CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

90 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
estimated in their countries. Growers have learned how to plant in smaller
plots and under trees where helicopters, aircraft, and satellites cannot spot
plants thriving beneath a loose canopy of foliage.
Opium poppy cultivation has been reduced in the infamous Golden
Triangle of Burma, Laos, and Thailand, only to surge again in Afghanistan.
Furthermore, cultivation has also spread to new growing areas in South
America and Europe. Authorities hate to admit it, but the truth is global
drug production is like an inflated balloon; you squeeze it in one place and it
expands in another place.
Cannabis, from which marijuana and hashish are produced, is grown all
over the world—in warm climates, cold climates, outdoors, indoors, backyards,
and living rooms. Two-thirds of countries reporting to the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime see an increase in consumption, making
marijuana and hashish far and away the most heavily produced and widely
consumed illicit drugs on the planet.
Synthetic drugs are soaring in use. Amphetamines are cutting into other
drug markets. Production centers include China, Burma, North Korea, Australia,
New Zealand, Belgium, Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, South
Africa, Mexico, and the United States. Recipes are readily available on the
Internet. In the current decade, tens of thousands of labs—everything from
home kitchens producing a few ounces at a time to “super labs” capable of
producing up to 10 pounds of methamphetamines a day—have been seized
in the United States and Mexico.
Meth, available in powder, rock, or tablet form, is glorified with a variety
of street names such as “crystal,” “ice,” “crink,” “glass,” “chicken
feed” and “the poor man’s cocaine.” A versatile drug, it can be injected,
ingested, smoked, or snorted. Another type of the drug, which is known
as 3-4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), or “ecstasy,” “go,” or
the “hug drug,” is available for about $20 to $30 a pop, and school surveys
in North America and Europe show that consumption is growing
among younger users. 81
The economics of trafficking explain why this line of work is so attractive.
Take just two drugs for which data in metric measurements are reasonably
reliable—cocaine and opiates, including heroin—as shown in Table 3.7.
The $35 billion wholesale value for opiates and nearly $9 billion for cocaine,
received by drug cartels and kingpins, roughly suggests the amount of
money that is laundered into the international financial system from these