Forget the romantic drug smuggling movies, filled with sophisticated villains driving Maseratis, swaggering down the Vegas strip with a supermodel on each arm, smoking Cuban cigars, sucking a fortune in white powder up their aquiline noses, dancing the night away with other sophisticates in posh nighteries, all with the proceeds from tunneling under the border with buckets of marijuana.

Things have changed for the worse. The drug smuggling method du jour is the cannon!

No, Dear Reader, this is not science fiction, nor the hallucinatory ramblings of a deranged mind (mine). The drug cartels have perfected air-powered cannons that shoot packages of drugs over the heads of oblivious border guards to a soft landing in the good old Estados Unidos, where they are picked up by the local distributors.

Talk about technological decline. (Well, not completely – a few months ago they were using catapults. Replacing the twelfth century catapult with the nineteenth century air gun is progress of a sort.) This is the 21st Century, for God’s sake! There are significantly better methods on the horizon.

Teleportation immediately springs to mind. Current research by non-mad physicists has reached the point at which light can be teleported. The cartels have mucho dinero. They should be funding improved teleportation research! Imagine shipping pot to New York without passing through Arizona or Texas or Illinois. How about teleporting directly to the ultimate consumer? The cartels’ profits would skyrocket, since they would no longer need to pay all those middlemen, corrupt DEA agents, and venal local police. There would be no more messy ripoffs to garner unfavorble publicity and blood-soaked hundred dollar bills.

How about going a stage further ; teleport the THC directly into the bloodstreams of the customers. It would provide a clear public health benefit, since the amount of lung damage produced by inhaling smoke from your joint is substantial.

How do the cartels collect their pittance if these methods are adopted? you well may ask. Simple. Ensure that the teleportation technology is bidirectional. If someone fails to pay up, you simply teleport his or her head back to Mexico. Separating heads from bodies has already been established as one of the cartels’ most popular and effective forms of discipline. This method is a bit reminescent of the eighteenth century guillotine, but I think that there is something to be said for preserving a little continuity to hold civilization together.

And this will only be the beginning! Soon this blossoming technology will be applied to other fun activities: putting ethyl alcohol directly into the bloodstream of drivers without requiring them to drink themselves into unconsciousness in  dingy barrooms; delivering campaign contributions directly into the pockets of politicians without leaving messy records in the banking system; etc. You get the idea.

You should have paid more attention in physics class.