The Idiocy of Fighting Narco-Terrorists With a Useless $200 Billion Surface Navy

Talk about attacking a gnat with 1,000 pounds of TNT!

We are referring, of course, to the Donald’s latest gambit of sending a $40 billion carrier battle group to the coast of Venezuela in order to help kill a few fishermen (46 to date) on $400,000 speedboats, who run a side-gig of bringing cocaine across the Caribbean to distribution points to the US market. These hapless fishermen have been relabeled as “narco-terrorists” by the Washington War Machine, but as we show below, that’s pure barking hogwash.

The real reason for all the bellicose posturing from the Donald and the pathetic wanna be Navy Seal who got made Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is yet again “regime change”.

To be sure, Maduro is a relentlessly destructive socialist dictator, but so what? He doesn’t have even a tinpot military that could get out of port if it tried.

Moreover, if the Washington neocons have failed to notice a notable event, we haven’t. To wit, the Cold War ended 34 years ago – so the remnant of the World Communist Menace in China and Russia is no longer even a remote military threat to the Homeland Security of the US, even if the US spy satellites can identify an operative or two from these nations stumbling around the ruling courts of Caracas.

In short, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to be sending the state-of-the-art Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) carrier battle-group to the Venezuela coast on the hoary grounds of national security. In fact, this hideous exercise of the mighty US Navy is a reminder of the pure idiocy of the $200 billion per year that Washington spends on the Surface Navy and Marines.

In this day and age the skies are full of satellites and military arsenals are rife with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and high-powered, lethal fighter aircraft – and soon, mother-ship bombers capable of launching swarms of hundreds of weaponized drones at Navy battle groups floating on the surface waters like sitting ducks. So the only thing the Surface Navy is good for is –

• (a)fighting regime change wars of invasion and occupation against no-count third-world dictatorships, which is not a legitimate purpose of homeland security.
• (b)Helping to kill defenseless fishermen on speed boats!

Yes, under the Donald, that’s what the Mighty Washington Empire has been reduced to. So far, it has killed 46 Venezuelan fishermen for no valid purpose whatsoever.

And, no, it’s not because they are sending boatloads of “poison” to kill innocent Americans as per the bombastic rhetoric of Hegseth and Ice Barbie at the Homeland Security Department. The latter had this to say the other day, but it’s absolute malarkey.

“You’ve saved hundreds of millions of lives with the cocaine you’ve blown up in the Caribbean.”

OK, that just unadulterated bullshit. That is to say, last year there were 178 million alcohol drinkers in the US, which, unfortunately, resulted in 178,000 alcohol related deaths in the US. That’s a regrettable 0.1% fatality rate among users.

But alcohol isn’t illegal because America hasn’t forgotten the bitter lessons of the Prohibition disaster 100 years ago.

By contrast, the only illegal drug that comes in from Venezuela is cocaine. There is no evidence whatsoever by the Federal government’s own lights that any fentanyl comes into the US from Venezuela.

So the “killer” drug they are gumming about is cocaine. Yet even then, Venezuela grows zero percent of the annual US supply of about 826,000 pounds, and accounts for only 8% of US-bound shipments via transit from Colombia and other sources.

Still, cocaine may well be both illegal and a dubious source of recreational stimulants for most people, but it is actually no more deadly than alcohol. To wit, according to the DEA and other government agencies, last year, there were about 5 million cocaine users in the USA and about 5,000 deaths from pure cocaine overdoses.

In this regard, the higher figure of 20,000 cocaine deaths per year often cited by drug prohibitionists reflects the widespread spiking of street cocaine with deadly fentanyl. The latter is far, far cheaper at 0.3 cents per dose versus $150 per dose for cocaine or more than 1,000X more.

In any event, the fatality rate among cocaine users purely from cocaine is just 0.1% or the same as alcohol. Yet due to Nixon’s long-running misbegotten War on Drugs, we spend billions each year trying to eradicate it – a pointless effort that now includes even the mobilization of the US Navy against fishing boats.

But here’s the thing. Using $40 billion carrier battle groups to blow up cocaine-transiting speed boats is simply the stupidest, most irrational action ever conceived on the banks of the Potomac, and there is surely plenty of competition for that honor.

The reason is straightforward: Namely, interdiction and destruction of supply only drives up the price and drastically so – thereby making the illicit business of growing, shipping, and distributing cocaine all the more profitable. In turn, this also means that the illegal cartels which distribute it are capable of spending whatever it takes to counteract law enforcement and to compensate for the loss of product due to interdiction. Stated differently, the idiots behind prohibition – from alcohol to cocaine and heroin – believe that they can win by defying the law of supply and demand.

They most surely cannot. The only thing supply destruction actually accomplishes is to massively increase the revenue of the drug cartels and their ability to maintain ever larger armies of ever more violent operatives to conduct their insanely profitable businesses.

For want of doubt, let’s begin with the basic facts of supply and demand. Currently, Grok 4 indicates that US cocaine consumption is estimated at 514,000 pounds per year. Among an estimated 5.0 million active users, that’s an average annual consumption of 2 ounces per user per year. That is to say, the overwhelming number of recreational users are not about to kill themselves on 2 ounces of snort.

Nevertheless, the actual supply of cocaine coming into the USA in 2024 was about 826,000 pounds, meaning that about 312,000 pounds of seizures by the Coast Guard, other border control operations, and law enforcement domestically amount to nearly 61% of actual use.

Yes, for a product with the inherent high price inelasticity of a recreational stimulant like cocaine, just have the cops confiscate 61% of the end demand. That does make the price go sky-high!

And that gets us to the absurd economics of the so-called War on Drugs. In this case, we are talking about using hundreds of thousands of domestic law enforcement personnel led by the DEA, thousands of Coast Guard and other border patrol, and now $40 billion Navy carrier battle-groups to hunt down 312,000 pounds of a drug that is no more lethal than alcohol!

After all, the US government at all levels spends an estimated $100 billion per year on the War on Drugs. So even if just 20% of that is directly against the cocaine traffic, that’s nearly $320,000 per pound of cocaine interdicted!

That’s surely stupid enough, but it’s not even half of it. Spending that much on policing, interdiction, and supply destruction drives the price skyward. As shown below, the farm-gate value of cocaine paste grown in Colombia is just $382 per pound, which rises by another $525 per pound for in-country processing and delivery to shipping points, but then the cost of interdiction takes off like a bat out of hell.

The landed value in the US is estimated by Grok 4 at about $11,320 per pound. However, the shipping cost of the 826,000 pounds that makes its way to the US is not remotely the $10,340 per pound uplift from the port of export value. That 10X markup is plain and simple, the high cost of combating law enforcement and compensating for the 61% of supplies that are lost due to interdiction on the way to end customers.

Beyond that, as also shown by the table, there is another nearly 5X markup on the way from illegal entry at the US border to street value at retail. Needless to say, the standard ratio of landed price to retail for normal legal commerce is 2X, as exemplified by the case of coffee in the second column.

In all, the markup from the Columbia farm-gate to retail is 142.5X or $54,050 per pound of product distributed at retail. By contrast, coffee beans grown in Colombia and distributed via legal commerce exhibit a markup of just 2.86X between farm gate and retail value per pound. The only reason the farm-gate value of cocaine is more than 100X higher than that of coffee beans is that it takes about 500X more land to generate enough cocaine leaf for a pound of paste than it takes to grow enough coffee cherries for a pound of brew.

Accordingly, were cocaine commerce to be legal and were the leaf-based paste produced at the farm level at $382 per pound to be handled by legal shipping lines and domestic drug store distributors, the street retail value would be about $1,100 per pound or 98% less than current levels. Stated differently, the prohibition cost amounts to more than $53,000 per pound.

Stated differently, what does that $53,000 per pound cost of law enforcement and prohibition in the retail price of coke really fund?

Well, violent criminal syndicates. That’s what!

And yet and yet. The Donald is compounding the insanity by mobilizing $40 billion Naval carrier battle groups to make, well, a lot more totally unnecessary crime on the streets, byways and communities of America.

Supply Chain Cost Of Columbia-Produced Cocaine Versus Coffee