Give the drug smugglers credit. They may be ruthless cowards who get people to do their dirty work by threatening loved ones, but they're also smart, creative and highly motivated to get their lethal products to market. And thanks to Americans' insatiable consumption habits, the drug lords have almost unlimited resources to work with.

Among other things, those resources go to acquire submarines — yes, submarines — which help transport large amounts of cocaine from Colombia to the United States, along the Central American and Mexican coasts. Colombian officials have seized nearly a dozen "drug subs" in the last few years, and now Mexican authorities have their hands on one. The Mexican navy intercepted the vessel off the coast of Oaxaca. It was filled with cocaine and commandeered by a four-man crew. The sub was snagged when it surfaced.

Pablo Escobar meets Jules Verne.

Meanwhile, the smugglers have not given up on moving drugs on the ground. At the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents recently stopped and took control of three tour buses hauling more than a 1,000 pounds of marijuana, hidden in just about every place you could think to hide it. The agents were tipped off by drug-sniffing dogs. The drugs were stashed in an air-conditioning unit, an oil reservoir, a gas tank and in the interior floors of the buses. Two of the buses were empty of passengers, but one had 19 people aboard, plus the driver. All three drivers were arrested.

Tour buses? Those drugs were traveling in comfort.

Stories such as these should remind us of just what a formidable and crafty adversary we're up against in the drug war. Our agents on the ground need the latest weapons and the best surveillance equipment. But we also have to employ our secret weapon. We have to turn off the faucet of drug profits heading south if we ever want to stop the flow of drugs heading north.

Many of our drug prevention programs are a failure. They've become objects of ridicule, and a sign of just how weak our commitment really is.

But, more to the point, in the home, many parents are failing their children by not being attentive enough or tough enough or involved enough in their lives. They're too busy being pals instead of parents. And because many of them are baby boomers who lived through the 1960s, when the drug culture in this country was pervasive, they tell reporters they feel hypocritical about telling their own children to do as they say and not as they did. They wind up being too permissive.

That's a shame. Better to be a hypocrite than a bad parent. Teens tell pollsters that they look up to their parents, and often look to them for guidance. If parents don't hold up their end of the bargain, they might as well hand their children over to the drug dealers.

It's the demand we have to curb. And until we do, there will be plenty of supply. In fact, chances are that another submarine is already en route to a high school near you.

REPRINTED FROM THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE.

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