El Problema de los Túneles de la Droga

Bienvenidos a la esquina de los Estados Unidos continentales.

Some homeless guy crawled on to the wheelchair ramp of my building and OD'ed on fentanyl last night.  Just there dead, needle sticking out of his arm.

And that's not really news. It will be added to a database some time in the next few weeks, if at all. Annoying and unsightly. Something to post about online.

I know everyone's about maximizing their profit but this cartel fentanyl laced crap is either a scurge or natural selection in disguise. Mentally ill homeless addicts from all states can come here and die on our streets. And like in New York City, get stepped over and barely noticed. And that's what they chose. They'd rather steal bikes and beg for drug money. Or just fight a street light. As it turns out fentanyl also sends mental disease to another level.

But here is the $64,000 dollar question: How do you stop it?

And before you say it. It's not coming over or through the wall, but under it.

Just some examples I could find.







On this last one the end point is actually the warehouse complex to the upper left of the endpoint pictured, which is the CBX (Cross Boarder Express) to the Tijuana Airport.

And for every one you find there's a better one being built to replace it. No drug dogs. No zealous border patrol. No smugglers to get caught and rat. No wall to stop it. It could be 100 feet high and block 1/3 of the days sunlight on Calle Coahuila and we'd still have addicts dropping left and right.

The biggest crime problem on our streets has seemingly no solutions.

Sinaloa owns Tijuana, and both Bajas. They own media interests and people with pull in Mexico City, and they'll kill the entire family of anyone that compromises their illicit commerce. They can buy or lease the building in San Ysidro or Otay Mesa and no one is the wiser of their legitimate import business front. Or as seen on Showtime, their store at the border outlet mall. Or whatever they buy legally in the US.

They laugh at the idea of a border wall because that bypass crossing can handle traffic 24/7. And at unheard of rates with less risk.

A digital fence? Ground penetrating radar technology? A single vehicle fitted with GPR to drive the border continuously?

I dont think so. High conductivity matter like clay attenuates GPR relatively easily.  And the natural layer of caliche doesn't help much. 

So how do you stop that which owns Mexico and can buy anything in America?

a reply to: Degradation33

China sent a biological weapon to weaken our economy, the worlds economies.

Now they're sending fentanyl to kill us off.

One terrorist with a crop duster could kill a major city.

a reply to: Degradation33
As an ex-opiate user, fentanyl was on my list. Have been away from the destructive downward spiral of opiate addiction for seven plus years now. How did I do it? I grew some steel balls and went cold turkey. It was the worst withdrawls of my life.
It was long term withdrawls with nightmares, sweating, chills, craps. And this was all because I went to see a doctor at a pain clinic in 2005 for lower lumbar cronic pain from degenerative disc disease. I thought I was going to die. Now i see reports about this fentanyl crap going around everywhere.

lol

tunnel vision

The new design is to place the radar antennas in a trailer towed by a Border Patrol truck. The antennas’ harmless electromagnetic waves penetrate the earth to construct a multi-colored picture of what’s below. Tunnels show up as red, yellow, and aquamarine dots against a blue background. Border patrol agents would see these images on a monitor mounted inside their truck. The ground penetrating radar is a promising technology because it is already used by civil engineers to reconstruct underground images. But these engineers are usually only interested in detecting cables or pipes that may be a few meters beneath the earth. S&T needs to find tunnels that often run much deeper. To find these, the radar uses much lower frequencies that can penetrate the ground much deeper, and a sophisticated new imaging technology that can display clear pictures of deep tunnels.

a reply to: MConnalley

Ha. Yeah, I suppose I could have looked into it more. Old post and technology too.

I dont think its working. I think they might be going deeper now. I'm pretty sure 40 meters (125 feet) is beyond the limits of even sophisticated GPR. And they may have caught on to that. They sure have the money with a revenues up to 40 billion a year.

And I'm only saying that because you blew a giant hole through my thread

I know this will not be popular, or widely supported, but...

the way to:

- stop degenerates from OD'ing on God knows what drug laced with heaven knows what chemical
- prevent bad state level actors from corrupting the narcotic pipeline as an act of war
- completely annihilate the Mexican cartels by removing their #1 profit center
- eradicate probably either the first or second most common motivation for illegal crossing of the southern border

is to end prohibition of certain narcotics only, and for some responsible party to regulate and manage the acquisition and use of said narcotics.

I don't know any other way to explain it than like this: the pursuit of "getting high" and using drugs, is not ever going away. Never. No matter how hard you squeeze the borders, no matter how much funding you give the DEA, no matter how vigorously and dispassionately you wage the "War on Drugs!", it is a losing battle, that only ever leads to casualties, and no winners (unless that is you consider the money launderers, drug cartels, and China as "winners").

You don't have to like drugs, or use them, or condone them, or give 2 sh1ts about them. If you are so inclined, you can wish a slow, painful death on drug users, if that makes you feel better. But the reality is, and the 4 bullet points mentioned above are just a few points that reinforce this, the prohibition setup is giving our adversaries, from Mexican drug lords to Chinese lab owners, an opening to send drugs, arms, and bad people across our border. Without a black market, and with controlling the creation and supply of narcotics completely internally here, in a closed-loop system, you would scratch out all 4 of the issues mentioned above, and potentially a lot more.

This is not going to happen anytime soon though. For two reasons:

- the "War on Drugs" turns out to be a very, VERY lucrative operation for some very wealthy and well-connected Americans

- people are so completely welded to and tightly bound to a morale revulsion to drug use that they'd rather give cartels, smuggling coyotes and Chinese labs free reign to keep FKING us rather than consider that ANY WAY YOU SLICE it, junkies gonna junk, so why not eliminate the black market participants from this enterprise.

The only way to end this madness is to either let Musk and Gates find some way to use a neural chip or DNA altering to eliminate the urge for people to get high, or end prohibition. Otherwise, the black market drug trade, and the attendant violence and corruption it brings, is not ever going away.

a reply to: Degradation33

Buen Dia Degradation33.

To be honest, and I may well get flamed for this, but I do see the drug problem in the US and anywhere else for that matter, very much like the issue of gun control.

Too many people flapping around totally incapable of solving the problem because they singularly focus on the symptoms not the disease itself. You even highlighted it in your OP;

As it turns out fentanyl also sends mental disease to another level.

There are of course going to be people caught up in all of this who like ditchweed innocently went to the doctor for medical assistance for example, and were promptly junked up to the eyeballs through no fault of theirs. But I suspect these numbers are on the thin end of the wedge.

Cohesive strong and meaningful communities underpin our society. That society in turn looks after it's own, including the mentally deficient. Stop the degradation of our communities, stop the isolationist and separatist agenda of big tech, as well as your very own government and it's institutions.

One thing I have learned from the WEF and their fascist cohort is that we really do need to Build Back Better. But we need to build back better communities to build back better a stronger and more resilient society that we can all live in, not as a collective bunch of individuals but as people who genuinely care about their neighbours.

originally posted by: Degradation33
a reply to: MConnalley

Ha. Yeah, I suppose I could have looked into it more. Old post and technology too.

I dont think its working. I think they might be going deeper now. I'm pretty sure 40 meters (125 feet) is beyond the limits of even sophisticated GPR. And they may have caught on to that. They sure have the money with a revenues up to 40 billion a year.

And I'm only saying that because you blew a giant hole through my thread

I have family that works on oil locating with this tech

a reply to: MConnalley

Figures.

Okay, last attempted salvage. Stealth angles? Triangular tunnels so no matter what angle from the surface it deflects the signal away? 50° should do it.

I dont think it works like that underground.

Joking aside.

Until this I thought the tactical GPR was unable to clearly see structure that far down. Everything I look up says to 100 feet for finding defined voids. I knew you could map the layers of the earth down to oil reserves but I thought they were for large veins of material, layers of crust, or faults. Miners use those too to find fault lines when excavating tunnels. I did not know the military/defense tunnel one (like the R2TD) and the oil reserve finding versions were one in the same in terms of refinement.

And thanks for killing the thread.

a reply to: Degradation33
A quick look into the tech makes me think that there are a few limiting factors in 3d seismic surveys.

First off you have to have a large tunnel, preferably not very deep and you have to be on top of it.

The reason I say a large tunnel is because one of the goals I saw mentioned was reaching 1 meter resolution. In other words, something smaller than 1 meter might not be easy to pick up and I'm guessing it only becomes harder as the depth increases and, of course, if you are surveying where the tunnel isn't then you are not going to find it.

I know that the tunnels in the OP are also used for moving people under the border but if you focus just on drugs, it has always seemed to me that even a small diameter pipe, >2 inches, placed between point A and point B would be really hard to find and a lot of material could be pumped through it. That Tijuana to Otay Mesa tunnel in the OP was less than a mile and I've seen people say that a decent pump can push water for a few miles horizontally.