Originally published at: The US and Canada litter the seas with exploded narco subs | Boing Boing
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I guess that’s where the saying “high as a fish” comes from.
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I read this as “nacho subs” and thought it sounded delicious.
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Dammit, there goes my diet!
Goes off and makes a nacho sub
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I scratch my head regarding the Canadian involvement in this. Are narco subs heading up the East Coast and entering the St. Lawrence Seaway ?
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Not ruling it out, but you realize Canada has a Pacific coast too, right?
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When I was younger, I thought that the US Coast Guard was a cool outfit, helping stranded people and engaging in harrowing rescues. Then once I was touring Moffett Field near Mt View, California where I saw USCG helicopters with pot leaf insignias on them. They represented drug busts they were involved with, not unlike notches on a gun for how many killed. My attitude instantly changed: In my book, they were now less like the good guys (the local fire department) and more like the bad guys (the local police).
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While far less dramatic, may I suggest just towing the boats someplace and disposing of the drugs and oil safely?
Apparently, that seems too much like the right thing to do. It says a lot that those in command of these operations agreed with this approach. There’s money in salvage and scrap, right? I’ve got to wonder if munitions manufacturers are funding those big budget movies and video games where a bunch of things go boom - and then they move on to the next scene.
Hopefully, environmental groups, regulatory agencies, and negative press will lead to changes. Maybe “explosive content” could include more consequences, so that particular choice looks less like fun and more like work. There could be post-explosion scenes involving dead marine life, exposure to toxins, wreckage, and other problems requiring lots of cleanup. 
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The Coast Guard is downright creepy, shackling prisoners on deck for extended times just because it’s more convenient than bringing them ashore for trial:
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Seems like a perfect way to raise money by invoking RICO and auctioning off confiscated submarines for “research purposes”.
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The War on Drugs continues to fuck up the world in multifarious ways.
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Thanks for the link, I hadn’t heard of this. Here’s one disturbing story from the article of one man who was captured by the US Coast Goard:
"He is a fisherman from a coastal town in Ecuador and was having a particularly, economically, rough year and made a decision to take a job smuggling cocaine off of the coast of Ecuador. He really didn’t know all that much about what he was doing.
As he was moving this cocaine on a boat with three other men, another Ecuadorian man and a Colombian man, they were approaching Central America, approaching Guatemala and the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard intercepted that boat and pulled these men off. For the next 70 days, Mr. Arcentales and the other man he was detained with were held — always chained by their ankle to the deck of a ship or to a cable running along one of these large Coast Guard or Navy ships — for 70 days. He was moved from ship to ship as these Coast Guard cutters went about their patrols, picking up more cocaine in the Pacific Ocean."
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Do we really want to supply templates for these to the highest bidder?
These “submarines” are death traps & the only people who would ever buy one are the cartels. The Narcos are OK with killing off most of the crews, we, generally are not.
The author should volunteer trying to implement his suggestion, either paying for a flotilla of tugs or piloting these deathtraps back to port. Having a less than 50% chance of surviving and/or losing fortunes just to bring them back to port would likely change his point of view.
nice “UFO descends into the sea” video quality here. But seriously, why are “cartels” still importing cannabis into the USA? Is it not de facto legal everywhere there now?
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