Cartels Are Using Firetruck-Sized Drillers To Make Drug Pipelines 323
Daniel_Stuckey writes "In the beginning, they used catapults, dune buggies, 'jalapeños,' $1 million submarines, and sophisticated drug tunnels to move drugs northward. Now, Mexican drug cartels are taking to high-end industrial drills to carve out literal drug pipelines into the U.S. It's the next big leap in the evolution of the narcos' ingenious smuggle tech. The future of borderland drug running, it turns out, is boring. Jason Kersten reports on the phenomenon in a great GQ feature that focuses on the Sinaloa Cartel, the international crime syndicate believed to be behind the first known narco pipeline in 2008: '...Mexican authorities, responding to reports of a cave-in and flooding near the [All-American] canal, discovered a tunnel unlike anything they'd ever seen. Only ten inches wide, it was essentially a pipe. The Mexican cops traced it back to a house about 600 feet from the border, where they found a tractor-like vehicle with a long barrel on its side—a horizontal directional drill, or HDD.'"
something similar happened already (Score:5, Interesting)
Worse than jobs, it's authority (Score:5, Interesting)
My neighbor is a cop and a pretty conservative guy.
I've been on ride-a-longs with him and one thing that surprised me was the amount of "paperwork" (which is really just database entry, not actual paper) associated with pretty much any call. We went to a house that was under renovation that had been broken into. Lockbox smashed and door opened. As it happens, the house was nearly done and they had just finished doing the hardwood floors -- the place was EMPTY, no tools, nothing at all to steal. The only thing that had happened was the breaking and entering. We were at the house and talked to the owner for maybe 10 minutes. We were at the precinct entering data for nearly an HOUR!
I asked him what he does when he finds pot on someone. He said mostly nothing if its a small amount -- dump it on the ground and grind it up with this boot -- "You saw how much paperwork there is. If wrote every guy up with pot, I'd catch hell from my supervisor because I wouldn't be taking enough other calls."
But, I suspect that despite that street cops don't want to or can't arrest everyone, cops generally LIKE that pot is illegal because it gives them a LEVER. A tool to use against people to justify stopping them and searching them. Look at Stop and Frisk in NYC -- so many arrests there are from stopping someone, making them dump their pockets and then arresting them for public display of marijuana.
The DEA and the like organizationally don't like legalization because it undercuts their bureaucracy, but they really don't like the loss of authority.
Re:Worse than jobs, it's authority (Score:5, Interesting)
I was talking to my cop friend a month or so ago and he said the same thing: "No one wants pot to be legal more than us cops. We have better things to do. We really cant voice our opinions about it because as cops, we have a duty to enforce the laws. It's taboo for us as protesting the laws we are supposed to enforce. It's looked at as unprofessional by our superiors." Those aren't his exact words but it sums up what he said. Basically they have better things to do than arrest or fine a kid for a bag of weed. They simply destroy the bag and tell them to take a hike. The intoxicated trouble makers are mostly drunks who get into fights or car accidents. Its a bit ironic that the legal substance (alcohol) is responsible for more deaths and violence than the illegal substances.