Coast Guard seizes 223 pounds of cocaine from boat en route to Long Beach

There’s never a happy ending when you go broke as a Colombian drug smuggler. Police seized 223 pounds of cocaine and arrested two people who were en route to Long Beach after their ship was disabled, FOX11 Los Angeles reports.

The panga-style vessel, an open-top fishing boat with an outboard motor often used in developing countries, collapsed off the coast of Colombia on July 4 and is far from the first cocaine-filled boat to do so. The US pressure on the Colombian government to take action against the cocaine trade has completely failed. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), coke production in Colombia rose in 2021 to the highest level in two decades of monitoring. Reuters reports that the area planted with the coca plant has increased by 43% to 204,000 hectares (500,000 acres).

Needless to say, the two people on board the ship weren’t having their cocaine-infused American Dream of July 4th. According to a US Coast Guard press release in the Los Angeles-Long Beach sector, they stopped a Good Samaritan on their way to Long Beach. Her rescuers towed her broken boat – but ratted it out. Perhaps not wanting to get into trouble when they sensed the boat had more than people on board, the rescuers (although the smugglers probably wouldn’t use that word) contacted the Coast Guard and alerted them they suspected the panga -Boat had drugs on board.

Your suspicion was correct.

The Coast Guard searched the boat and found 223 pounds of cocaine hidden in the ship’s double bottom. US Customs and Border Protection officers detained the two people on board and impounded the passenger and the boat.

“This operation is an example of excellent cross-agency collaboration with the U.S. Coast Guard and CBP,” said Lt. Commander Keith Robinson, Chief of Law Enforcement, Los Angeles-Long Beach Sector.

Colombia’s leftist President Gustavo Petro is not a supporter of illegal drug smuggling. But he did make some interesting points about the environmental impact of the drug war, something too many U.S. cannabis growers whose crops have been burned know about. During his first speech to the General Assembly in 2022, Petro said the world’s dependence on money, oil and carbon is destroying the Colombian rainforest in what he called a “hypocritical” war on drugs, the UN reports.

“The forest that was supposed to be saved is being destroyed at the same time. To destroy the coca plant, they eject poisons like glyphosate that drips into our waterways, they arrest their growers and then imprison them,” he said. “The jungle burns, gentlemen, while you wage war and play with it. The jungle, the climatic pillar of the world, is disappearing with all its life. The large sponge that absorbs the planet’s CO2 evaporates. The jungle is our savior, but in my country it is seen as an enemy to be defeated, a weed to be eradicated,” Petro continued.

Rather than blame the plant, Petro has proposed expanding voluntary crop-replacement programs and regulating drugs by focusing on gang leadership while increasing social funding in coca-producing areas. He argues that the world’s dependence on oil and the negative climate impact of the failed drug war causes more deaths than drugs themselves.

“What is more toxic to mankind, cocaine, coal or oil? “The opinion of those in power has decreed that cocaine is poison and must be prosecuted even though it results in minimal overdose deaths…instead, coal and oil must be protected even if they can wipe out all of humanity,” he also said in his General Assembly Speech.

Petro’s point is best understood by knowing that the war on drugs fueled Colombia’s civil war – and there is a report that proves it. The study was conducted by a commission formed as part of the 2016 peace deal with left-wing rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The accord ended five decades of civil war and stated that “the unification of the interests of the United States and Colombia led to the construction of Plan Colombia” (a multi-billion dollar military aid program that began in 2000), “which brought the opposing party together.” -insurgency- , counter-terrorism and counter-narco-terrorism programs with the war on narco-terrorism,” reports The Guardian.

The report also noted that a “major change in drug policy” was needed, while appealing to the US, which had funded Colombian forces during the war.

And meanwhile, in America, cocaine is still just a Schedule II drug, while cannabis remains a Schedule I drug.