Drug Submarine Seized In Ecuador Is Huge Leap For Smugglers | Hacker News Reader

Drug Submarine Seized In Ecuador Is Huge Leap For Smugglers

npr.org

46 pointsdwynings55 comments

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....

"O brave new world that has such people in it. Let's start at once."

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.

Why would the entire workplace suddenly decide to start using drugs? Its not like employers can't detect stoned employees.

You don't do it at work, you do it after. Your life purpose becomes "being able to pay for enough Khat".

The story there is that the man that managed Djibouti's port forbid the usage of Khat for his workers and couldn't walk around without his body guards.

I don't believe that for a second. Most people I know can get any drugs they want, and yet they're not a bunch of drugged up crazies, just like most adults can buy alcohol whenever they want, and most are not alcoholics.

Let people make their own decisions.

If people can use drugs at home and escape detection by their employer, how is it the employer you mentioned is able to enforce his rules?

The United States State department reports "Penalties for possessing, using, or trafficking in illegal drugs in Djibouti are severe, and convicted offenders can expect long jail sentences and heavy fines."

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1101.html

So severe penalties for drug use don't seem to work in your example. And they don't work in prisons in the US, either drug use runs wild and the state has complete control over the lives of the inhabitants.

/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.

Err... They would simply use their billions to go legit? No damage, just making their business legal.

If I may, let's say there's no more illegal activity related to drug. Would that solve violence? Not really, life of crime is chosen because you don't have options. Only the top drug lords are wealthy with drugs, read Freakonomics for more info about it.

There was an interview from a crime lord who said something along the lines "when people have the possibility to get real jobs, it's very difficult for me to hire".

Drug is one end of the problem, it's also a health problem in itself. But making drug legal won't solve much of violence and misery in the world.

Of course not. The skills and infrastructure needed to run criminal organization are vastly different from those to run a business in a regular market. Apart from that, I don't see the problem with former drug lords turning into 'regular' companies, as long as they stick to the rules of the 'regular' market, which they'll have to if they want to succeed. It's not like Proctor & Gamble goes around beating people up to maintain their edge in the diaper business.

Secondly, it will of course not solve all violence. But it will at least solve the assassinations (and the collateral damage that comes with it) that directly stem from doing business in a lawless world (there is no way to enforce contracts in the underground except by violence and reputation) and it will take away much of the necessity to commit petty crime by small time criminal junkies.

Depending on which country you look at, 20 to 60+ % of prison populations across the world are incarcerated for drug-related offenses. Are you honestly going to argue that all of those people will switch to robbing banks or other violent crimes when drugs are legalized? There are basically three ways to illegally make money nowadays: drugs, violent crimes (including property crimes which may not be 'violent' in the standard definition such as night-time burglary) and fraud (white collar but also smuggling cigarettes etc.) Many of the people who are now in the drug business will simply not have the opportunity to switch into a different field even if they wanted to!

And yes I did read Freakonomics, I don't know what your point is there. While an entertaining read, a quote from a single guy who may or may not be the 'drug lord' he's claiming hardly makes for a convincing argument to defend current drug policy on. It's quite obvious that 'solving' poverty (whatever that may mean, considering that 'poverty' is such an ill-defined concept) is a good way to eliminate crime. It's not something that can be reached with policy though, at least not in the near term. Drug policy is much more contained and within reach of the legislature (by definition even), if it weren't for all the people who oppose drugs on ideological and/or mis-informed factual grounds.

I don't get your point.

A poor person sells drug because it's the only way to make money. He doesn't make a lot of money out of it and any job would be better as he would get health care and pension on top of it. He would not also risk going to jail or die from a gunshot.

Now there's no more "illegal drugs" to sell.

What does this person do to make money? Remember there's no job for him/her and he somehow needs to eat to live.

I'm not saying the war on drug is fought properly, but between putting in jail all people who sell and/or consume drugs and let everyone do as they want there's probably stuff to be done.

Heroin was legal when first discovered, it was removed from the market because it's a lethal substance.

The "let everyone decide" doesn't work. Food education doesn't beat the commercial from Coca-Cola & the like. You would get the same problems with drugs, except drugs are not only lethal on the short term but somehow make you unproductive.

Then you're going to tell me "but we would regulate these drugs and they would have to comply to strict regulations". Boom. Crime opportunity.

My point is that legalizing some drugs wouldn't change the core of the problem.

Heroin was legal when first discovered, it was removed from the market because it's a lethal substance.

Care to cite a couple of sources for that? I thought it was due to being highly addictive with few medicinal benefits.

Your argument only holds if all poor people would switch to selling drugs. You're saying there is no alternative to selling drugs, which there obviously is, as demonstrated by the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who are poor yet do not sell drugs. If drugs are not illegal, those who are now selling drugs will simple have to do like the other poos people now.

No, I'm saying that people who currently chose a life of crime would look for other criminal activities.

Oh OK well I addressed that point two posts earlier. In short, most people who are now in the drug are not in a position to switch to other forms of crime. So overall the number of crimes and the number of criminals must go down. I have no data to back up any estimates onto how much, but I'd guess that something in the magnitude of 75% of all current criminals who commit crimes because of drugs now will not switch to violent crimes (let alone to fraud, for which - let's be frank here - most petty criminals are too stupid).

Hm. Didn't cocaine get an order of magnitude cheaper a decade ago? And didn't it mostly wipe out inner-city drug violence? Seems I remember Freakonomics covering this.

Err... They would simply use their billions to go legit? No damage, just making their business legal.

Yes, that is exactly what they will do. Read about the Kennedy family sometime.

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.

... 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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

By "not as much" do you mean way way less?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1268064...

Surely you aren't claiming alcohol smugglers create a level of violence even close to the "drug trade"?

Additionally, if laws for illegal production and distribution were kept as serious as they are now, the risk/benefit ratio would be way off.

It will impact drug lords. They will probably move to other illegal activities and violence is likely to increase. Still it will eliminate a big incentive for people to choose a criminal life.

This is really becoming very serious. Today, we woke up by the noise of gun fire. They killed a police officer a few blocks from my house. A LOT of innocent people are being killed everyday. My 17 year old nephew and his dad were killed last week. And every week something new happens.

legalization itself would make drugs safer. half the problem with illegal drug safety is the inconsistency in potency.

But when products are legal, brands develop that have an interest in delivering quality. And they have bank accounts. That guy in the alley really doesn't.

If I remember correctly, I think there's even a chemical you can add to cocaine that prevents overdose. No real incentive to do that when its an illegal product.

A living customer is far more profitable even to drug lords than a dead one.

Yes, but I don't think drug lords have a problem with the supply of those.

They can always blame someone in their supply chain. And I'm pretty sure returns aren't permitted anyway. And they have guns and are on drugs and could even report you to the police.

The normal incentives for ensuring quality simply are not there. I don't think they know about Six Sigma.

Drug lords are much like the big telecom companies in the US: They do want customers, but their product has steady enough growth that they don't mind burning a few customers if it's convenient to their business model. (See, for example, all the hate AT&T has gotten over its handling of iPhone customers.)

Might it not be better to make drugs less safe? Kill off all the users, and there's no market.

What we should do is make it illegal for hospitals to treat overdoses.

Why not just enforce a death penalty for drug use?

And maybe excessive parking tickets?

But who defines "excessive"? If we can define it as "1 ticket", that simplifies the whole process, since we can issue SWAT gear instead of ticket-writing paraphernalia to meter enforcement workers.

I think one ticket is fine. If you break the law once, you're likely to break it again. Kill off all the violators, and there's no lawbreakers.

>That's the problem with wars - they lead to arms races....

You were high when you wrote that, right?

This doc is worth watching http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/if-drugs-were-legal/ (the version on torrents has an after-movie discussion panel). It takes a shot on predicting the pros and cons of drug legalization, with fictional scenarios (including commercially developed recreational drugs you wrote about) and comments.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

"a shady shipyard in Shanghai"

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

Why not just buy one? They have the money.

What I find odd is that they're hiding their construction efforts at all. Why not start a company and build them out in the open? It's not like it's illegal to construct submarines.

It is illegal under US law to use unregistered vessels to evade detection anywhere in the open ocean.[1] I'm pretty sure the US government would extend "conspiring" to include your smuggling yacht company's owner and employees.

[1] http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s110-3598

In the U.S. yes, but this is in Ecuador. Such a company would operate wholly outside the U.S., and only sell the submarines in kit form, ready for assembly.

Here's the full text of the law b.t.w.: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-110publ407/html/PLAW-110pu...

As soon as a sub comes into international waters the law applies. I see no reason why the interpretation of "conspiring" would be hindered by kit-form subs or sovereignty of the manufacturing location. If there was a thriving market for cargo submarines for non-covert haulage, maybe.

I suppose if the shipyard owners don't do too many subs, don't travel internationally, and the country doesn't extradite to the United States, then the shipyard owner would be relatively secure. You'd have to make a fair number or be otherwise interesting for a forcible extraction.

Erm... an US law applies in international waters? It's not like Ecuador will go to war with the US if the US decides to arbitrarily enforce their rules on the open waters, but Venezuela might... (I'd try Venezuela if I were a drug smuggler)

Edit: the US law intends to apply to vessels "without nationality", but I'm pretty sure the crew has a nationality which might want to object.

Most other nations would at least release a statement against such practices by the US (I know mine would, heck I'd draft it myself)

Strange isn't it. And the crew can read that statement for 15 years while they "pay their debt to society".

I don't think this law has been used yet, at least it didn't make any news that I've seen. I expect there to be challenges and appeals the first time someone gets defended in court. Hopefully it will gut the law.

In case the back story is missing, the law was passed in reaction to semi-submersible smuggling boats that would travel in deep water and if confronted by US forces, the crew would just scuttle the boat and then wait for the coast guard or navy to rescue them. No evidence, no crime, plus now the task force has to return the crew they just rescued.

It will be really easy to follow the trail to see who is buying the submarines.

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.

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