There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed. (Buddha)

Down here along the shoreline, we might be especially attuned to the consternation and speculation about the decimation of the world’s shark population among conservationists, environmentalists, scientists, and various other professional hand-wringing klatches. The seeming diminishment of the species has been attributed to everything from demand for its meat to gill nets, to everyone from Alice Waters to Frank Mundus and Steven Spielberg. Swimmers and surfers aren’t all that broken up about it. And pork connoisseurs are celebrating. But it still has a bunch of folks pretty preoccupied.  At the risk of mixing my protein-source metaphors, what’s the beef?

It’s hard to pinpoint the genesis of the idea that sharks should be left alone. But among conservationists, environmentalists, and scientists, some of the earliest finger-pointing might be directed at the late Jacques Cousteau who, along with his son, Phillipe, and the crew of The Calypso, made underwater antics more popular than they’d been since Lloyd Bridges sensationalized scuba diving (which Cousteau invented) in Sea Hunt – followed by Keith Larsen and Jeremy Slate, who followed (wet)suit in The Aquanauts. Largely because Sea Hunt and The Aquanauts concerned themselves with killing people, not undersea creatures, it was The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau that made it safe for every davenport-diver with a TV to look the finned fiend right in the kisser and neither back down a single kick of our flippers nor sneak our snorkels from its snout, and sneer, “Take that, Anchor!” even though Jacques told us it was a no-no to hurt the menacing mammoth, even if the look in his eyes was making us feel more like a snack than a sensitive do-gooder.

But none of that satisfactorily explained the subsequent warnings issued by governmental, nutritional, medical, and other groups as the shark-hunting tide began taking an inexplicably inexorable turn for the prohibitive. While shark seemed to start catching on as a trendy staple among ostensible gourmets, especially after it made the transcontinental leap to La-La Land, it was challenged by attempts to dissuade us from our growing prandial attraction, attributing our need to avoid the beast to chemicals like mercury, PCBs, and dioxins. Nevertheless, we remained resolutely steadfast in our determination to pursue the Chondrichthyes Elasmobranchii, evolving all manner of rationales, excuses, and smokescreens for our growing addiction. So irrational did the pursuit become that the otherwise sagacious Spaniards adopted the most obvious but least plausible national alibi for their shark jones: they didn’t know. But why didn’t the conspiratorial they want us pursuing sharks? As is the way of most mysteries, this one was cleared up almost as a matter of happenstance. In this case, the reason for our worldwide weakness for sharks was stumbled on in Mexico. Ironically, the bugaboo turned out to be a chemical, after all, albeit a recreational one.

Seriously. Is it any wonder the the authorities didn’t want us in on the secret? Now that we know, should we be surprised that sharks are disappearing faster than reason and accountability in the Senate Banking Commitee? And who’d have imagined Mexico might be involved? Were we really supposed to remember all the way back to 2007, the year in which the CIA identified our friends south of the border as:

… the primary transshipment country for US-bound cocaine from South America, with an estimated 90% of annual cocaine movements toward the US stopping in Mexico.

And with the copious quantities of weed coming out of Mexico, can we get an inch of slack for thinking there might not be enough time or ingenuity to add coke to the contraband caravan? If not, can we at least catch a break for letting our vigilance slide during the summer — or if we happen to vacation in more tropical climes? I mean how much of a grudge can you carry for someone wanting to catch a little blow with his burger on the beach? I’m telling you, it gets more difficult to have fun every year.

Speaking of fun, and now that we know how and why sharks have been causing such a buzz – and why they’re disappearing so rapidly – the only thing more fun than the idea of using the monsters as media for smuggling coke is the thought of the copycat crimes that will bubble up in the wake of this story’s breaking. How much of a stretch is it to envision strung-out grocery shoppers digging for cut-rate pharmaceuticals in the Canadian section of the fish department? Why wouldn’t one imagine enterprising dealers using the goldfish in local parks to deliver fixes to their suburban clientele? And how long will it be before rogue fish-and-game agents are sneaking carefully wrapped hits of acid into rainbows, browns, and cutthroats as they stock streams and trout ponds around the country? It tickles the fancy to speculate that we could soon be seeing YouTube aswarm with calamitous clips of fly fisherman tripping from Taholah to Presque Isle.

An Italian proverb says, “Imagination gallops. Judgment merely walks.” Now that we’ve learned imagination also swims, things are about to get a lot more interesting. After all, your garden-variety smuggler has been known to secret stashes in dental fillings, crowns, and bridges. We now know his shark is worse than his bite. And he’s swimming in a torrent of greed.

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