July 17, 2002

3:54 PM

Tech secrets of Cocaine, Inc.- a look at the IT infrastructures of Colombian drug cartels. "I spent this morning working on the budget," the head of DEA intelligence, Steve Casteel, said recently. "Do you think they have to worry about that? If they want it, they buy it."
posted by edlundart (24 comments total)

My comments when it was in print-only embargo, in a closely-related thread. If drug dealers are doing it, terrorists can, unfortunately.
posted by dhartung at 4:30 PM on July 17, 2002

IT Project Dream. Clear and specific goal. Unlimited budget. Anyone get in your way, kill them.
posted by stbalbach at 4:50 PM on July 17, 2002

the AS400 is a mainframe?
posted by quonsar at 5:01 PM on July 17, 2002

Clearly there is a big difference between money earned by producing something that people want despite overwhelming opposition, and money that is made essentially by legalized extortion.

Doncha think?
posted by clevershark at 5:08 PM on July 17, 2002

Heh.

And wouldn't it be nice if the head of the DEA were to give his head a shake and say "Hey, if this shit were legal but controlled, I could be making a freakin' mint overseeing the manufacturing and distribution chain! I'm gonna push for government-run drug stores!"
posted by five fresh fish at 6:35 PM on July 17, 2002

True story: Buddy of mine is a serious database jock, lives, sleeps, breathes the stuff. Right about this time of year in 1999, he got contacted by some parties interested in reviewing their "operational system" for Y2K compliance and doing some SQL development. Group of drug dealers in the southeastern US. Clandestine meetings, blind drops and blindfolds, etc. Small to medium small fry, no doubt, but one thing my friend said (he was intrigued by it, and thought seriously about it, but turned them down) was how much money they wanted to throw at him. And keep throwing at him, even after he said no, repeatedly. He finally wound up changing his phone number.

As I mentioned to him, imagine the penalties in your contract if your deliverables are buggy.
posted by ebarker at 7:05 PM on July 17, 2002

five fresh fish: That's what i keep thinking too. The logical leap from making his statement, to the one you're suggesting, is... not much of a leap. In fact, it seems almost impossible to me that someone can say what he said, based on his knowledge of the situation, and NOT see the benefits of controlled legalization.
posted by edlundart at 7:18 PM on July 17, 2002

The way I see it is that no matter how much the country puts into its war on drugs, the demand will just be too big. I think one possible solution is to head in the direction of the more liberal European countries. After hearing the opinions of a few distant in-law Dutch family, it just all seems to make sense.

The biggest thing that they emphasize is the separation between soft and hard drugs. Legalize and control marijuana, shrooms, and less lethal stuff like that and keep the penalties for cocaine, heroin, etc. I think the option of legal, less dangerous drugs will steer a lot of people (or at least future generations) away from deadly addiction. And the soft drugs will be that much safer. Holland is really the best example. Sure, people often toke up in the coffee shops, but isn't that better than having cocaine addicts dying all over the place? Not to mention the drug cartels killing everyone.
posted by swank6 at 8:36 PM on July 17, 2002

According to a former narcotics operative in the U.S. Army's Southern Command, cartel pilots routinely map the radar coverage of U.S. spy planes by putting FuzzBuster radar detectors in their drug plane cockpits and logging the hits.

Lol, that made my day :P
posted by delmoi at 8:45 PM on July 17, 2002

"I spent this morning working on the budget," the head of DEA intelligence, Steve Casteel, said recently. "Do you think they have to worry about that? If they want it, they buy it."

With a budget of almost 2 billion a year spent on a policy that makes things worse instead of better, I think the DEA has more than enough money to do their jobs

If drug dealers are doing it, terrorists can, unfortunately.
.
This is the same type of fear mongering behind many other fiascos such as the the internment of Japanese Americans and the genocide of Native Amerricans.
posted by keithl at 8:47 PM on July 17, 2002

Ah, yes, that's exactly what I was advocating, keithl. Internment and genocide. Thanks for completing my thoughts, as I merely hadn't determined how to present them to the present company.
posted by dhartung at 11:33 PM on July 17, 2002

I don't know if terrorists can really do this. For one thing, they're crazy. Why would someone capable of this bother with terrorism? There's not much money to be made in mass killings.

I mean, I'm sure this cartel could aquire a nuke if they wanted to.

Anyhoo. The DEA makes plenty of money of the war on drugs, both with taxpayer money and by confiscating peoples stuff if they think they might be involved in the drug war.

If the war did end, most of the money would evaporate. People would just buy generics.
posted by delmoi at 1:39 AM on July 18, 2002

All this drug war talk brings up one question that has bothered me for years. Perhaps one of you can shed some light.
Users get busted regularly and fill our prisons. Street dealers get busted on a regular basis and also fill our prisons. An occasional kingpin gets busted and is important enough to make some news.
The Mr. Moneybags behind these transactions NEVER get busted and they make multiples of billions every year. The real power behind the drug trade and they're bulletproof. Don't agree? Try and get a banking transparency law past some of our esteemed Congresscritters and see how quickly it gets quashed (say...Armey or Gramm or DeLay.) But little guys like us would get reported to the TIPS hotline for any transaction of 10K or more, a little less than billions shifted worldwide :).

So is the drug war another "blame the victims" game when we should be taking down the truly big guy, Mr. Moneybags (not gonna happen?)
posted by nofundy at 5:05 AM on July 18, 2002

As I mentioned to him, imagine the penalties in your contract if your deliverables are buggy.

Now that made me laugh.

I am usually pro-legalization, but the thought of this:

"Hey, if this shit were legal but controlled, I could be making a freakin' mint overseeing the manufacturing and distribution chain! I'm gonna push for government-run drug stores!"

scares the shit out of me. Imagine the DEA and the drug cartels working together (if they don't already).
posted by insomnyuk at 6:50 AM on July 18, 2002

Legalize drugs, and the drug cartels are out of business. Prices would come way down, wiping out their profit margins. They wouldn't get away with murdering competitors, because in a legal business, people would be willing to go to the cops. (You don't see Walmart and Kmart employees shooting at each other.) Their business would be taken over by a different brand of scum-suckers, like, say, Phillip Morris. Once the recreational drug market was firmly in the hands of legitimate corporations, we could bring some class-action suits against said corporations and win some money for treatment centers. We'd still have the societal health problem caused by the drugs, but we'd bankrupt organized crime and remove a corrupting influence on law enforcement.

Just my 2 cents worth.
posted by tdismukes at 7:16 AM on July 18, 2002

Cleveland is supposed to be doing better than average at stopping noxious white powder drugs. This article explains why:

Big Game Hunters - "The war on drugs has been criticized for targeting dimestore dealers. But the Caribbean/Gang Task Force pursues only the kings of the narcotics jungle."

Even so, our billionaires are facing stiff oppostion in their efforts to pass the Ohio Drug Treatment Initiative.
posted by sheauga at 7:29 AM on July 18, 2002

"Other examples (from disparate cases) were planes using fuzzbusters and GPS to determine the extent of US coastal radar, a packet-switching text-messaging network with encryption that was used to send instructions, warnings, etc. to various operatives, semi-submersibles which could approach coasts without detection by radar or just monitor police activity, and the coup-de-grace which is the move to fully operational diesel submarines. Sure, not every criminal cartel is that sophisticated, but clearly -- some are."

Fuzz busters defeating coastal radar? Fully operational diesel subs? Dhartung, you are without a doubt one of my favorite posters but that kind of paranoia is scary.
posted by keithl at 8:40 AM on July 18, 2002

When I say "legalize," I mean legalize in the way that many Canadian provinces have legalized alcohol: namely, the provincial government owns/licenses the stores that sell it, choose what those stores can sell, and taxes hell out of it.

Unfortunately, the taxes don't go to alcoholism treatment programs; it goes into g.d. general revenue. Sigh.

You can, of course, brew your own at home or, these days, at the local U-Brew. There are rules about it, the most important being that you can't sell your booze. Get caught selling, and you get jailtime.

So for drugs -- and I don't really care if it's just soft drugs or for all drugs -- let's have the government have control over the distribution chain, pricing, and taxes. Just like my local wineries make product that ends up in the stores, there can be commercial pot farms that supply weed to the government.

It can be quality-tested, prettily-packaged, THC-content-noted, rated for various effects (mellowing, jiving, hallucinatory, etc). It can be sold at a hella profit. People can, of course, grow their own, too.

Just make sure that the taxes go toward drug rehab programs. And come down *really hard* on anyone who's growing commercial quantities illegally, or selling shit on the streets.

I know that for almost everyone, the preference is to purchase known-good, known-quality product from the local liquor store, than to buy Creepy Mel's Moonshine. Don't hear much about ethanol poisoning these days, do we?
posted by five fresh fish at 9:44 AM on July 18, 2002

keithl, YOU MAY WANT TO READ THE GOD-DAMNED ARTICLE.

Just a suggestion.
posted by dhartung at 2:16 PM on July 18, 2002

What if keithl can't read? Did you ever consider that?
posted by websavvy at 2:34 PM on July 18, 2002

dhartung, read the article. I wasn't impressed or surprised by the content. The drug war has been going on for 30 years. 15 million Americans Americans have been jailed for doing something you openly brag about. When you have a product that costs $200 in one country and can be sold for $4000 there isn't police force in the world that can stand in the way of that profit margin. Smugglers have attached magnetic containers to cruise ships. Even gone so far as stuffing corpses of dead Americans being shipped back to the U.S. As long as drugs are illegal this kind of thing will always happen. And it will always evolve.

Submarines? Technology? A high-ranking Columbian military official says that cartels have a fleet of submarines? Please. Your link to a picture of an empty hull is no closer to being a submarine than my ironing board is to being a surfboard. The DEA will yet cash in with their budget using scare tactics and never once mention the Vietnam like quagmire of their mission. Where is the accountability?


You hysterically link this to the terrorists. Maybe if the FBI, and the CIA didn't have to divert so many resources to the war on drugs, 911 might have been prevented.
Also I guess the Iraqis didn't have their fuzz busters plugged in the MIGS during the Gulf war, otherwise things might have been different

Websavvy, no one likes a lackey.
posted by keithl at 6:08 PM on July 18, 2002

I'm being paranoid and "hysterical", yet you say:

Smugglers have attached magnetic containers to cruise ships. Even gone so far as stuffing corpses of dead Americans being shipped back to the U.S. As long as drugs are illegal this kind of thing will always happen. And it will always evolve.

What you're saying is no different from what I am saying, yet you choose to characterize what I say as paranoid and hysterical. Fuck you very much.
posted by dhartung at 8:45 PM on July 18, 2002

A liveried mail servant? A footman?
posted by websavvy at 8:48 PM on July 18, 2002

Male, even?
posted by websavvy at 8:49 PM on July 18, 2002