This "Prohibition in the Media" post is not tied to a particular article. If you do a Google News search on "drug money laundering," you'll get a list of over 1,400 articles. These are only the ones that the news outlets still have online -- the global financial system is virtually "awash" in illicitly-generated revenues, much of it from the drug trade.

Of course, it has to be that way under prohibition -- because we've made drugs illegal, all the money that people spend on them goes into the criminal underground. That's hundreds of billions of dollars per year -- I've seen estimates ranging from $150 billion (the RAND Corporation) to $400 billion (the UN) -- and it has an enormous increasing effect on violence rates. The local dealer protecting his turf, to the vicious source or transit country cartel trying to intimidate press or the authorities, to the terrorist organization using the relatively easy-to-get proceeds of drug sales to augment its budget and be able to kill more innocent people, these are just a few of the ways that prohibition has made our world a more dangeous place in which to live.

I've written about that here before. The main point I'd like to make today is the effect of the flow of the money itself. If a drug lord is able to buy or build a city, for example -- it is said that the skyscrapers making up the Bangkok, Thailand skyline were built with drug money -- that gives him an enormous amount of influence going beyond his original illegal business. When our investigators of possible terrorist activity try to track the flow of that kind of money, that must be made more difficult to pinpoint given the ocean of drug money in which it is immersed. And of course anyone happening to stand in the way of some of the money is a potential weak link for corruption.

Does drug money have an effect on how some international aid dollars get spent? Probably. I don't say that because of any particular examples to which I have access. It's just that there's so much drug money, in so many places, that it seems like it must have some such impact here and there.

We need to drain the flooded basement before we'll have a chance of being able to clean it up. That first means blocking off the pipes that are spilling into it. Which in the case of drug money means... legalization.

We are going to say "legalization" over and over until the point sinks in with people. In the meanwhile, we would be most grateful if readers could bring our attention to any particularly interesting money laundering stories you spot, especially stories that involve some additional harm resulting from it. (We'd also appreciate if you have or know of some relevant images that are in the public domain that we could use on our web site.)

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