Despite the best efforts by the U.S. government, illegal narcotics fly, seep, skip, run, drive, dig and hike from South America to North America every day.

They come via trucks and cars; via plane and boat; via rail track and tunnel; via coyote and mule; they come any way you can imagine – and more than a few you cannot. If there is a way to get dope across the border, rest assured, it's coming across.

And there's always a way.

In my newly published book, "Bad Trip: How the War Against Drugs is Destroying America," the chapter on smuggling is one of the longest. In fact, keeping it a manageable length was a challenge because smuggling is really about one of the biggest and broadest subjects any author can cover – human ingenuity. Says 1970's narcotrafficker Zachary Swan, there are "a million ways." And he's underestimating.

Here are just a few specific examples and tactics from recent years:

• Covertly building a submarine capable of hauling 10 tons of cocaine to carry it from Colombia to the U.S.

• Using time-released buoys and GPS trackers to sync drug shipments on the open sea.

• Combining cocaine with plastic resin and producing functioning, commercial goods from which the drug can be chemically extracted once across the border.

• Disguising stashes of cocaine in hollowed-out passion fruit or in plastic plantains; hiding psilocybin mushrooms in chocolates.

• Digging a 1,200-foot tunnel, complete with ventilation ducts and electric lights to take marijuana and cocaine from a home in Mexico to another in California.

• Dropping drugs in the uninhabited desert by plane and using GPS locaters on the ground to find and bring them across the poorly manned border.

• Training – no lie here, folks – pigeons to fly packets of dope across the border.

Swan used to buy cocaine in Colombia and then tightly compress it into wooden souvenirs – like rolling pins, carved tribal heads, and statuettes of the Madonna (who would suspect Mary?) – which he would easily smuggle into the United States. He never got busted with a load.

Successes from early smugglers like Swan encouraged others to give it a try. Some did well, others did not. But the border coke rush of the late 1970s and early 1980s caused the feds to clamp down tight and try to stop the illegal flow. It didn't really work.

As I explain in "Bad Trip," interdiction efforts fail for one basic reason: Smugglers are entrepreneurs; border agents are bureaucrats. It's one of those stubborn facts of economics, but entrepreneurs always beat bureaucrats because they have the incentive and competitive edge.

Former DEA agent Robert Stutman makes this clear, joking in an interview for the PBS Frontline show "Drug Wars":

You build a 12-foot wall around the United States, and the old joke goes, it will take the dope peddlers 60 seconds to realize that a 13-foot ladder gets over a 12-foot wall. And then what do you do? Build a 13-foot wall?

Get Joel Miller's new book, "Bad Trip: How the War Against Drugs is Destroying America," today in ShopNetDaily.