Coast Guard offloads drugs worth more than $1.4B in Florida

The U.S. Coast Guard offloaded drugs worth more than $1.4 billion in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Thursday, The Associated Press reports.

The Coast Guard announced that the crew at Port Everglades unloaded 59,700 pounds of cocaine and about 1,430 pounds of marijuana. Officials said it was the largest offload in the history of the Cutter James vessel.

“It’s a big team effort,” Carson McCluskey, a crew member who’s been with the Coast Guard for 14 months, told CBS Miami. “We use small boats, we use helicopters, we use people on land. And we just all come together to make this happen.”

Captain Todd Vance told CBS Miami that the amount of drugs the agency has seized in the last three months are double what was interdicted in fall 2020.

In 2019, the agency intercepted 17,000 pounds of cocaine, which was part of a larger $569 million drug bust, in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. The bust was part of a mission that included 14 other drug-smuggling interceptions along the coasts of Mexico, Central America and South America, according to a press release.

The Coast Guard will now hand the drugs from the Fort Lauderdale port to an interagency team and work with the U.S. attorney’s office to identify the drug traffickers behind these shipments and hold them accountable, according to CBS Miami.