So Mr Drug Czar, how's that War on Drugs working out for you now?
About 20 tons of cocaine -- seized in the largest maritime bust in U.S. history with a street value of $500 million -- was unloaded under heavy guard Monday at Coast Guard Island in Alameda County.
U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Charley Diaz said the bust took place in the waters off Panama last month.
"The bust was pretty amazing," Diaz said. "We were told to go identify a vessel that had been spotted by a Coast Guard C-130. We found the vessel and sent a boarding team aboard. There were some inconsistencies between what the master was saying was in the containers and what the crew manifest said."
For a group that claims victory in the face of defeat, the Office of National Drug Control Policy seems to be finding itself deep in a quagmire right about now. If the United States were winning the War on Drugs, drugs would only be able to be realistically shipped into the country in small, extremely expensive quantities, not shipped in to the tune of forty thousand pounds of cocaine. That's akin to saying that we are winning the battle to control the flow of arms into Iraq with the announcement of a bust of enough ordnance, firearms and communication equipment to outfit an entire brigade's worth of insurgents.
Half a billion dollars. That's $12,500/pound of cocaine. Adjusted to the metric system, that's $27,500/Kg. According to this set of statistics from the, the average street price of Cocaine in the US in 2002 was $90/g. This seizure, divided per gram, was $27.50 per gram. Free market economics works, even when the government doesn't want it to.
I'm perhaps naive then, but isn't it important that we get any and all drugs confiscated, regardless of what it costs us to do so?
Just asking :)
No. The ends do not justify the means. The cost to society in terms of the damage to civil liberties has been higher than the cost to society that would have been caused by the increase in drug use.