Posted by thm 15 hours ago
He does videos on youtube too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO-VQllYIZo
Its very likely the mainstream media pick up this stuff because they follow him :D
Why wouldn't they track it and wait until it rendezvoused with people they could arrest?
Also, today I learned it's illegal to operate a semi-submersible in Colombia.
Miguel Uribe is in the minority conservative party and was shot three times at campaign event by an underage youth who was hired for this purpose. A number of arrests have taken place.
The leftist president Gustavo Petro has not strongly reacted against this event, and the U.S. recently recalled their ambassador for somewhat confusing reasons (Columbia did the same).
It’s a pretty batshit story that focuses on what became of the right wing death squads (they run the start of the cocaine supply chain it turns out among many other things) that’s extremely well researched and has amazing access. A strong recommendation from me https://insightcrime.org/audio-from-the-ground-up/the-shadow...
Steer with GPS, that way you are only listening.
I wouldn't rely on Starlink, it seems like something that could be discovered easily. Any authority that had a map of where legit ships are could filter down to the mysterious Starlinks that are in the middle of the water, but near a remote coast, having traveled from Colombia, not on a known vessel.
Maybe if you need the comms, you rely on radio. Whatever the ham radio people use could perhaps be made into something. You don't need a lot of bandwidth anyway.
I guess the question is economics, then. How many trips could you get on a little boat that has a solar panel, electric engine, a battery, GPS, and a radio? And what would that cost?
It's the same reason it makes no sense to put solar panels on a car: the solar panels would add minutes of driving daily.
You would need massive area of solar panels to power a sub which is obviously not workable if you want to be stealthy.
> 72hrs On My Unlimited Range Solar Boat > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc2PFExZXas
The math doesn't work out.
So yeah, South America is still a main hub of the drug trade.
Quoting an AI summary (because I'm looking for a quick answer here):
Mexico has become the primary financial beneficiary of cocaine money today. Mexican cartels now control the most lucrative parts of the supply chain - smuggling into the US market and wholesale distribution. They've essentially become the "middlemen" who buy cocaine from Colombian producers at relatively low prices and then sell it in the US at much higher prices, capturing most of the profit margin.
Colombia remains important as a producer of coca and cocaine, but the economics have changed dramatically. Colombian groups now often function more as suppliers to Mexican cartels rather than controlling the entire supply chain themselves. The raw materials and initial processing generate far less revenue than the final distribution stages.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/06/26/the-gold-b...
When you have accumulated so much power you can demand cash from the world around you.
There's no substitute for the margins you can get in the illegal drug trade. Take away the primary source of funding and you make it much easier to break the gangs. We've already gone through this. Just legalize it already.
Illegal goods have better margins but extortions provide a platform for power and money with less effort.
Finance wars. Like with the "Ten Cents War": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
I would agree that letting black market bs continue will eventually lead to groups that could threaten global control on random other commodities but that's no reason kick the can further down this road.
No they couldn't. That'd just mint another cartel run black market that they don't control and that cartel would tax the black market coffee at substantially less.
You can kind of think of the current drugs situation as a "so big the number doesn't matter, it's a non stater" percent tax.
I think controlling municipalities like they are is working fine for them. No need to mass produce weapons when you can just buy them.
- Problem? What Problem? I don't see no stinkin' Problem!
We really did not learn anything from the alcohol prohibition.
Take the opioid epidemic for example. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people per day. Do you think "humane and sensible" people were responsible for that?
In other words, it was the enforcement of prohibition that ultimately caused more societal and health issues than the quasi-legal sales of hard drugs. It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies!
So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption.
The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal.
Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people.
How could violence not result, when it is an integral part of the alleged ”solution”?
Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.
> The opioid epidemic is not a great example
You think the issue of regulating heroin and fentanyl is comparable to alcohol prohibition, but not the opioid epidemic?
> The problem blew up when authorities started cracking down on those prescriptions
The problem blew up when pharmaceutical companies deceitfully advertised addictive pain killers as safe and aggressively prescribed them to even those who didn't need it. It would've been prevented if the government adequately stepped in before it happened. It was already too late when authorities started cracking down, and to frame that time as the starting point of the problem is blatantly disingenuous.
> It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies!
It's you who's framing the deregulation of OxyContin, heroin, and fentanyl as "humane and sensible," not me.
> So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption.
No, you haven't presented a single supporting argument that stands the test of logic and common sense.
> The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal.
What kind of logic is that? The only way to regulate something is to not regulate? What kind of mind games are you playing here?
> Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people.
Just because the US tries to solve every social issue with over-policing, police militarization, and mass incarceration doesn't mean that it's the only solution.
> Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.
Yes, and you think having more would-be Sacklers selling highly addictive drugs without anyone to stop them is a solution to that? Give us a break. Libertarianism doesn't stop billionaires and their exploitation of everyone else.
Do you really think ”legal” means unregulated? That, if something, is a libertarian viewpoint.
Think about how many regulations you need to fulfill to be able to legally build a house, or employ a person. Are those things completely unregulated? How about the fuel you purchase at a gas station? Ever get only water or nitromethane instead of unleaded gas? Of course you haven’t, because you are buying a legal, regulated product.
Making drugs legal would make it possible to enforce standards of quality, labeling, age limits, et cetera before the products ever got to market.
By making drugs illegal, the society has abandoned all those controls and replaced them with the threat of violence: enforcement of behavior instead of enforcement of regulations.
That does not sound like freedom to me.
(Please don’t start arguing that murder also needs to be legalized, we both know that is not what I’m arguing for.)
If an opiate addict could get their daily heroin legally for $10/day, there would be no black market filled with poorly dosed fentanyl pills that kill people.
The amount of overdose deaths is caused by enforcement forcing the market to select an inferior product, fentanyl
I’m not advocating for making opiates legal, for what it’s worth. I’ve been addicted to heroin, suboxone got me clean.
As hyperbole, you can stop all court cases, assume everyone is guilty if they're arrested, and give everyone capital punishment. That would most likely end cartel issues rather quickly, but it would absolutely mess with society to a dangerous level. El Salvador took a (less hyperbolic) extreme approach, and it dramatically reduced crime, but it's not clear that citizens are actually happy with this outcome as.
Of course, it could be possible that leaders are corrupt, but it could simply be that the cost to fixing things is very high.
Everyone agrees that no-one should do meth. But the solutions presented so far by prohibition are not just conceptually flawed - they demonstrably don’t work. We literally have 50+ years of data that shows it.
We need to a) legalize drugs, b) provide proper treatment to addicts, and c) get unsafe drugs off the streets.
I’m speaking as someone who lost a close family member to an overdose. What we’re doing now is not working.
I finally managed to quit vaping a year ago after starting as a teen. To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time or umpteenth time. Speaking only for myself, I suspect I would be a happier and more productive member of society if it continued to be the case that these chemicals were inaccessible to me. I'm interested to know if there's data suggesting that I'm mistaken or just an outlier.
Just given what I know about the issue (which, admittedly, isn't a lot), I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice. I want people to be able to test their drugs for fentanyl without fear of legal consequences, but I'm reluctant to trust corporations or individuals not to push addictive poison into the hands of the vulnerable when there are profit incentives and no legal boundaries.
It never worked. Not even a little bit.
Now that I can get weed at a legit store, I have no clue where to get the harder stuff. My dozens of hookups have all left the field.
Are they?
I have the feeling they are easier to obtain than if they were only sold at dedicated stores and teenagers had to show an ID, or similar to casinos addict trying to get out could ask to be put on ban list.
Having said that, legalizing would not get rid of cartels, who are very diversified and also operate illegally on legal products by taxing producers and controlling transport and distribution. It would merely allow us to spend the same amount of money on health care and prevention so that less people get addicted and those who are have more chances of rehab.
If war on drug worked, you would see addicts accross the country in the news complaining that their dealers are all in jail and they can't find a new one. Or saying that their dealers do not have any stock so they have to travel to get their fix. Has this ever happened?
There's no doubt in my mind that addicts know how to find dealers, and don't have trouble finding new dealers when their former dealer gets arrested. What I'm worried about and asking for data about is the possibility of legalization creating a new cohort of addicts who would start to use hard drugs if they were to be as conveniently-obtained as liquor.
I'm not advocating for the war on drugs, to be clear, I'm dubious about treating hard drugs like alcohol, tobacco, or weed (in some states). I still lean towards decriminalization of possession and harm-reduction as being better policy, but I recognize it doesn't solve all the issues.
1. Alcohol is deeply embedded in human culture, to get a significant portion of society to stop using it would be like trying to get people to stop eating bread or to stop having sex. It would be expensive and unproductive to enforce.
2. Alcohol is easy, though more dangerous, to make. To prohibit it would be to turn people towards more-dangerous moonshine.
3. Relatively speaking, alcohol's health effects aren't that bad; it's poison, but it's only very mild poison. Overindulging on alcohol once mostly leads to a hangover, it's difficult to drink enough alcohol to kill yourself and it starts to get unpleasant before you reach that point. The real dangers of alcohol seem to come with chronic use.
4. Alcohol is not extremely addictive. It seems most people can somewhat regularly partake without becoming alcoholics. In my understanding most addictive drugs won't get you hooked the very first time you try them, but trying them a few times is usually all it takes. Anecdotally, having used both, sometimes in excess, I find it much easier to resist a drink than nicotine.
If you pair these with the other harms and expenses of general drug prohibition (organized crime, disproportionate criminalization of minorities, etc) it becomes very hard to justify the prohibition of alcohol, in my mind.
Some of those things apply to tobacco too but to a lesser degree, so the case for illegalizing it might have some legs, although I suspect it's not worth it either. I might argue that burning tobacco products, specifically, should be illegalized due to the fact that there are several known, practical, and less destructive nicotine delivery methods. Lozenges, patches, and vapes work, and so far seem to be much less catastrophic for one's health. It's not clear to me that you'd get murderous tobacco cartels who lace their product with fentanyl.
When people discuss "legalizing drugs" in the context of ending the war on drugs, they don't necessarily mean it should be sold at corner stores. Generally the exception to this is Cannabis which has its own legalization movement, but not hard drugs.
> I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice
This is usually what legalization means in most practical policy discussions. They want to make possession legal or "de-criminalized", not distribution. Because they want addicts to feel safe seeking help.
Portugal had a big "legalization" push around 2000 which saw a huge uptick in rehab and addiction treatment cases, and it's often the program advocates point to. Oregon tried this in 2020, but didn't couple it with strong social support (recovery programs) and rolled it back a few years later. Oregon is often what detractors point to.
There isn't really a whole lot of difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine. Meth is, weight for weight, stronger due to the methyl- group enabling the molecule to pass through cell membranes / the blood-brain barrier easier, and at the effect-equivalent dose most people wouldn't notice any difference.
Meth is different, even though it's basically the same if you look at it reductively. Meth hits you fast, it's not slow release. It gives you mind melting sex and gives you psychosis if you use it a lot. In a world where Adderall is easily and legally accessible to everybody, meth will remain desirable and ruinous.
Check the weight then compare with wholesale prices
The black market can easily compete because they can sell a cheaper product without either of these things (and now that it's legal, it makes it easier to bring shipments into the country under the guise of a legal business) and it eventually drives the legitimate companies out of business.
This has now been seen in both Colorado and California.
Violence still drives the business and it only makes the cartels richer. I'm also tired of all the pot smoke you can smell everyone now in every US city where it's legalized.
The people like me, that didn't want drugs legalized, predicted all this would happen a decade or so ago.
Update: you know I'm right
That’s some level of confidence on the part of the Colombian military. I thought it was still customary to declare at least half otherwise nobody would believe you.