
Drug Submarine Seized In Ecuador Is Huge Leap For Smugglers  - dwynings
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128315848
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demallien
That's the problem with wars - they lead to arms races.... The sooner western
governments start looking into the development of safer recreational drugs (ie
no worse than alcohol, and preferably with low dependence), the sooner we can
get rid of drug lords, drug wars, and all the killing and suffering that goes
with it. Stupid stupid stupid....

~~~
shin_lao
The problem is that you don't want more recreational drugs in your country.
Alcohol is already a problem, so is tobacco, do we really want to add more?

It's naive to believe that legalizing drugs will damage drug lords. They will
continue to sell different kind of drugs, because whatever you legalize,
there's going to be a market for different kind of substances; and they will
simply flood the market with cheaper, not health-approved, substances.

An example of it is illegal cigarettes smuggling caused by the rise of
cigarettes prices.

There is an example of a country devastated by "soft" drugs, it's Djibouti
(<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djibouti>) with Khat
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khat>).

You really don't want your whole workforce getting just enough to buy Khat and
spend the day stoned or do you?

No silver bullet.

~~~
roel_v
/It's naive to believe that legalizing drugs will damage drug lords./

This is the most ridiculous thing I've heard in weeks on the internet, and
believe me, that counts for something.

How can they flood the market with cheaper substances? There is little reason
a kilo of cocaine should cost much more than a kilo of coffee (ok maybe 5
times more than that because of lower yield per square cultivated meter).
Still, the profit in the drug trade comes _directly_ from it being illegal -
i.e. the premium that users pay is a risk premium for the producers,
traffickers, whole-sellers and retailers. Making production legal would not
only make the product much much much safer but it would also reduce profit
margins by so much that the people currently employed in this economic sector
would be pushed out of the business by regular pharma / foodstuffs companies
almost overnight. Along with it, the corruption, assassination and many of the
other externalities would disappear, at the same speed.

~~~
dagw
Criminal gangs make good money selling tobacco and alcohol, which are legal
basically everywhere. Sure not as much as illegal drugs, but still good money.
Claiming legalization will destroy the illegal drug trade is just as naive as
believing legalization will have no effect.

~~~
roel_v
... well yes because of the market distortion that the taxes on them produce.
The only reason people smuggle them are to evade taxes. If you're going to
legalize and then tax it so high that it will still cost the same as before
the legalization, of course the negative side effects will continue to exist.

~~~
dagw
Do you honestly believe that the government would legalize drugs and then not
use the opportunity to increase their budget by heavily taxing them? In fact
one of the main argument I keep hearing for legalization is that it will bring
in all kinds of tax revenue.

~~~
roel_v
Of course it will be taxed, and probably at a higher rate than other products.
The trick is to tax it at such a level that fraud (smuggling) is contained
within acceptable bounds. For example, normal VAT here in the Netherlands
(only country I know the rates of by heart, I have no reason to believe that
it's significantly different in the rest of Western Europe) is 19% ;
cigarettes are taxed at close to 300 % (VAT + excise). Yet still smuggling
cigarettes is a relatively small problem, which indicates that this level can
be borne by the market.

Note that I support nor advocate 'sin' or 'health' taxes, be it for moral or
utilitarian reasons, I'm simply saying that even at 300% the amount of people
that turn to the black market is fairly small. But even when taxing them at
normal rates (VAT only) they would already bring in money - everything is
better than the 0 they bring in now, or negative if you take into account the
costs that arise from situations that exist _only_ because drugs are illegal.

(edit: added missing half sentence)

~~~
protomyth
Seeing the sales of cigarettes on reservation that do not honor state taxes
and the number of customers buying, I would say paragraph one is not
completely true. Smuggling is happening, it is just from a legal source.

~~~
roel_v
I don't understand - yes there is smuggling, but on a small as I indicated. In
Western Europe (the area I restricted myself to in my post) most of the
fraudulent import comes from Eastern Europe and Russia, so yes they are bought
legally there and then imported. Likewise, a fair number of people drive to
Luxembourg where the tax rates are lower.

I take it that you mean that (Native American or Aboriginal?) reservations
have autonomy when it comes to taxation and that they leverage that to attract
tobacco customers from outside the reservation. Which makes sense, but I'm
hard pressed to believe that it's a significant amount of total consumption.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations (based on estimates of the World Bank and
40% of the EU population smoking 10 cigarettes a day) say that in the EU on
less than 10% of all cigarettes smoked, no taxes have been paid. Which is not
that much.

Of course if you have numbers that show that in the case you indicate the
percentages are different I'd be interested to learn.

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profitoftruth85
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_Cowboys> is a good documentary on the
drug trade that has an interesting portion on the use of submersibles in the
drug trade. That documentary came out in 2006 and it showed how drug runners
had already evolved past these vessels by using containers shaped like
driftwood logs and attaching them by long ropes to fishing vessels. The
driftwood containers had gps trackers on them so when the coastguard came
close they would sink them with the rope attached and another ship would pick
them up later. I think its available on thepiratebay.

~~~
stcredzero
You don't even need GPS trackers on the containers. Just note the GPS location
at the time you cut the rope. Have a transponder aboard that listens for a
specific signal before it starts transmitting. Such devices would be cheap to
make and might be harder to detect than GPS devices which broadcast location
signals.

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avar
Both this submarine and the semi-submersibles they had earlier have crews.
It'd be very interesting if they can develop something completely autonomous.
E.g. a 10 meter tube that navigates by GPS, occasionally surfaces to get its
bearings, and has enough diesel for a ~5000km ocean voyage.

You could program that to zig-zag across the ocean and land on a beach
somewhere, where you could extract the cargo, refuel it, and send it back.

~~~
stcredzero
There have been oceangoing robots designed to move with very little power by
exploiting buoyancy and gliding on dive planes. Swarms of such small drones
could be exceedingly hard to detect and could be made cheaply in large
numbers.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_glider>

The practical range of these things is literally ocean-spanning. Program these
on roundabout courses and land them in random places on the coast. They would
be very hard to track.

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tomjen3
I wonder how much they would pay for some of the old Soviet diesel subs - they
are properly to expensive to scuttle after one trip, but they can properly
carry a lot more than these homemade ones, and they would be better at evading
radar too.

~~~
protomyth
Yeah, but the US Navy might be inclined to deal a tad bit differently with a
bunch of russian subs approaching the US shore.

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dublinclontarf
I did a little digging around a little more than a year ago when I had read
about the narcotics submersibles.

With this step up to full submarines I'm thinking that the people using these
can now have them built in almost any location next to the sea around the
world.

Somalia would seem to be a good place to build, no government to sieze them.

~~~
demallien
Well, yes and no - you need a decent chink of infrastructure to build a
submarine - you know, not having your engineering staff murdered, important
supplies stolen, that sort of thing. It's hard to supply the sort of
protection needed to guarantees these basic conditions when you're a long way
from your support base. Of course, if a Somali warlord wanted to get in on the
submarine-building business, he'd probably be able to make a decent amount of
money. But I bet you could get the same service from a shady shipyard in
Shanghai or somewhere similar for a lower price...

~~~
BerislavLopac
"a shady shipyard in Shanghai"

Thank you for giving me the title of my next novel. ;)

------
stcredzero
Prediction: market forces will collide. As electric cars become more
widespread, and lithium-ion batteries get cheaper, we'll get to the point when
it will be profitable to run such subs entirely on batteries. Such subs
wouldn't be disposable, but they could be exceedingly hard to detect.

