The Drug War at Sea Is Getting Bigger and Bigger
Traffickers have gone from using small boats and planes to putting vast loads in container ships.
By James Stavridis
August 12, 2021, 10:00 AM EDT
James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a retired U.S. Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also chair of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation and vice chairman of Global Affairs at the Carlyle Group. His latest book is "2034: A Novel of the Next World War."
At a Florida port, the U.S. Coast Guard drops off $1.4 billion worth of cocaine and marijuana seized in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. The haul, the fruit of nearly 30 incidents and boarding operations by the U.S., Canada and the Netherlands, contains nearly 60,000 pounds of cocaine alone.
No, it’s not a reboot of “Miami Vice” — it happened last week.
Huge shipments of drugs are being captured at sea on their way to the U.S. and Europe. In 2019, U.S. authorities boarded the Gayane, a 1,000-foot container ship registered in Liberia, as it was entering a Philadelphia marine terminal at the end of a 9,300-mile voyage from Chile. The raid netted 40,000 pounds of cocaine worth $1.3 billion.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-12/the-drug-war-at-sea-is-getting-bigger-and-bigger?srnd=opinion
