If you had any doubt that the War On Drugs has been a massive failure:
“If the drug trade were a country, it would have the 19th largest economy in the world. In 2005 the UN estimated that the illegal drug trade is worth more than $320 billion. If currently illegal drugs were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco they would yield $46.7 billion in tax revenue.”
By the way, does anyone believe for even an instant that our rich financiers, politicians and generals in drug-producing areas aren’t getting their cut of that very lucrative pie somehow?
Bonus Read: The James Bond Banker and the Killer Bag Lady: who really killed CIA financier Nick Deak, who was also implicated in laundering hundreds of millions for Columbia’s cartels?
The Black Market gets that way…and as long as it remains illegal to own or deal in this stuff, it will remain a growing ‘industry’
You’d think our Government would have remembered its failed experiment with Prohibition
The government and banking complicity is the topic of John Le Caree’s ‘Our Kind of Traitor’. Don’t mess with the big boys and their money (hint: the big boys are not the cartels).
Yes. I think the problem is that so much of our failed War on Drugs is actually successful policy – for beady-eyed bankers, for the prison industry, and for police departments that rely on federal alleged anti-drug funds to help bolster their budgets. Seen this way, a sane (tax-generating, crime-reducing, life-saving) public-health approach to the drug trade would be policy non grata.
“Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor
Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims