cannabisnews.com: The Prohibitionist’s Burden





The Prohibitionist’s Burden
Posted by FoM on July 10, 2001 at 08:28:05 PT
By Mike Krause & Dave Kopel
Source: National Review
On May 3rd, the U.S. Coast Guard boarded the Belize ship Svesda Maru in international waters, seized over 26,000 pounds of cocaine, and the crew into the United States for prosecution. The bust was hailed as the largest maritime drug seizure ever and is sure to be used by some as evidence that we are winning the war on drugs. Actually, it's better evidence that imperialism is one of the side effects of the U.S. government's addiction to the drug war. 
Over the last five years, the Coast Guard has been involved in the seizure of over 490,000 pounds of cocaine with value of over 17 billion dollars, not counting the latest seizure. Yet today in America, cocaine is cheaper and purer than it was 15 years ago.In 1997, the Coast Guard claimed a 16% cocaine seizure rate. The U.S. National Drug Control Strategy calls for reducing the supply of cocaine by 25% in 2002 and by 50% in 2007 — but this is like a Soviet five-year economic plan which promised to double steel production and triple grain harvests. What the Svesda Maru bust suggests is that more cocaine is actually getting through than ever before. The more drug shipments carrying more cocaine, the more ships for the Coast Guard to catch.The Svesda Maru was spotted by a U.S. Customs airplane, stopped by a U.S. Navy Guided Missile Frigate some 1,500 miles from U.S. shores and boarded by an accompanying Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment (LEDET) who searched the ship for five days before being relieved by an actual Coast Guard Cutter, whose crew found the drugs.The U.S. Code (Title 14, sect. 89) gives the Coast Guard the authority to "At any time, to go on board of any vessel subject to the jurisdiction, or to the operation of any law, of the United States, address inquiries to those on board, examine the ships documents and examine, inspect and search the vessel…" In other words, Congress has repealed the Fourth Amendment for everyone on a ship.The Coast Guard can come onboard and snoop around whenever it wants. Recreational boaters in coastal waters tell numerous stories about the Coast Guard inviting itself onto fishing boats, sailing sloops, and every other kind of boat, in order to start looking about for a stray joint, as a pretext to seize ship. Federal forfeiture laws promote this form of legalized piracy.But how did the Navy get involved in this? What about the federal law (the Posse Comitatus Act) which forbids the military to participate in law enforcement? What about the principle that turning the military into a police agency is a disaster for freedom and due process — as many other countries have learned the hard way?During peacetime, the Coast Guard is part of the Department of Transportation, not part of the Navy. So the Coast Guard doesn't have to obey the Posse Comitatus Act. Thus, what the Navy does is put some Coast Guard personnel on Navy ships. Then, when U.S. Navy guided missile frigate wants to stop being a warship and become a world's police cruiser, it hoists a Coast Guard flag, and magically become a legitimate law enforcement platform. "Coast Guard" naval operations have put the Coast Guard very far from America's coast: in Ecuador, Guatemala, and even on the rivers of land-locked Bolivia. (Likewise, the United States Border Patrol has also been sent to Bolivia.) The Coast Guard gets the credit for the bust, but it is the Navy and the Navy's drug interdiction budget that runs the drug war at sea.One of the authors, Mike Krause, served in the Coast Guard from 1989-1991, including five joint agency Caribbean patrols on the Coast Guard Cutter Hamilton. If the Hamilton wanted to board a foreign vessel in international waters to look for drugs, the crew would simply ask. Now why would the master of a ship, outside U.S. territorial waters, consent to the U.S. Navy/Coast Guard boarding his ship? Because it is more coercion than consent. The Hamilton was 378-feet long and in addition to her main 3-inch gun and an array of M-60 machine gun mounts, she carried six harpoon missiles on her bow. The captain of a ship in the middle of the ocean would be hard-pressed to turn down a request from a warship capable of blowing him out of the water. This would be similar to a squad of police on your front porch pointing guns in your general direction, then "asking" to come inside and look around. But even if a ship's captain refused, it really doesn't matter. The Coast Guard already has blanket permission from some nations to board foreign flagged ships. The Svesda Maru was caught in the "Transit Zone", a six million square mile area that includes the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, over which the U.S. seeks to enforce international anti-smuggling laws, even over foreign vessels and in cooperating nations' sovereign waters.Testifying before Congress in 1999, Coast Guard Rear Admiral Ernest Riutta explained that Article 17 of the 1988 United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psycotropic Substances requires "cooperation to the fullest extent possible to suppress illicit traffic by sea, in conformity with the international law of the sea."Article 17 is the basis for U.S. agreements with nations within the "zone," which give the U.S. authority to board and search vessels of a signatory nation in international waters and to pursue, stop and search vessels in sovereign waters. About two dozen nations, including Belize have signed such agreements with the U.S.But is Belize a cooperating nation, or simply afraid of being on the bad side of the U.S.? In 1999, Belize was removed from the State Department's list of major drug-transit countries. This is important because it eases the threat of being decertified as a cooperating nation and potential loss of U.S. backed international development aid. ("Development aid" is often a euphemism for money taken from U.S. taxpayers and given to corrupt governments and their local allies. Only a small fraction of development aid benefits poor people in the recipient country.)According to the State Dept. Narcotics report, U.S. tax dollars have gone to train Belize's' new Counter Narcotics Task Force, renovation of the Belize City Police Station, the forming of a Joint Information Coordination Center in Belize and a Police Canine Unit. Allowing their rich Uncle Sam to board and seize their ships seems the least they can do.But while the Coast Guard (and the Navy and the Customs Service) are busy policing the waters of supposedly sovereign nations, who is looking after the U.S. shores? All those Coast Guard personnel in non-coastal Bolivia or in the waters of Belize aren't available to help victims of boating accidents, contain oil spills, or perform the other duties of an agency whose job is to guard the American coast, not to patrol the jungles of Bolivia.And while Latin American governments have always been eager to surrender their sovereignty in exchange for American government money that goes straight into their pockets, the innocent people of Latin America — the ones who find U.S. Navy cannons pointed at them, and whose fishing boats get searched for hours or days while the "Coast" Guard searches for drugs and fish go somewhere else — may begin to wonder why they are being subjected to American military law enforcement in a futile effort to prevent some Americans from consuming politically incorrect substances.Note: Congress has repealed the Fourth Amendment for everyone on a ship.Mike Krause is a research associate with the Independence Institute -- http://www.i2i.org/ -- & a veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard where among other duties, he served as boat coxswain for drug patrols in the Caribbean Sea. Dave Kopel -- http://i2i.org/davepage.htm -- is research director at the Independence Institute, and author of a chapter in the Cato Institute -- http://www.cato.org/ -- book After Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policy in the Twenty-first Century.Source: National Review (US)Author: Mike Krause & Dave KopelPublished: July 10, 2001 Copyright: 2001 National ReviewContact: letters nationalreview.comWebsite: http://www.nationalreview.com/CannabisNews Articles - Fourth Amendmenthttp://cannabisnews.com/thcgi/search.pl?K=fourth+amendment
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Comment #9 posted by dddd on July 11, 2001 at 09:14:09 PT
that's a good insight Doug
......to put it another way..... it relates to the reason that they make surethat the public thinks there are only two games intown,,Rep.,,or,,Dem.....Either way,they win,,sothey make sure that the false dichotomy dominatesthe media,making people buy into the fake "choice",between one or the other,,via fear.....
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Comment #8 posted by Doug on July 11, 2001 at 08:51:02 PT
Fear
I totally agreed with kaptinemo, but unfortunately too many people are unwilling to follow their consciences. We're still a fear-based society, and when they get in the voting booth (or as here in Oregon we had mail-in ballots so voted in our living rooms) the fear that someone they don't want might be elected is overpowering and so they vote for someone else who they dislike less. I feel as long as people keep voting (and acting) from fear, they will always get what they fear.And since things aren't getting any better, and the two "Establishment Elites" are not only acting more similar but even talking more similar, there is only one solution. When you're offered the two choices of murder by hanging or murder by firing squad, you've got to realize that the game is fixed and make your own options.
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Comment #7 posted by dddd on July 11, 2001 at 05:31:23 PT
HEY!
CongressmanSuet,,,,,read Kaps words of wisdom for the future elections......I was right,,but just too early......or who knows,,if more people like you and my brother would have listened to the voice of reason.....Harry Browns' ass might be sittin' in that big chair now,,,,or maybe Ralph Nader,,if he could have ducked when driving around those darn grassy knolls..dddd
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Comment #6 posted by kaptinemo on July 11, 2001 at 04:59:22 PT:
It's that time again
Time to register prospective voters. And inform them they have other choicse besides DemoPublican.I've held forth on this before: think what kind of message would be sent to the pols if a significant number of people registered as Independant.Mind you, I said 'register'. They don't even have to show up to vote. (Of course, it would be nice if they voted for the third parties they registered for, but I'm a realist.)Only the most benighted, calcium-cortexed pol would miss the obvious: people are fed up. Change your platforms or risk defections and losing districts. For example, the recent Jeffords defection from the Republican Party has taught the Reps the meaning of the words "bind not the mouths of the kine who tread the grain". Piss off the worker bees, don't invite them to important functions, denigrate their work, all the while expecting them to be a good little drone and take it, and when they don't and decide enough's enough, look out. One minute your party is the majority, and you think you can do anything you want because of that one-vote advantage, and in a single instant, they're the minority. Now imagine that both party's have to be extremely careful, lest a third party full of angry people decided to start throwing shoes in their long-established, highly lucrative and smoothly functioning political deals.)We've heard all manner of p*****g-and moaning from Dems that Nader gave Bush the White House. Friends, Gore and Bush belong both to the same club of Establishment Elitists that actually run this country. Party affiliations, like the party platforms, are bunkum for the masses. The fix was in from the git-go; Nader only proved how crooked the game was.But inject a viable "third" party into the equation, and they start to sweat.(That word is in quotation marks because, as most of us figured by now, George Wallace was bang on target when he said there's not a dime's worth of difference between the Reps and Dems; they're DemoPublicans. Third parties are actually 'second' parties.) Registering to vote Independant is a vote of no confidence in the rigged shell-game of American politics. A statement that the Elite would find hard to ignore. Because it hints at something much more dangerous to them: an awakening, of sorts.Get enough Americans interested in a 'third' party and they just might see some chance at - and entertain expectations - real change. Thwart those expectations in a very obvious way, and you risk something lots worse than a bunch of easily confused geriatric pensioners demanding recounts of their votes; you'll have an entire country ticked off enough at the political system to actually do something about it. The gloves would finally be off, and the majority of Americans that sense that something's wrong with the political system when we see the same old rich f*****rs making (highly lucrative) foreign and domestic policy and controlling the economy would have the confirmation of their suspicions.The Elites really don't want that. They prefer a somnambulistic electorate oblivious to their existence to one that's aware of their presence.
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Comment #5 posted by lookinside on July 10, 2001 at 19:26:04 PT:
power...
the government exercises it's power at the pleasure of thegoverned...supposedly...time to get rid of any politician that supports the WoD...athird party viable enough to garner 10% of the seats incongress could make changes far exceeding it's numericalmight...a good place to start might be the coastal districtsin california...we gotta try any and every avenue to stop this b******T...
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Comment #4 posted by E. Johnson on July 10, 2001 at 17:35:18 PT
Re: US Imperialism
How do you stand up to a bully that is 100's of times larger than you are? You make lot of allies and you all stand up to the bully together.
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Comment #3 posted by E. Johnson on July 10, 2001 at 11:21:21 PT
The left and the right unite?
Is the Drug War so bad that is gives common cause between the right and left?
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Comment #2 posted by kaptinemo on July 10, 2001 at 09:26:11 PT:
Doug, I was thinking the same things
The only thing that's missing are the 'press gangs', the nasty habit the Royal Navy had of kidnapping able-bodied seamen from US ships. Now, we are doing something just as bad: stealing the vessels of other nations. And on what grounds? Because a joint of cannabis is found on board, a whole vesel is seized?.The US Navy had best return to its' history books and remember what happened to pirates on the high seas; they were hunted to extinction by nations fed up with their sometimes governmentally ('letters of marque', remember?) excused criminality. One last thing: the Svesda Maru had 12 effin' tons of cocaine on board. Twelve...TONS. With that huge a haul, removing so much from circulation, to use anti logic, the street price should have gone ballistic, the quality should have dropped measurably, and the quantity should have become so small you'd need an electon microscope to find any.Instead, there's no appreciable difference in quality, price, or quantity. The ugly white river just pours right through the underground economy with nary a ripple on it's surface to show for the loss.How many more "Biggest Bust Ever!!!!!"'s will they need to realize that they are losing? Will it require 30 Tons? 50 tons? 100 tons? How much more before Uncle tumbles to the fact he is a modern day King Canute?
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Comment #1 posted by Doug on July 10, 2001 at 08:53:12 PT
U.S. Imperialism
Actually, it's better evidence that imperialism is one of the side effects of the U.S. government's addiction to the drug war.I never thought I'd see an article about U.S. imperialism in the National Review. The example given in this article is one of many that show that the only-remaining-Superpower is quite willing to lord it over anybody in the world. These kind of actions, as exemplified by the article above, reminds me of the type of behavior we found so reprehensible in the British when we were colonies of them.   But now it no longer seems possible to overthrow the imperialist power that boards ships at will. I'm sure other countries don't like it, but there is nothing they can do. How do you stand up to a bully that is 100's of times larger than you are? 
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