I was a US Submarine sailor, and one of our missions was to hunt these. The amount of sophistication of the narco subs was surprising

More than what’s here. The amount of money narco cartels are spending rival NATO countries in some cases.

Just legalize the drugs and tax this for good. People want drugs. Why is this so hard to accept? Many (not all, obviously) drug users manage to sustain better health and lives than an average drug-hater.

Drug criminalisation also provides funding and a market for other crime such as weapons smuggling and "homebrew" "justice" since they cannot use the normal justice system to resolve disputes.

In California, the illegal marijuana market continues to thrive because of the taxes and regulation.

Also, marijuana is not legal in the US at large, which California is a part of. Hard to judge the situation when it's legal but not really legal. Banks still refuse to help companies in the marijuana industry for example, as it is illegal on the federal level.

the other big problem is not enough licenses being given out to sell marijuana, and extensive corruption in the awarding of those licenses. much of the "legal" grows are diverted to the black market, because there is demand but no ability to sell. black market marijuana these days, depending on location and circumstances of course, is cheaper and higher quality than the legal market.

I'm having trouble verifying this. I find it unlikely that the illegal marijuana market is 'thriving' in California. It seems like all of the illegal weed dealers pivoted to selling mushrooms.

Just fix the taxation and regulation and increase enforcement. The illegal market will thrive if legal weed costs more than 2 times the illegal at equal quality and practically no risk. But I believe almost nobody will take any risk if the risk is real and the cost of avoiding it completely (by buying legal) is just a dollar or two extra.

Drug usage culture leads to better drug usage education and prevention than ever taught to public. Just read through "trip reports" etc. There's basically nobody telling you drugs are "all fun", because they're apparently not fun. But so is nicotine.

Tolerance is a difficult thing. Standing by and watching people hurt themselves can seem equivalent to actually hurting people.

To me a lot of even the protective rationale for prohibition is shown to be nonsense by alcohol being legal.

Alcohol is as bad or worse than most illegal drugs save maybe crystal meth and some opiates. It’s also one of the more addictive ones, up there with the opiates and possibly more so than cocaine for some people. (There seem to be differences in susceptibility to addiction to different substances between people just like everything else.)

All drugs can be harmful if misused or abused, even very tame OTC pharmaceuticals.

Semi-automatic weapons, very fast cars, risky sexual practices, huge fireworks, and dangerous sports are also legal at least in most of the USA.

Another legal drug in the US is tobacco. For decades it was heavily marketed as being safe, healthy, and cool. Yet its addictive properties raise questions about whether its use is strictly voluntary.

> Alcohol is as bad or worse than most illegal drugs save maybe crystal meth

Don't try this at home! :-) Not a medical advice, just logical speculation:

It is hard yet possible [for some rare individuals] to use meth sustainably for significant good and little harm. Right dosage, right supplements, right mindfulness, right partner and you can have increased productivity and sustain it, together with reasonably good health, for decades. I know there are at least some people who manage and that also is why medical desoxyn exists.

I believe individuals who can sustainably extract any significant productivity increase from regular (I don't mind an occasional beer with a friend) alcohol usage while minimizing the harm it does to really negligible levels are even more rare.

For many drugs, the worst negative effects are caused directly or indirectly by the drug being illegal. Opiates in general have very limited negative effects on your body - constipation is a common complication. People can br highly functional when using controlled doses of heroine. Morphine is a fairly common analgesic in hospitals because it’s strong, effective and poses little danger.

But needle sharing, the social stigma, the impurities in the drugs, the varying quality, that’s what gets you in the end. And all of these are caused by the drug being illegal, and to address this, you must make drug use legal. That doesn’t mean make it freely accessible in a supermarket, but controlled access like cigarettes and alcohol. Drug use must be treated like an illness, through health and prevention programs, through the medical system. Portugal does so, to great effect.

So if you’re talking about harm reduction bring the priority, then prioritize legalization. It will almost instantly reduce harm.

Spite is a powerful drug. There are lots of people who just want to watch other people suffer. Or ensure that those other people do indeed suffer.

I think one example is a program for homeless people that hands out keys to apartments to homeless people. It is far cheaper and far more effective than other homeless projects yet it gets huge amounts of anger, resentment and opposition from people who say things like "that's not fair - I pay my rent" or "that will just encourage people to not pay rent".

Another example is our country's opposition to sex education and abortion. To the religious people, there must be some sort of punishment for having pre-marital sex. Therefore preventing STI or pregnancy is, to them, absolutely immoral and should be illegalized as much as possible.

Spite. It's not just on the menu, it is the menu.

0 - https://dpbh.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/A%20MillionDollarMurray.pd...

Indeed, the real problem with drugs (also with many other things in our broken society) is not in people taking them. It is in people taking too much. People should learn to exercise whatever they would do in a sensible amount but they tend to pursue extremes in everything. They want more and more and this is what hurts them. At the same time there are people who take drugs rarely enough so they can get amazing effect from small doses, forget about tolerance and get almost no harm.

The US drug money is so abundant, that legalization goes beyond ideological acceptance. The system is so corrupted that legalization touches the interests of many powerful people.

The cartels basically run a parallel state in many places so that's not surprising.

Look at tax rates in the relevant nations and figure that the cartels use a good chunk of the same amount of money (they spend much less on social services and administrative programs that don't need duplication).

I mean, obviously the cartels have lots of money, but they don't have anywhere near the kind of money that NATO states spend on defense. The UK, for example, spends like $60 billion on defense.

Which NATO states do you have in mind?

Let’s say Canada, they spend 8 billion on defense. Mexican cartels, according to Wikipedia, earn between $13.6 to $49.4 billion annually. Of course there are more than one cartel and who knows how much they spend on that. But we don’t need to check every NATO budget to conclude the original comment might not be that wrong.

My numbers are almost a decade old, I can’t speak to specifics, but wanted to give a rough scale that this website is not doing justice to the complex wheels the cartels have in motion.

Thats interesting. I assumed narco subs fell into DHS/USCG jurisdiction and since they have no ASW/ASuW functionality (I think?), getting the USN involved seems kinda overkill? Am I wrong?

As an engineer I can't help but be kind of impressed with narco subs, especially traversing the atlantic from south america to europe. I wonder where this arms race will go: unmanned narco subs? weaponized narco subs?? yikes.

Does the Coast Guard have submarines?

Not that I know of, but I guess elements of the USCG can be seconded by the USN to assist in a law-enforcement capacity? it makes sense that the maritime forces get to play together though.

Also guess it would not violate the posse commitatus (sp?) act because this is off shore and not involving US citizens.

This is correct. The USCG often rides along with the Navy in order to conduct blue-water LE operations, as the Navy and DoD are barred from LE by Posse Comitatus.

Navy has vastly more maritime resources than the USCG and will pass info, but doesn't board ships or engage in pursuit on it's own.

It's actually a good system, as the difference between Defense and LE is important to maintain.

Depends on where. International waters? No problem. Close to shore? Need LE backup to be legal. Navy VBSS teams can and do run interdictions on the regular in open seas.

The movie Sicario is basically premised off this idea of getting a LE Officer onboard for legality’s sake.

Nope

By "hunt" he means "they're on the list of things we listen for and track and when the sonar guy finds one we pass the tip to the guys on land who'll pass it to the coast guard"

A submarine isn't gonna blow its cover to conduct what's basically a wet traffic stop except maybe in some edge case circumstances and even if they wanted to there's a bunch of other ancillary reasons not to do that.

By hunt I meant a specific deployment

This year they have evolved into narco submarine drones: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/04/spanish-police... .

I wonder if the rotor drones pictured there provide some type of guidance/comms to the submarine drones or if they were used for surveillance capabilities.

Curiously enough just a few days ago I saw a Spanish miniseries on South American narco subs crossing the Atlantic into Galicia: 'La marea negra'.