Part I: The First 30 years
With a seizure of opium near the entrance to San Francisco Bay in November 1886, cutters of the Revenue Marine Service began a fight against maritime drug smuggling that continues to this day.
The smuggling of opium into the west coast prompted the entry of the Coast Guard — at earlier times called the Revenue Marine and the Revenue Cutter Service—into maritime drug interdiction. The mission would stretch through WWI, wane during Prohibition, and practically disappear during World War II. However, a resurgence would begin in the early 1970’s, with the growing popularity of marijuana. A decade later, the Coast Guard’s focus would begin to shift yet again, this time as maritime smugglers began to emphasize moving cocaine over marijuana.
The Beginning: Opium by Sea
The first at-sea drug seizure was made on November 30, 1886. On the morning of that day, U.S. Revenue Cutter (USRC) Richard Rush, a 175-foot hybrid sail/steamer, had been running a northeast/southwest-oriented barrier patrol off the entrance to the passage through the San Francisco Bar. For two days, the cutter had enjoyed calm seas, clear skies, and balmy temperatures while awaiting the arrival of the SS Rio de Janeiro — which intelligence from the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong indicated would be attempting to smuggle opium into the U.S.
Despite reduced visibility from a light fog that rolled in at around 8:00 a.m., a lookout board the Rush detected the approach of a large steamer at mid-morning. As the steamer neared, CAPT Calvin Hooper directed the launch of a whaleboat and the firing of a blank charge from the RUSH’s forward 6-lb rapid fire gun to signal the vessel to slow and prepare to be boarded.
After the Rush’s boat pulled alongside the 345-foot transpacific steamer, a boarding party led by 2nd LT Thomas Benham scrambled up over its side, then proceeded aft as the Rush escorted the steamer into the Bay. At the stern, LT Benham found several large packages—each containing a box of 20 tins holding roughly half a pound of prepared (aka “smoking”) opium, for a total of about 350 pounds. He had just made the service’s first known drug seizure at sea.
Opium into San Francisco
By the time of the Rush’s seizure, opium had been legally imported into the U.S. for decades. Transpacific steamers plying the trade route from San Francisco to Hong Kong via Yokohama returned with Indian and Chinese opium as part of their cargoes. The opium was widely—and legally—used as an active ingredient in medicines and consumer products. However, in the late 1870’s the U.S. experienced a major shift in usage. The highly addictive practice of smoking opium had spread from immigrant Chinese workers to the general U.S. population—with an attendant rise in crime and related health issues. Accordingly, the U.S. government implemented a series of actions designed to limit the availability of opium. The most significant action was taken in 1883, when Congress increased the tariff on refined opium (which at the time retailed for $10/pound) from $1/pound to $10/pound.
While a low level of smuggling had been going on since the importation of opium began — mainly by passengers and crew of transpacific steamers smuggling a few to around 50 pounds at time — the low profit margin limited the practice. The new tax expanded the profitability of smuggling opium tenfold and drove an explosion in the practice.
Soon after the levy was implemented, every transpacific steamer arriving in San Francisco from Hong Kong was believed to be concealing several hundred pounds of opium somewhere onboard. These loads were increasingly ferreted out with intelligence that had been gathered by Treasury Agents working out of the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong and telegraphed to the Customs House in San Francisco. Officers and crews of revenue cutters were frequently detailed to assist Customs Inspectors with vessel searches, providing both manpower and technical expertise.
Some smugglers reacted to the success of these searches by seeking to drop off the opium prior to entering San Francisco Harbor. Loads of 300 to 500 pounds would be wrapped in waterproof coverings, attached to a marker float, and dropped from the stern of a steamer for retrieval by a contact boat. Cutters Rush and Chase were kept busy reacting to intelligence of these events, which was shared by the local Collector of Customs.
Only 10 days after having first seized 350 pounds of opium from the Rio de Janeiro, Rush made a second bust. During its first seizure, a boarding party from the Rush had found the drugs on the stern of the steamer—the same light fog that had complicated the Rush’s intercept had likely prevented the smugglers aboard the steamer from sighting their contact boat and dumping the opium over the side for pick up. In the second instance, the poor visibility of the rainy and foggy morning of December 9, 1886, again hindered the smuggler’s plans. Incredibly, this time, in the reduced visibility, smugglers aboard the SS Gaelic mistook the Rush’s whaleboat for their contact and lowered 500 pounds of opium into the very laps of the cuttermen.
A Shift to Washington Territory
Concurrent with the rise in trafficking from Hong Kong to San Franciso, a new, much more efficient smuggling route emerged—aided once again by unintended consequences of new U.S. policy. Besides increasing the tariff to discourage importation, the U.S. had also targeted domestic production of smoking opium. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which severely limited the entry of Chinese Nationals to the U.S., and an earlier ban of the importation of raw opium by Chinese persons and businesses, were designed to eliminate the workforce and material needed to produce smoking opium in the states. While these measures did achieve the intended purpose, operations merely shifted across the border with Canada to British Columbia.
Not only was importation of opium into Canada by Chinese persons still legal, but the import duty remained only $1/pound. Now rather than making a long, trans-Pacific voyage, smugglers could make a short run from Canadian ports such as Victoria, which sat at the southern end of Vancouver Island, less than 40 miles from U.S. territory. Within a few years, every boat of Victoria’s fishing fleet and most coastal freighters plying the region’s waters would be suspected of carrying opium at one time or another.
The Service’s Early Seizures
Ten and a half months before the RUSH made the first at-sea seizure, the USRC Oliver Wolcott made what appears to be the service’s first solo opium seizure — oddly enough, ashore. On Jan. 14, 1886, a landing party from the cutter found 3,011 ½ pounds hidden in barrels stored at the Kasaan Bay Salmon Fishery, in southern Alaska. The opium had been concealed there by the SS Idaho — a coastal freighter that ran a route between ports in the Washington Territory, Canada, and southern Alaska. Several weeks earlier, officers and crew of the Wolcott had assisted Customs Officers at Port Townsend, Washington Territory with the seizure of several hundred pounds of opium from the Idaho. The vessel had been released, since no ties between the opium and the owner or officers of the steamer could be proven. However, a disgruntled crewman from the Idaho — upset after having been fired for missing movement after a night of partying on New Year’s Eve — subsequently provided intelligence on the location of additional contraband. Using this intelligence, the Wolcott raced almost 700 miles to Kasaan Bay from Port Townsend to seize the opium before it could be moved by the Idaho.
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Three years later the Wolcott would make the service’s first at-sea interdiction that included seizure of both opium and the vessel smuggling it, and the arrest of its crew. Prompted by intelligence from customs agents in Victoria, on Jan. 10, 1889, the Wolcott steamed from Port Townsend to nearby Port Discovery Bay. Once there, the cutter hid behind Clallam Spit, just inside the entrance to the bay. That evening, when the British sloop Emerald entered, one of Wolcott’s boats shot out to intercept it. The Emerald’s Master and crew immediately began tossing packages overboard, but the Wolcott’s boarding party quickly scrambled aboard and took control. They found nearly 400 pounds of opium on deck. A subsequent search of the vessel also revealed 12 undocumented Chinese migrants hidden aboard.
The Emerald’s master and crew were arrested, and the vessel and opium were seized. The cutter steamed to Port Townsend the next morning, where the vessel, contraband, prisoners, and Chinese Nationals were transferred to customs officials. The cutter then returned to Discovery Bay and recovered an additional ten pounds of opium that had been jettisoned during the interdiction.
Outdated, Outnumbered, and Outrun
Although the revenue cutters on the west coast did cut into the illegal maritime flow of opium into the Pacific Northwest, they were outnumbered and often outrun by smugglers, especially in Puget Sound and surrounding waters. In response, in 1896 the RMS added two 65-ft steam-powered harbor launches — the Guard and the Scout — capable of making up to 15 knots, to the Port Townsend force. The addition of what would today be called fast coastal interceptors, certainly increased the interdiction capability in the region.
However, Capt. Dorr Tozier, who commanded the small flotilla at the time, found that despite the new interceptors and continued intelligence support from the U.S. Consulate and treasury agents in Victoria, his vessels often still found themselves in hopeless stern chases of smugglers. The speed advantage of his harbor launches was not enough to overcome the inability to coordinate the underway movements of his force—until the advent of radio (then called wireless telegraph).
Recognizing the potential advantages of this new technology, Capt. Tozier brokered a deal in 1903 between the newly formed Pacific Wireless Company and the local customs collector. According to the terms of the agreement, Pacific Wireless would install and operate on a test basis, wireless telegraph sets aboard the USRC Grant, (which had replaced the Wolcott), at the Port Townsend Customs House, and at a substation at Friday Harbor, on San Juan Island. This allowed Tozier to alert his launches back in port to intercept incoming smugglers that he had detected while patrolling Puget Sound aboard the Grant. Based on the success of this experiment, Congress later appropriated funds to install wireless aboard the Coast Guard’s 12 cruising cutters.
Displacement of Smuggling Ventures
Adoption of this new technology allowed near-real time coordination of the cutters’ efforts and displaced many smuggling ventures to the land border with Canada. Seizures began to be made as far east as international the rail crossing in northern New York state. When Canada finally outlawed opium in July 1908, even more traffic was displaced from the region. The loss of a secure base for production and the added threat from Canadian law enforcement motivated smugglers to move much of their operations to Mexico.
However, the existence of a large customer base in the Pacific Northwest kept smugglers from totally abandoning the region. Maritime drug smuggling continued throughout World War I, with the Scout making multiple seizures of opium, morphine, and undocumented aliens along the west coast from 1914 to 1917.
By the start of Prohibition in 1920, smugglers had expanded their illegal cargoes to include heroin, morphine, and cocaine, and added new maritime routes from Cuba to the American Gulf and Florida coasts. The smuggling of drugs continued throughout Prohibition — although at a lower volume than alcohol—but little is known of the practice during the World War II era.
Maritime drug smuggling would remain low-key until the early 1970’s. By that time, Marijuana had become the preferred recreational drug of Americans. Accordingly, it quickly became the preferred cargo of smugglers. Marijuana would dominate the market until the mid-1980’s, when the shipment of cocaine began to displace it.
Throughout the entire period, the Coast Guard would continually improve interdiction effectiveness by supplementing its already extensive use of intelligence with the rapid adoption of evolving technology—including radio, air surveillance, and radar.
Part II: 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, totaling10,100 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 ten 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.
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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 ten 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 lbs — 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.
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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.
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.
Technological Innovation
In addition to effective use of intelligence — beginning with the first seizure at sea in 1886 — the Coast Guard has been in the forefront of harnessing new technology to counter the shifting tactics of drug smugglers. The first major technological innovation came in 1903.
Capt. Dorr Tozier commanded a small flotilla consisting of the USRC Grant, an old and slow sail/steam schooner, and two faster 15-knot steam launches. He was responsible for stopping opium smugglers dashing across Puget sound from Canada to Washington state. However, despite excellent intelligence support from the U.S. consulate and Treasury Department agents in Victoria, Tozier often found himself aboard the Grant in hopeless stern chases of smaller, faster smugglers. Then he brokered a deal between the newly formed Pacific Wireless Company and the local customs collector to install and operate, on a test basis, wireless telegraph (as radio was then called) sets aboard his cutter, and at both the Port Townsend Customs House and Friday Harbor, on San Juan Island, where his launches were stationed. This allowed the Grant to telegraph ahead for an intercept of a faster smuggler by his even faster launches. Based on the success of this experiment, Congress appropriated the $35,000 needed to fund installations aboard 12 cruising cutters, in March 1907.
The next major advance came with the addition of aircraft to the Coast Guard in 1925, during Prohibition. Although limited by the airspeed, range, rudimentary communications gear, and visual-only search capability of early aircraft, this was a major step expansion of the surveillance capability of interdiction forces. The Prohibition era also saw the destruction of contraband and the first instance of airborne use of force, or disabling fire, from an aircraft.
Radar came into common use by surface vessels during and after World War II. By the time the Marijuana War at Sea started in 1973, all cutters were equipped with radar, and most Medium and High Endurance cutters sported flight decks that could accommodate shipboard helicopters These two advances even further expanded the detection radius of cutters.
Another of the Coast Guard’s responses to the threat posed by long range, speedy fast boats, was the formation of HITRON, the Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron. HITRON’s helicopters were equipped 7.72 mm MGs and a .50 caliber, laser sighted, precision rifle. When a fast boat attempted to outrun a cutter, its assigned HITRON aircraft would quickly overtake the fleeing vessel, and if both commands to stop and warning shots across its bow were ignored, the helo’s gunner would disable the go-fasts engines with a shot from the .50 caliber rifle.
The new generation of the Coast Guard’s fixed-wing, long-range surveillance aircraft, such as the HC-130J Super Hercules, is light years ahead of what was in use during Prohibition. Although earlier versions of long-range surveillance aircraft were in use at the start of modern drug interdiction operations, today’s aircraft use a suite of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) components that are far beyond what was available at that time.
The Coast Guard also began experimenting with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in 1999. In May 2013, Coast Guard Cutter Bertholf used a version called “ScanEagle” to maintain visual surveillance of a fleeing go-fast boat, which was carrying over 1,000 lbs of cocaine, until it was able to stop the boat.
The Drug War Today
The Coast Guard integrates its surface vessels and aircraft in a layered approach to stop maritime drug smugglers. Sighting information from maritime patrol aircraft operated by the Coast Guard, CBP, DOD, and allied nations is combined with intelligence from JIATF-South and other agencies, to identify and locate suspect vessels. Additionally, Coast Guard law enforcement detachments embark on U.S. and allied Navy ships to increase its reach worldwide.
This approach enabled the Coast Guard to capture an LPV carrying 12,000 lbs of cocaine on 2019, and to seize more than 150 metric tons in FY 2022 alone. While drugs will continue to be smuggled with varying degrees of sophistication aboard a variety of types of smuggling vessels, the Coast Guard will continue to seize them.
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