In a scene that sounds like something straight out of Breaking Bad, a warehouse that everyone assumed was nothing more than a carpet shop was actually the entryway to a massive tunnel built to smuggle sh•t tons of marijuana into the U.S.
When feds raided the warehouse they found a three foot wide hole in the floor. The hole then opened up onto one of the most sophisticated and elaborate drug smuggling tunnels ever discovered.
The tunnel was dug 32 feet below the ground and stretched the length of 8 football fields from Tijuana, Mexico to the Otay Mesa neighborhood of San Diego, California. It had full-scale electrical lighting, elaborate ventilation, and a crazy rail system used to safely and secretly transport loads of weed back and forth across the border.
After discovering the tunnel, cops began pulling out bundles of weed by the tons—12 tons to be precise. That’s a street value of at least $6 million, and more importantly for Green Rush Daily potheads, enough herb to keep approximately 2 of us stoned for life.
Cops are still finding bundles of marijuana buried in the massive tunnel, so that number could get even higher (get it—higher?!).
At this point, most people think the tunnel was probably built by the infamous Sinaloa cartel, which has designed a vast network of drug-smuggling tunnels crisscrossing beneath the Mexico-U.S. border.
The Sinaloa cartel’s equally infamous leader, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán escaped from prison this summer through—you guessed it—a tunnel.
Check out this video of El Chapo disappearing into the tunnel that had been dug right into his prison cell:
Officials are calling the newly discovered ganja burrow a “super tunnel,” and believe it could be the most elaborate drug-smuggling tunnel discovered yet.
“This super tunnel is the tenth large-scale drug tunnel discovered in the San Diego area since 2006, according to the U.S. Attorney,” a San Diego news outlet reported. “Federal officials have found more than 75 smuggling tunnels in the last five years, most located in California and Arizona.”
Seriously, though, while all this makes for a cool Hollywood-esque story, all the effort and resources that go into investigating smugglers, staging big-time stings, and worst of all, the craziness of criminalizing an activity that the majority of Americans both participate in and support demonstrates yet again the insanity of the “war on drugs.”
Just one more reason why it’s high time (nailed it!) to legalize marijuana and end the war on drugs forever.