Mexican Police Find Bazooka Shooting Pot Over the Border

If Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump really wants a wall to prevent illegal drugs from being smuggled into the United States, he’s going to have to build the damn thing pretty tall.

Over the weekend, Mexico’s Policía Federal stumbled onto a panel van modified to haul a massive homemade cannon that they believe was used had been used to catapult illicit substances across the U.S./Mexico border. The van was discovered in the city of Agu Prieta, Sonora, just over the border from southeast Arizona. It was was found with its doors wipe open and without licenses plates.

A press release issued by federal authorities said the nearly ten foot long “homemade bazooka” was equipped with a small gasoline engine and an air compressor that was likely used in conjunction to blast drug shipments across the border.

This is the second time such a contraption had been discovered, police said.

Drug traffickers have been using this kind of equipment for years to get shipments of dope into the United States. The Mexican newspaper Reforma said earlier this summer that several packages of marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine have been found along the U.S. border, perhaps the result of similar efforts.

Some reports have suggested that Mexico is finished distributing marijuana in the United States because the quality simply cannot compete with what is being produced in legal states like Colorado. Nevertheless, the abandoned packets of cannabis still being found along the U.S./Mexico border is evidence that these dope slinging thugs are not yet ready to give up on the illicit pot market.

But U.S. legalization efforts are certainly making a dent in cartel profits.

Data released earlier this year by the U.S Border Patrol indicates that police seized less marijuana along the Mexican border in 2015 than they have in any of the past ten years. The report shows that drug agents got their hands on around four million pounds of illegal weed in 2009, but only confiscated somewhere around 1.5 million pounds last year.

The United States is poised to legalize marijuana in several more jurisdictions this November – perhaps crippling the Mexican marijuana sector enough to finally get the cartels to abandon this product forever.