TEXT: The crew of a 45 foot Coast Guard patrol boat runs through their pre-departure briefing in San Diego harbor in San Diego. With the drug war locking down land routes across Latin America and at the U.S. border, smugglers have been increasingly using large vessels to carry multi-ton loads of cocaine and marijuana hundreds of miles offshore where the lead federal agency with extensive law enforcement powers is the Coast Guard, a military service roughly the size of the New York Police Department.