Patrol boat off Venezuelan coast shoots and sinks vessel suspected of carrying drugs as three people go overboard

Patrol boat off Venezuelan coast shoots and sinks vessel suspected of carrying drugs as three people go overboard

A high-seas shootout pitting drug runners against the law ended with the smugglers’ boat at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea and the US Coast Guard seizing $63m worth of cocaine, authorities in Florida said on Friday.

The dramatic encounter took place on Tuesday about 25 miles (40km) north of Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, when the coast guard cutter Resolute – patrolling with the Dutch navy ship Groningen – identified a vessel in international waters suspected of carrying narcotics, according to a press releasefrom the USCG south-east region.

The crew of a joint forces fast interception craft fired on the suspected smugglers when the “non-compliant vessel” was turned at speed towards them, and the boat caught fire and sank. The US and Dutch sailors acted “in self-defense and defense of others in response to the life-threatening situation”, the press release said.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    1·
    20 days ago

    Imagine if this sort of money and effort was put into, I don’t know, providing people with free resources beyond shitty 12-step programs to fight alcohol and tobacco addictions in the U.S.

    I had to explain to my daughter how lobbying groups with big corporate money behind them are the reason tobacco is still legal in America but cannabis is (federally) not so.

    Someone might ask me what my tobacco cessation solution would be. This is what it would be: make tobacco and other nicotine products available by prescription. Doctors can then slowly wean addicts off of them by lessening the amount prescribed each time.

    Will some doctors do it wrong? Yes. Will some doctors just keep writing a “40 cigarettes a day” prescription for any patient who wants it? Yes. I still think it would work a lot better than what we have now… although it would need to be a subsidized program as well in the beginning so that poor addicts could also deal with this issue. But we have subsidized methadone clinics, so that should be doable as well.