This is a sort-of a can-you-guess-who-I'm-talking-about quiz. They fly their cargo in a fleet of very modern, very large, airplanes. They use Boeing 727's, Caravelles and Turboprop Lockheed Electras. Some of the planes have been rigged with auxiliary fuel systems, allowing them to fly as long as 20 hours--or 8,00 miles--without refueling. And here is the clue that will give it all away: one fully loaded airplane carries a cargo worth about 1.8 billion dollars.
Of course we are talking about the Columbian Drug Cartel, which has purchased a fleet of more than 40 used long-range passenger jets. Forty airplanes, and theoretically, one fully loaded airplane carries a cargo worth 1.8 billion dollars. Okay, the plane is not fully loaded. We only used one half the space. That's a cargo of 900 million dollars, or about a billion dollars. Forty airplanes equals forty billion dollars.
These are just numbers, numbers we cannot even begin to imagine. Someone once explained a billion dollars this way. If you spent a dollar a second, every second of every day, and you began your spending 2,000 years ago, when Christ was born--at a dollar a second, you would still have not spent a billion dollars.
So what we are gonna do in our war on drugs is jail this bunch of criminals, these billionaires, and shut down the business. No one will come along and take up the slack, right? After all, the profits aren't that good--only a billion dollars an airplane--and initially, I mistakenly said a million. A million dollars? That's chicken feed--and we are the chickens, pecking away, getting a dollar here, a dollar there. They deal in billions.
I'm going to have to stop talking about this highly controversial subject. It is too serious to be satirized, and yet it is funny.. How can you make fun of a country that seriously thinks it can jail a bunch of people and stop millions of people spending billions of dollars to feed their habits, their pleasures, their desire for death, oblivion, or whatever.
The other team has billions of dollars. Yes, we have more billions than they have, but do we want to spend our billions on this war--when there is a war on poverty to be fought, and a war on our highways--which are deteriorating and demanding we spend money on them.
The wise man knows what to overlook. We will never solve all problems. What problems can we solve? What problems are worth solving? What situations are problems? Are drug pushers a problem to us? Are drug users a problem to us? Currently users are a problem because, as we just learned, they need billions of dollars to buy planeloads of illegal cocaine. But you and I know that the planeload--if legal--wouldn't even be worth 100,000 dollars. Cocaine is dirt cheap. As cheap as any flower. Cocaine is expensive because we made it so by declaring it illegal. We half-created the problem, and it is a problem. not something to be laughed at.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein