Enforcing the Law at Sea—Drug Interdiction since 1886! Pt. 2: The Rise of Marijuana and Cocaine

Following a decades-long pause that began soon after the end of Prohibition, the Coast Guard was once again called upon to combat maritime drug smugglers in the early 1970s.

Shortly after 6 p.m. on May 3, 1971, Coast Guard Cutter Point Barrow, a Coast Guard 82-foot patrol boat, raced outbound past the Golden Gate at the entrance to San Franciso Bay. Point Barrow then headed for a 57-foot converted shrimping vessel loitering a few miles offshore. The former fishing vessel fit the description of a suspected pot smuggling boat, Mercy Wiggins, which had been sighted to the south earlier that day by a U.S. Navy aircraft.

Although the suspect immediately attempted to escape to seaward, Point Barrow overtook them in about 20 minutes. In a position about ten miles southwest of Agate Beach, U.S. Customs Service special agents Erson Kern and William Wagoner boarded the suspect from the cutter, and immediately encountered two men. James Olson, the vessel’s captain, greeted the agents with the now famous line: “Please Gentlemen, you don’t need guns. We are professional smugglers, not gangsters.” Both Olson and his crewman, Gorden A. Maack, were arrested minutes later, after the Customs agents discovered 333 plastic-wrapped bales of marijuana, totaling 10,100 pounds, aboard.

Coincidently, this seizure was made only a few miles from the location where the Cutter Rush, also acting on intelligence from the Customs Service and with several Customs agents aboard, had made the service’s first-ever drug seizure at sea, in November 1886. On that occasion, a boarding party from the Rush had discovered 350 pounds of opium aboard the SS City of Rio De Janeiro.

The Rise of Marijuana Smuggling

By 1971, nearly 40 years had passed since the Coast Guard had last stopped a smuggler at sea. Within a few years of the end of Prohibition, maritime smuggling had declined precipitously…and so had the Coast Guard’s interdiction efforts. No longer were the service’s cutters and planes chasing down liquor-laden vessels in a widely unpopular effort to keep America sober. Instead, over the years the service had come to be seen as the “guys in the white hats.” Fisheries enforcement, protection of marine mammals, marine safety, search and rescue, and national defense became the mission foci of the service.

Then came the 1960s. Although widely known as the decade of civil rights, it was also the decade of counterculture and drug experimentation. During these years, many Americans explored the experience of LSD, heroin, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, and other hallucinogenic drugs. However, by the end of the decade, the popularity of these drugs had begun to wane.   Many new users, wary of the physical and psychological tolls associated with use of hard drugs, turned instead to pot. Marijuana was seen as a gentler, non-addictive alternative. Many Americans, then as today, felt that it should not be lumped together with hard drugs, or even that its use should not be illegal at all.

By 1971, studies estimated that more than half of college students and 40 percent of 18- to 21-year-olds nation-wide in the U.S. had tried smoking pot. Marijuana had become the recreational drug of choice…and nearby Mexico had become the premier supplier to a growing U.S. demand.

Concern over the rising rate of American drug use led Richard Nixon to campaign on the promise of a “War on Drugs.”  After his election, he sought to make good on this initiative. His strategy was based on “supply reduction.” Since most of the drugs consumed in the U.S. at that time—and essentially all the marijuana—came across the land border with Mexico, Nixon decided to reduce the supply by attacking the flow there, as drugs were smuggled across the border. The opening campaign of the new “war” was called “Operation Intercept.”

Operation Intercept, launched in September 1969, essentially closed the land border with Mexico for 10 days. Every northbound vehicle was searched, and crossings were brought to a virtual standstill. Although the scale of searches was soon eased to restore commerce, this effort ushered in a new level of heightened border scrutiny that severely restricted drug smuggling by vehicle from Mexico.

As a result, smugglers soon began to shift to maritime routes. Pleasure boats began sneaking marijuana into southern California from northern Mexico. Nine hundred pounds of marijuana were seized aboard a barge at Long Beach, California, in 1970. The owner of the Mercy Wiggins, seized in 1971, later claimed to have made six successful previous runs from Mexico to the U.S.

Despite efforts like these to flank the Mexico/U.S. land border, U.S.-sponsored aerial eradication of growing fields, and an extended drought doomed the efforts of Mexican growers. They were unable to meet the rising U.S. demand, and Colombian and Jamaican growers quickly stepped in to fill the void. Mexican growers would never regain their early market domination. By 1973 the Coast Guard would rapidly reorient its efforts towards interdiction, as it had at the start of Prohibition.

The case involving Coast Guard’s first marijuana seizure at sea began in January of that year.  The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, or BNDD, the forerunner of today’s DEA, had opened a “controlled delivery” case after being approached by the owner of the fishing boat Adventurer III in Miami. The boat, with undercover BNDD agents posing as crewmembers, headed to Jamaica to pick up a load of marijuana. However, when smugglers decided—after the Adventurer III had already picked up the load—to switch to an at-sea transfer to a contact boat rather than returning directly to Miami, the controlled delivery plan was no longer viable. Since the BNDD had no maritime assets and no authority to make arrests outside of the U.S., the agent in charge of the operation turned to the U.S. Coast Guard.

Cutter Dauntless was recalled from a patrol in the Florida Straits, and supported by a BNDD aircraft, was able to intercept the sports fisherman Big L with 1,130 pounds of marijuana that had been transferred from the Adventurer III, near Cat Cay, on the southwestern edge of the Bahamas.

This was the Coast Guard’s first boarding as the lead enforcement entity of a vessel smuggling drugs or alcohol in nearly 40 years. The seizure clearly marked the return of the Coast Guard’s role of stopping smugglers at sea—a major pivot from rescuing vessels in distress, checking safety equipment, and counting fish. The Coast Guard would quickly adapt to and flourish in its new “old” role, seizing more than 1,300 smuggling vessels and removing millions of pounds of marijuana from the maritime pipeline over the next decade.

The Rise of Cocaine Smuggling

Almost 10 years after the start of maritime marijuana smuggling, a gradual shift to hauling cocaine began. The smaller bulk and greater value of cocaine conferred a major advantage over smuggling marijuana: much smaller loads could be moved at a much greater profit. This meant that not only could cocaine be much more easily concealed aboard a smuggling vessel—which decreased the odds of a Coast Guard boarding party discovering it—the reduced-size loads could be moved aboard smaller, faster boats, lowering the chance of being detected in the first place.

The Coast Guard found only a few small cocaine loads—totaling only around 160 pounds—in the early 1980’s. The first interdiction of a boat carrying a major load took place on April 1, 1984. On that day, the USCGC Gallatin, a 370-foot, high endurance cutter, encountered the 33-foot S/V Chinook in the Windward Passage. A boarding party from the Gallatin conducted a consensual boarding of the vessel—one in which the master of the vessel agrees to allow a boarding party to come aboard—to check its registration after initial radio communications raised some discrepancies.

The boarding only raised more suspicion, including the presence of unaccounted for space in the Chinook’s hull. The master, a U.S. citizen, displayed a Canadian flag, but also claimed a homeport of Key West, Florida. The only other person on the boat was also a U.S. citizen. The results of an “EPIC check”—a query of DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center for intelligence indicating any drug-related activity—revealed that both the master and the vessel had been suspected of drug smuggling since 1975. Based on this intelligence and the discrepancies raised during the boarding, the Coast Guard requested a Statement of No Objection (SNO) from the government of Canada. Although unable to verify the vessel’s registry, Canadian authorities granted permission for the Coast Guard to board and search the vessel, and if illegal drugs were found, to enforce U.S. law. This sealed the Chinook’s fate—if it was Canadian, the Coast Guard was authorized to take law enforcement action; if it were not Canadian, a false claim of flag put the vessel in the stateless category, which would allow any nation’s enforcement units to act. The re-boarding led to the discovery of over 1,900 pounds of cocaine concealed aboard.  From then on, cocaine seizures increased yearly, and almost totally supplanted marijuana by 1990—a year in which the Coast Guard seized nearly 17,000 pounds of cocaine.

A Change in Smuggling Vessels and Technology

The shift to cocaine as the cargo of choice for drug smugglers also came with a shift in the type of vessel employed. While some cocaine smugglers continued to use the same types of fishing boats, sail boats, and coastal freighters that had been used to smuggle marijuana, many shifted to smaller, faster vessels—called “go-fasts” or “fast boats.” These were, as the terms suggest, propelled by high-powered outboard engines. Heading north from Colombia via both Caribbean and Eastern Pacific routes, they were hard to detect and harder to run down. Even supported by both long-range surveillance aircraft and cutter-embarked helicopters, cutters were hard-pressed to catch them.

Although the use of fast boats conferred several advantages on smugglers, these advantages were somewhat offset by the Coast Guard’s advances in detection technology and interdiction tactics. In response to increased seizures, smugglers advanced from using simple small fast boats to developing semi-submersibles, and to a much lesser degree, fully submersible vessels. No true, fully submersible vessels have actually been seized in the act of smuggling. Those that the press has called submersibles, have really been semi-submersibles. These are collectively called Low Profile Vessels (LPVs).

A semisubmersible is built such that its deck is awash or nearly awash when loaded. With only a small “conning tower” above the deck—out of which a person can see to steer the vessel—these vessels are difficult to detect both visually and by radar. Despite the small size of LPVs, they are still capable of transporting a multi-ton load over distances of hundreds of miles.

Credit: U.S. Coast Guard video by Patrick Kelley

U.S. Coast Guard crews transfer bales of seized cocaine from a semi-submersible suspected smuggling vessel onto Coast Guard interceptor boats and take them aboard the cutter Bertholf in international waters of the Eastern Pacific Ocean on Oct. 24, 2019. The semi-submersible was intercepted and cocaine seized the day before by the crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Harriet Lane.

To combat the growing threat posed by growing use of semi-submersible vessels, the U.S. enacted the Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act of 2008. This law made it a felony for any person to operate an unflagged submersible or semi-submersible vessel, with the intention of avoiding detection on the high seas—regardless of whether or not illegal drugs are onboard.  Persons interdicted in a semisubmersible or submersible vessel in international waters may be prosecuted in the U.S.

Credit: U.S. Coast Guard video by PO1 Matthew S. Masaschi

Boarding team members from the Coast Guard Cutter Bertholf and Pacific Tactical Law Enforcement Team board a low-profile-go-fast-vessel suspected of smuggling illicit drugs supported by an aircrew from the Coast Guard Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron aboard a MH-65D Dolphin helicopter and an aircrew from the Department of Homeland Security aboard a P-3 aircraft during the cutter’s counter narcotic patrol in the Eastern Pacific Ocean on March 3, 2018. The interdiction was the result of an interagency effort to thwart the flow of illicit narcotics by transnational crime networks.