Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
Link:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...s-1870218.html
From the article:
"Prepare to shed a tear over the loss of revenue that eventual decriminalisation of narcotics could bring to the traffickers, large and small, and to the contractors who have been making good money building and running the new prisons.."
...and the loss of liquidity drug trafficking brings to the global economy; or the significant contribution to GDP narcotics production and trafficking brings to developing countries which far eclipses foreign aid received.

All of which is in part, and I hope I am wrong here, why we are not likely to see legalization anytime soon.

The following anecdote is a passage from the epilogue to retired Customs and DEA agent Robert Mazur’s book The Infiltrator: My Secret Life Inside the Dirty Banks Behind Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009). The book tells of Mazur’s undercover role as a money launderer in what would become Operation C-Chase, an incredibly successful undercover law enforcement operation in the late 1980’s.
The conversation is with an officer of the Latin American division to the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International which Mazur had successfully penetrated:
Regine’s nightclub, Miami
2:00 A.M., September 3, 1988

As our night on the town was coming to a close and Scotch had loosened Bilgrami’s tongue, he said, “Bob, do you know who the biggest money launderer is in the U.S.?”

“Who?” I shrugged, smiling.

“The Federal Reserve Bank. They are such hypocrites! They know that the Bank of the Republic in Bogota has a teller window known as the ‘the sinister window.’ Under Colombian rule, any citizen who has huge piles of cash can come to that window and anonymously exchange their U.S. dollars for Colombian pesos – no questions asked. This causes the central bank to accumulate palletloads of U.S. dollars that are shipped to the Federal Reserve and credited to the account of the Bank of the Republic—again, no questions asked. The people at the Federal Reserve aren’t idiots. They see this river of hundreds of millions in U.S. dollars being shipped to them from Colombia. They know what generates that cash. That’s drug money that has been smuggled from the U.S. and Europe to Colombia. The Federal Reserve takes that because its good economics for this country’s banking system. The Americans’ so-called War on Drugs is a sham.”

I was floored. If this was true, why were risking our lives?

Later research confirmed Bilgrami’s claim, and I had never felt more betrayed. For the first time, I questioned whether we’d been naïve to think we could make a difference.

- Mazur, pp. 339-340
Now, I must say that this is the only part in this book where Mazur offers an opinion on the war on drugs; and it cannot speak for his overall assessment of it. Rather, I believe this passage illustrates the economic complexity, if not underlying hypocrisy of the war on drugs (at least in the 1980’s). I do not know if this loophole with the Federal Reserve still exists today.