Business
Mexican Drug Cartels Are Using Monster Trucks Like Killing Machines
Mad Max actually takes place in Mexico.
If you’ve ever listened to country music (there’s no shame in embracing your inner redneck), you’ve likely heard about cowboys modifying their trucks to have as much Big Dick Energy as possible. And when the rapper DMX died (rest in power) in 2021, his brilliant red casket was carried around his home city, New York, in a customized Ford F250 with “Long Live DMX” inscribed on its side.
But in Mexico, drug cartels are making monster trucks to use like tanks. The cartels are retrofitting pickups with battering rams, four-inch-thick steel plates welded onto their chassis complete with turrets for firing machine guns, The New York Times reports.
These clever yet criminal gangs transforming trucks include the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, who use the vehicles for gun fights with the cops. The Treasury Department described Jalisco New Generation Cartel as one of the world’s “most prolific and violent drug trafficking organizations.” Known for their ultra-violence, they primarily deal with cocaine and meth and allegedly have forced recruits to engage in cannibalism by eating the flesh of murdered victims, The Daily Beast reports.
Others, including the Gulf Cartel (one of Mexico’s oldest and original cartels) and the Northeast Cartel, bloodily enhance the vehicles to battle one another. They, too, proudly adorn the trucks with their initials, and camouflage is also a popular design (and makes it tricky to tell the monster trucks apart from the police’s vehicles). Mexican security forces call these trucks monstruos (monsters), rinocerontes (rhinos), and narcotanques (narco-tanks). Other weapons include (perhaps outfitted in the monster trucks) steel-penetrating Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles, rocket launchers, and rocket-propelled grenades strong enough to shoot down military helicopters.
It tracks that the cartels would utilize monster trucks. They have long used mechanic skills to modify cars to smuggle drugs across borders. Monster trucks really can be the war machines demolition derbies in the U.S., with car names like Reaper or Grave Digger, want them to be. “The monsters are the way to send the message, ‘I’m in charge, and I want everyone to see I’m in charge,’” said Mr. Le Cour, senior expert at the Switzerland-based Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. “These are commando-style groups looking to replicate special forces in how they’re armed, how they’re trained, how they look” shares The New York Times.
But what’s happening in Mexico with monster trucks makes American demolition derbies look as innocent as a trip to DisneyLand. The cartel transforms trucks like the Ford Lobo (known as the Ford F-150 in the United States), the Ford Raptor, Chevrolet Tahoe, and even bigger vehicles such as dump trucks and heavy-duty trucks with large flatbeds and two rear wheels on each side. Technically, armoring a vehicle without authorization is a crime in Mexico punishable by up to 15 years in prison. This law has not stopped the weaponization of monster trucks.
The state prosecutor’s office in Tamaulipas, the state along the border of North East Mexico, issued a statement last year citing the “danger to the safety of the community” the modified vehicles, which are especially prominent along the border, present. Since 2019, authorities destroyed more than 260 of these armored monster trucks just in Tamaulipas, one of Mexico’s 31 states, which along with Mexico City, make up the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico.
As badass as the amped-up trucks may sound, even the cartel has car problems. Weighed down by steel plates, the monstruos can be heavy, slow, and challenging to drive, especially in cities. Also, all that modification can lead to mechanical breakdowns. “They’re too slow, too heavy,” said Alexei Chévez, a security analyst based in Cuernavaca, Mexico, writes The New York Times. And the retrofitting of the vehicles means that some of their parts malfunction. “We see them constantly breaking down and being abandoned,” Mr. Chévez said.
But there’s one more weapon the cartels have at their disposal which will help ensure the deadly monster truck’s legacy: social media. The monstruos often appear on TikTok, tricked out and deadly, accompanied by cartel rap songs. While the Mexican police will continue to battle them, it’s hard to fight cool.
Source: https://hightimes.com/news/mexican-drug-cartels-are-using-monster-trucks-like-killing-machines/
New Mexico regulators fined a cannabis operator nearly $300,000 and revoked its license after the company allegedly created fake reports in the state’s traceability software.
The New Mexico Cannabis Control Division (CCD) accused marijuana manufacturer and retailer Golden Roots of 11 violations, according to Albuquerque Business First.
Golden Roots operates the The Cannabis Revolution Dispensary.
The majority of the violations are related to the Albuquerque company’s improper use of BioTrack, which has been New Mexico’s track-and-trace vendor since 2015.
The CCD alleges Golden Roots reported marijuana production only two months after it had received its vertically integrated license, according to Albuquerque Business First.
Because cannabis takes longer than two months to be cultivated, the CCD was suspicious of the report.
After inspecting the company’s premises, the CCD alleged Golden Roots reported cultivation, transportation and sales in BioTrack but wasn’t able to provide officers who inspected the site evidence that the operator was cultivating cannabis.
In April, the CCD revoked Golden Roots’ license and issued a $10,000 fine, according to the news outlet.
The company requested a hearing, which the regulator scheduled for Sept. 1.
At the hearing, the CCD testified that the company’s dried-cannabis weights in BioTrack were suspicious because they didn’t seem to accurately reflect how much weight marijuana loses as it dries.
Company employees also poorly accounted for why they were making adjustments in the system of up to 24 pounds of cannabis, making comments such as “bad” or “mistake” in the software, Albuquerque Business First reported.
Golden Roots was fined $298,972.05 – the amount regulators allege the company made selling products that weren’t properly accounted for in BioTrack.
The CCD has been cracking down on cannabis operators accused of selling products procured from out-of-state or not grown legally:
- Regulators alleged in August that Albuquerque dispensary Sawmill Sweet Leaf sold out-of-state products and didn’t have a license for extraction.
- Paradise Exotics Distro lost its license in July after regulators alleged the company sold products made in California.
Golden Roots was the first alleged rulebreaker in New Mexico to be asked to pay a large fine.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/new-mexico-cannabis-operator-fined-loses-license-for-alleged-biotrack-fraud/
Four marijuana companies, including a multistate operator, have filed a lawsuit against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in which they allege the federal MJ prohibition under the Controlled Substances Act is no longer constitutional.
According to the complaint, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, retailer Canna Provisions, Treevit delivery service CEO Gyasi Sellers, cultivator Wiseacre Farm and MSO Verano Holdings Corp. are all harmed by “the federal government’s unconstitutional ban on cultivating, manufacturing, distributing, or possessing intrastate marijuana.”
Verano is headquartered in Chicago but has operations in Massachusetts; the other three operators are based in Massachusetts.
The lawsuit seeks a ruling that the “Controlled Substances Act is unconstitutional as applied to the intrastate cultivation, manufacture, possession, and distribution of marijuana pursuant to state law.”
The companies want the case to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.
They hired prominent law firm Boies Schiller Flexner to represent them.
The New York-based firm’s principal is David Boies, whose former clients include Microsoft, former presidential candidate Al Gore and Elizabeth Holmes’ disgraced startup Theranos.
Similar challenges to the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) have failed.
One such challenge led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2005.
In Gonzalez vs. Raich, the highest court in the United States ruled in a 6-3 decision that the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution gave Congress the power to outlaw marijuana federally, even though state laws allow the cultivation and sale of cannabis.
In the 18 years since that ruling, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized adult-use marijuana and the federal government has allowed a multibillion-dollar cannabis industry to thrive.
Since both Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice, currently headed by Garland, have declined to intervene in state-licensed marijuana markets, the key facts that led to the Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling “no longer apply,” Boies said in a statement Thursday.
“The Supreme Court has since made clear that the federal government lacks the authority to regulate purely intrastate commerce,” Boies said.
“Moreover, the facts on which those precedents are based are no longer true.”
Verano President Darren Weiss said in a statement the company is “prepared to bring this case all the way to the Supreme Court in order to align federal law with how Congress has acted for years.”
While the Biden administration’s push to reschedule marijuana would help solve marijuana operators’ federal tax woes, neither rescheduling nor modest Congressional reforms such as the SAFER Banking Act “solve the fundamental issue,” Weiss added.
“The application of the CSA to lawful state-run cannabis business is an unconstitutional overreach on state sovereignty that has led to decades of harm, failed businesses, lost jobs, and unsafe working conditions.”
Alabama regulators are targeting Dec. 1 to award the first batch of medical cannabis business licenses after the agency’s first two attempts were scrapped because of scoring errors and litigation.
The first licenses will be awarded to individual cultivators, delivery providers, processors, dispensaries and state testing labs, according to the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission (AMCC).
Then, on Dec. 12, the AMCC will award licenses for vertically integrated operations, a designation set primarily for multistate operators.
Licenses are expected to be handed out 28 days after they have been awarded, so MMJ production could begin in early January, according to the Alabama Daily News.
That means MMJ products could be available for patients around early March, an AMCC spokesperson told the media outlet.
Regulators initially awarded 21 business licenses in June, only to void them after applicants alleged inconsistencies with how the applications were scored.
Then, in August, the state awarded 24 different licenses – 19 went to June recipients – only to reverse themselves again and scratch those licenses after spurned applicants filed lawsuits.
A state judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Chicago-based MSO Verano Holdings Corp., but another lawsuit is pending.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/alabama-plans-to-award-medical-cannabis-licenses-dec-1/
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