learned it's illegal to operate a semi-submersible in Colombia.
Perhaps because they watched it long enough to know that it is not going to rendezvous with anyone, and if they wait longer it may turn around and they will lose sight of it?
I wonder how much of this is just a publicity stunt. Last time I dove deep into studying corruption in Latin America at University, Colombia was pretty much captive to the cartels. Hope it has gotten better now but I’m not sure if that’s the case given the massive Colombian diaspora that keeps increasing.
I just came across this podcast in the last week after wondering what ever happened to the FARC and AUC (right wing death squads) after the peace deal. How did things end up playing out relative compared to what was expected and feared at the time.
It’s a pretty batshit story that focuses on what became of the right wing death squads (they run the start of the cocaine supply chain it turns out among many other things) that’s extremely well researched and has amazing access. A strong recommendation from me https://insightcrime.org/audio-from-the-ground-up/the-shadow...
Next one will lie 300km of it's own fiber optic cable.
The next one after that will have a hologram of donald trump and atomatically try to bribe the officials with a detention center and bitcoins.
I'm kind of curious how much this matters to Colombia now. For this who haven't been following the drug wars, most of the action, and money, has moved to Mexico. If you only know this stuff through pop culture, Mexico today is what Colombia was in the 80's and 90's: the violence, level of corruption, money flowing through, etc.
Colombia is the main producer of illegal cocaine, responsible for 70 to 80 percent of the world's supply. It is the largest producer in the world.
Cocaine is still produced overwhelmingly in South America. Yes, it does have to go through Mexico. But the start of the trade route is Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru.
Also Mexican cartels are wreaking havoc in coastal Ecuador, which is being used in an alternative sea route for drug shipments north.
So yeah, South America is still a main hub of the drug trade.
Just legalize it already. This is stupid.
Cartels are already diversifying, thanks to bullish gold market they are going full tilt on gold. "In Colombia and Peru gangs are now thought to make more money from gold than from the sale of narcotics."[1]
[1]: https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/06/26/the-gold-b...
Even if they do, the cartels already own huge man & firepower. They will just move on to the next thing, maybe coffee, avocados, oil whatever.
When you have accumulated so much power you can demand cash from the world around you.
Coffee, avocados, and oil aren't illegal. But I'm pretty sure if you banned coffee it would spawn criminal gangs that made 1920s prohibition look tame.
There's no substitute for the margins you can get in the illegal drug trade. Take away the primary source of funding and you make it much easier to break the gangs. We've already gone through this. Just legalize it already.
They already extortion every single producer. Any coffee and avocado coming from South America has an extortion tax somewhere in the supply chain whether it’s to the farmers, shipping companies, distribution center warehouses at port or whatever you imagine. The extortion comes as placing gang members as part of security, real threats or just bribes to unlock to keep moving towards the consumer.
Illegal goods have better margins but extortions provide a platform for power and money with less effort.
They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced, if they can consolidate control. Latin America is 50% of the world coffee production. What will Starbucks / Nestle do? They will just pay up. They can even go against the families of the execs to make their case about the new price.
> What will Starbucks / Nestle do?
Finance wars. Like with the "Ten Cents War": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
They tried this before with fruit. The US companies just sold their interest in production and have plenty of other options for acquisition if they try to tax beyond the relative ease of South America verse anywhere else in the global south.
I would agree that letting black market bs continue will eventually lead to groups that could threaten global control on random other commodities but that's no reason kick the can further down this road.
Part of the reason such a large percentage of coffee is grown there is because it's cheap. The cartels can (and do) make profit on legitimate crops, but they can't magically rewrite the rules of capitalism.
Coffee beans are notoriously picky about their environment. But with modern technology, it wouldn't surprise me if large companies would resort to growing it in artificial greenhouses, or putting more stock in breeding plants that can be grown elsewhere.
They'll probably move onto mass producing weaponry, which, depending on the sophistication and scale, could be big issues for the rest of the world. They already partner with terrorist groups and other unsavory orgs as-is. Any group worth mentioning these days interfaces with the cartels
I don’t think weapon production is in their wheelhouse. Arms dealing maybe but not manufacturing. Facilities like those are permanent locations. Permanent locations tend to get raided and attacked.
I think controlling municipalities like they are is working fine for them. No need to mass produce weapons when you can just buy them.
They do have expertise in manufacturing and managing manufacturing facilities and logistics though. Likely the production equipment is not very sophisticated/ hard to reproduce if destroyed. I don’t expect them to produce state of the art F35s anyway.
Applies to corporations as well but they do it legally and we consider part of our 'economy'. Heck we even subsidize them and give them the power to lobby and legally be a 'person'.
- Problem? What Problem? I don't see no stinkin' Problem!
Not really, the competition with the existing governments will significantly limit the amount of replacement cash they can demand, so they won't be able to sustain the same scale of man/firepower
Which drugs exactly are you proposing to be legalized? All?
That would be the humane and sensible thing to do, so obviously we are not going to do that. Let’s double down on enforcement so violence, corruption and profits increase.
We really did not learn anything from the alcohol prohibition.
It's not a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption. Sure, the way the US cracked down on drugs did more harm than good. But that doesn't mean there should be no regulation for drugs whatsoever.
Take the opioid epidemic for example. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people per day. Do you think "humane and sensible" people were responsible for that?
The opioid epidemic is not a great example, as it began by overprescription of legal, regulated medicinal drugs. The problem blew up when authorities started cracking down on those prescriptions, and the newly dependent started seeking drugs from illegal sources. Those sources included clandestinely produced heroin and fentanyl, leading to massive numbers of overdose deaths.
In other words, it was the enforcement of prohibition that ultimately caused more societal and health issues than the quasi-legal sales of hard drugs. It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies!
So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption.
The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal.
Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people.
How could violence not result, when it is an integral part of the alleged ”solution”?
Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.
The only conclusion i can draw from all this insanity is that the powers that be want things to be this way.
Of course, "the powers that be" can want things to change, but not want to pay the cost required to truly change it.
As hyperbole, you can stop all court cases, assume everyone is guilty if they're arrested, and give everyone capital punishment. That would most likely end cartel issues rather quickly, but it would absolutely mess with society to a dangerous level. El Salvador took a (less hyperbolic) extreme approach, and it dramatically reduced crime, but it's not clear that citizens are actually happy with this outcome as.
Of course, it could be possible that leaders are corrupt, but it could simply be that the cost to fixing things is very high.
Or fix up the Latin America. Just stop pretending US has no control over internal politics of foreign countries.
We don't do that precisely because that's how you end up with this situation. We wonder how history repeats itself, but we can't be bothered to know history from over 40 years ago.
60 years actually but for the recent criminality you need to look to Venezuela’s attempt of revolution in the late 10’s which generated the expansion of the Tren de Aragua which evolved extortion from random events to an enterprise level kind of thing.
The US made this.
That’s a really smart idea, I don’t know why nobody thought of this or tried for multiple decades before.
The US is a big part of the problems of Latin America. They participate in the drug trade, big time.
The outcomes are bad for all parties involved.
Cocaine, I could maybe see the argument. But the article also said there was another submarine seized with 4.5BN worth of meth aboard. And I really hope you aren't suggesting legalising meth. I could see the argument that if other amphetamines were legal no one would use meth, but.....I don't think that's necessarily true. All the illegal meth would have to do to keep existing is to be cheaper than legal speed.
The war on drugs has failed.
Everyone agrees that no-one should do meth. But the solutions presented so far by prohibition are not just conceptually flawed - they demonstrably don’t work. We literally have 50+ years of data that shows it.
We need to a) legalize drugs, b) provide proper treatment to addicts, and c) get unsafe drugs off the streets.
I’m speaking as someone who lost a close family member to an overdose. What we’re doing now is not working.
I know we have data that shows just how harmful the war on drugs has been, but I'm curious if we have data showing that legalization in a modern society, with global supply chains and marketing campaigns, does not result in a bunch of people who previously wouldn't have done drugs - for fear of legal consequences, or just because they're hard to obtain - suddenly doing drugs. I'm genuinely interested to know, this isn't something I've made up my mind about.
I finally managed to quit vaping a year ago after starting as a teen. To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time or umpteenth time. Speaking only for myself, I suspect I would be a happier and more productive member of society if it continued to be the case that these chemicals were inaccessible to me. I'm interested to know if there's data suggesting that I'm mistaken or just an outlier.
Just given what I know about the issue (which, admittedly, isn't a lot), I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice. I want people to be able to test their drugs for fentanyl without fear of legal consequences, but I'm reluctant to trust corporations or individuals not to push addictive poison into the hands of the vulnerable when there are profit incentives and no legal boundaries.
Most places that focus on treatment rather than punishment see drops in all the relevant stats for deaths, crime, health issues, etc. related to drugs usage. And even drops in drug abuse itself. The one thing that has never really worked and continues to create endless amounts of misery is the war on drugs and all the collateral damage it causes.
It never worked. Not even a little bit.
> "or just because they're hard to obtain "
Are they?
I have the feeling they are easier to obtain than if they were only sold at dedicated stores and teenagers had to show an ID, or similar to casinos addict trying to get out could ask to be put on ban list.
Having said that, legalizing would not get rid of cartels, who are very diversified and also operate illegally on legal products by taxing producers and controlling transport and distribution. It would merely allow us to spend the same amount of money on health care and prevention so that less people get addicted and those who are have more chances of rehab.
If war on drug worked, you would see addicts accross the country in the news complaining that their dealers are all in jail and they can't find a new one. Or saying that their dealers do not have any stock so they have to travel to get their fix. Has this ever happened?
In most countries alcohol and tobacco are legal and widely available. They are both highly addictive and hazardous to health. And yet society mostly carries on, though we do lose some quantity of people to both of them.
> To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time
When people discuss "legalizing drugs" in the context of ending the war on drugs, they don't necessarily mean it should be sold at corner stores. Generally the exception to this is Cannabis which has its own legalization movement, but not hard drugs.
> I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice
This is usually what legalization means in most practical policy discussions. They want to make possession legal or "de-criminalized", not distribution. Because they want addicts to feel safe seeking help.
Portugal had a big "legalization" push around 2000 which saw a huge uptick in rehab and addiction treatment cases, and it's often the program advocates point to. Oregon tried this in 2020, but didn't couple it with strong social support (recovery programs) and rolled it back a few years later. Oregon is often what detractors point to.
Decriminalising without legalising manufacturing and distribution is a pretty shitty compromise, because it leaves lack of control of the safety of the drugs, and the violence and other criminality through the entire chain.
I see. I understood "legalization" to mean the same thing in this context that it means for cannabis, e.g. legal to distribute/purchase for recreational use. I should have clarified, thank you.
making drugs legal doesn’t mean it will be available at your local corner store. I’m all for keeping certain volumes of distribution illegal but no good has come from the war on drugs.
Yep I misunderstood "legal" to mean "regulated like alcohol/tobacco" or "unscheduled" in this context and "decriminalized" to be the colloquial term meaning "legal to own and use but illegal to sell." My mistake!
Addicts need help, if we want to reduce drug use we can do it through education and support. That's how tobacco use has dropped in western countries, not by banning it and using violence.
We already have legal meth, it's branded Adderall® and we regularly prescribe it to children, grad students, and hedge fund managers. You just have to be rich enough to afford the 'scrip.
Adderall is an amphetamine, but it is not methamphetamine. It would be closer to accurate to compare it to Dexedrine than meth.
Isn't Dexedrine just slow release dextroamphetamine?
There isn't really a whole lot of difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine. Meth is, weight for weight, stronger due to the methyl- group enabling the molecule to pass through cell membranes / the blood-brain barrier easier, and at the effect-equivalent dose most people wouldn't notice any difference.
Adderall is a mixture of 75% Dextroamphetamine and 25% Levoamphetamine.
The brand name is Desoxyn for meth
I do think Adderall should be available OTC to everybody. It's an open secret that rich kids with no legitimate mental issues buy prescriptions for adderall to boost their school and job performance. The popular talk of "ADHD brains" for which Adderall works differently is pseudoscience tacitly endorsed by the medical community to make people feel okay about using these drugs. They don't just boost the school performance of people who have ADHD, they do that for everybody. It's a relatively harmless drug in the vein of caffeine, almost everybody would benifit from using it, not just the people with diagnosed attention disorders. Broad legalization would level the playing field.
Meth is different, even though it's basically the same if you look at it reductively. Meth hits you fast, it's not slow release. It gives you mind melting sex and gives you psychosis if you use it a lot. In a world where Adderall is easily and legally accessible to everybody, meth will remain desirable and ruinous.
The $amount is dishonest.
Check the weight then compare with wholesale prices
Fascinating. Does the Starlink antenna work well underwater? Or was this sub surfacing to communicate?
Narco subs are mostly/entirely submerged to reduce visibility, but they almost all still operate at the surface
It's not a submarine and I wish news outlets would stop saying "narco sub". It's a surface vessel designed to have only a very small part above water. Building an actual submarine capable of submerged travel for lengthy periods is quite difficult.
The wavelengths used in satelite communication are entirely absorbed by water. I think the sub would have to surface to use the antenna.
Semi-submersible wild be a more accurate description. Most of the boat is under water, usually only an inch or so down so it’s hard to see from a boat.
> No drugs were found
That’s some level of confidence on the part of the Colombian military. I thought it was still customary to declare at least half otherwise nobody would believe you.
It’s possible they interdicted this on a test run.
I wonder if the alleged perpetrators are reading this thread? Are there any comments that would help with the next revision?
I think both conjectures are likely true.
I am wondering why they used the link so much that it was able to be used against them. Submersible loses benefits if it requires an external service.
Launch. Submerge. Drunkenly move in the direction of the destination. If N days since last check-in and/or uncertainty in location, ping mothership. Repeat. Only lean on communication channel for final handoff stage.
> Launch. Submerge. Drunkenly
I thought they were smuggling cocaine, not acid.
(this is like the second time this week someone has spelled out LSD on HN and it's been relevant)
To that end I suspect that tracking starlink used in an unmanned narco sub would be trivial for an insider at the company. My first thought was “I wonder if the movement and activity pattern would be unique. Yes probably. If unique could a script be run to pinpoint them? Yes probably.” If law enforcement has tasked someone with doing this (likely and legal) there’s high likelihood that any future narcosub using starlink will be intercepted. So to anyone on either side of this arms race: “you’re welcome”
This strikes me as not a very good technique. With minimal help from starlink law enforcement could find every sub out there. Anyhow, what does this buy you that an offline gps connected controller does not?
If you have direct control you need far less automation and can potentially solve more problems at sea or change destination as needed or retrieve it faster if it breaks down by telling you exactly what is wrong, and it requires less skills to build all the hardware. Your entire radio communications setup is as close to plug-and-play as it gets and it both looks like "legitimate" radio signals and is far less likely to detected on the ground as a remote control link since it is using phased array antennas pointed at the sky rather than at the horizon.
You also have to remember its not like they are building tons of identical subs and moved an entire fleet over to starlink. They could have a dozen very different setups running with just a few guys tinkering around with whatever devices are easy to obtain under the radar, and it prevents single design vulnerabilities from collapsing your entire sub delivery supply line at once. Even if it only evades enforcement a single time by being novel, the cocaine it delivers out values whatever hardware and work it took to setup in the first place.
Yes, this one got caught. ;)
This seems difficult. Even with two Starlinks: one to control it in Colombia, and one to control it at the destination coast, killing power to each. And make it autonomous on the way. This leaves the problem that there is a sudden (dis-)appearance of the link at sea, which might still make you light up like a lighthouse in analysis.
However, it would seem cartels could use a cubesat and make their own links?
GPS is only a confirmation of positioning. It doesn't free you from having a pilot in the vehicle.
Starlink opens the possibility for remote command & control. It opens up the possibility to fully remote drone capabilities.
Starlink should probably be disabled except to rarely report sensor data and accept new routing commands, so law enforcement can’t use EM scanning to find the source.
Because the cargo is high value and illegal, real time connectivity is needed. If it was on autopilot, how could they verify delivery? What if a third party was tipped by an insider and intercepted the shipment? What if it simply sank along the route?
>>If it was on autopilot, how could they verify delivery?
You put in a cheap SIM card and it will pick up signal when you get close to the coast and send a message saying it reached its destination.
I just imagine being a techie working for the cartel. In case you do not receive the ping, would you want to tell this to your violence prone boss: “Hey boss! Sooo. According to my calculations the significant investment you made in my idea should have pinged back by now. Maybe it is there, just there is something wrong with the SIM, or the antenna, or the network. Or maybe it is a few miles left or right on the coast and not getting cell signal. Or maybe the snorkel got swamped out on the sea and it stalled the engine and it is drifting somewhere. Or maybe our rivals nabbed it. Or maybe a random ship colided with it and it sunk. I hope this uncertainty is fine with you and won’t affect adversely our relationship, or how you treat my family.”
Sounds like a nightmare honestly.
Don't ask me how a criminal operation holds together without either someone defecting and getting everyone killed, or someone killing someone else because they thought they were defecting. Presuming that it does, in fact, somehow maintain cohesion, I think they're all aware the submarine stuff is risky.
They're earning however many tens of millions of dollars per successful shipment and it's way higher than what it actually cost them to produce. And I'd guess they send perhaps ten to fifty shipments per year. Having 50% shrinkage is balanced by a 9999% profit margin.
This one, if it truly had no drugs in it, might have been a test run (risk-reducing).
Remote tracking?
Just a simple radio transmitter could fulfil that function.
At the cost of it being really obvious where you are.
However the bigger draw is probably high bandwidth two way communication globally. No need for an obvious route as you can use GPS to get near US waters before turning it on, while still being in control of location of delivery or even meet up with it on the open ocean.
Not as obvious as a Starlink transmitter though!
Sending the position only requires a few bits, let's say 48. A position update requires even less, depending on how far it could have travelled since the last known position. At such low data rates you could hide the transmission quite effectively.
As a once off it’s not going to be investigated, start making regular trips and people are going to start looking for such signals. Short bursts strong enough to detected many hundreds of miles away inherently need to be fairly strong making them standout from the background noise for close receivers. You can similarly triangulate based on signal strength given some ocean ships or even cheap buoys.
Starlink needs to be detectable by satellites, but you can almost completely block the signal going in other directions.
SpaceX might already be sharing it’s data with coastguards though.
I also wonder if you could have a visible surface vessel (e.g. fishing boat) which acts as a navigation beacon for the sub. Sub can just follow the beacon without any active communication of its own. If enforcement appears, sub will destructively sink to avoid revealing the operation.
No. Consider the distances.
I thought drone delivery was years off, but I guess that only matters if the law is being followed.
Like most things, the tech is ahead of the legislation. ;)
Drone delivery is a pretty different thing. Drones are clearly visible to everyone. Submarines are... not that.
Wikipedia says unmanned underwater vehicles fall in the drone category as do unmanned surface vehicles.
Speaking of which does Ukraine use weaponized RC vehicles and roaming unmanned anti-ship subs? I would think you would get a larger payload and better damage from the undercarriage.
I think you are making mental assumptions that aren’t justified.
Narco drone subs are delivery vehicles, just not for the “last mile” to the end user. They are more like self-driving long haul trucks that don’t care about international borders.
I think the person you are replying to was making a joke.
What’s the purpose of starlink? Can’t be for GPS?
Remote command & control.
Drone submarine doesn’t require life support systems so it can be smaller, simpler, and stay submerged longer.
Search "Magura drone boat Ukraine"
It’s a space based data network, used for internet access.
Right I get that. Sorry my question wasn’t clear.
But you could theoretically build a drone that would guide itself to a destination with just GPS right? It would potentially be even easier with water?
Do you even need the two way command and control?
George Foy - Contraband
Bokon Taylay!