Dope Inc.'s takeover of the world economy

UN Drug Office: Dope Cash Rescued Banks

Antonio Maria Costa, director of the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), singled out the
role of drug money in propping up the disintegrating
financial system, in an interview published in the Jan.
27, 2009 Austrian weekly Profil, and in his blog entries
on the UNODC website on Nov. 19, 2008. Costa also
firmly opposed the idea of drug legalization, medical
decriminalization, and Britain’s proposal to purchase
the Afghan opium crop from local farmers. Here are
excerpts of Costa’s remarks:
From the Profil interview:
The drug trade at this time could be the only growth
industry, with little unemployment. The money is flowing
only partly back into illegal activities, in parts of
Asia, Africa, and South America, where it is used to
bribe politicians, buy elections, or finance insurgents,
such as the Talibans in Afghanistan, the Tamil Tigers of
Sri Lanka, or the FARC in Colombia. . . .
[The rest of the money] is fed into the legal economic
circulation through money laundering. We do
not know how much, but the volume is imposing. As
such, seen from the macroeconomic effect, this is
simply bringing in investment capital. There are indications,
that these funds also ended up in the finance
sector, which has been under obvious pressure since the
second half of last year. . . .
It appears that interbank credits have been financed
by money which comes from the drug trade and other
illegal activities. It is naturally hard to prove this, but
there are indications that a number of banks were rescued
by this means. . . .
In many cases, drug money is currently the only
liquid investment capital, to buy real estate, for example.
In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the biggest
problem the banking system had, and therefore, this
liquid capital became an important factor. . . .
To get around the electronic surveillance of bank
transactions, criminals stash their funds in cash sums
which can be up to hundreds of millions of dollars. . . .
We have to consider the interdependence of drugs
and criminality; anything else would be irresponsible.
. . . Legalization would inevitably send abuse way
up. . . . [When the British gave out over 100 million euro
to compensate Afghan farmers for their opium crops] it
had the opposite effect. Within one year, the cultivation
doubled, because the farmers knew that if the drug traders
did not buy their opium, then, “I’ll get my money
from the British.”
From Costa’s blog:
Today, the financial crisis is providing an extraordinary
opportunity for even greater mafia penetration of
cash-strapped financial houses: with the banking crisis
choking lending, these cash-rich criminal groups have
emerged as the only sources of credit.
Bankers’ . . . greed, arrogance and deception have
shaken people’s confidence in their profession and the
trust of the institutions that conspired with them to
cause the crisis—hedge and investment funds, insurance
companies, rating and audit agencies. During September
and October [2008], within about 60 days, the
world’s financial architecture as constructed in the past
60 years, collapsed. And we are just at the beginning of
the drama, as jobs, markets, revenues and production
are also being destroyed by the crisis.
Not only have bankers created monstrous financial
instruments whose size, complexity and ownership
nobody could understand or master. So many of them
have engaged in something both stupid and diabolical.
They have allowed the world’s criminal economy to
become part of the global economy. Investment bankers,
fund managers, commodity traders and realtors—
together with auditors, accountants and lawyers—have
assisted syndicates to launder the proceeds from crime
and become legitimate partners to business. In most
cases the predicated crime was mafia-type: namely, violence
against individuals, business and property. In
other cases the predicated crime was corruption: namely,
a silent yet pernicious violence against national treasuries
and against public services that remain unfunded.
Greedy banks have taken in and hidden this blood
money. Complex financial instruments have made financial
markets deliberately less transparent and more
accessible to wrong-doing. Thanks to bankers, accountants
and lawyers, criminal groups have become multinational
corporations: a sort of mafia borghese, or white
collar syndicate. Today, the financial crisis is providing
an extraordinary opportunity for even greater mafia
penetration of cash-strapped financial houses: with the
banking crisis choking lending, these cash-rich criminal
groups have emerged as the only sources of credit.


LaRouche: Stop Dope, Inc.'s Takeover of World Economy

by Dennis Small

[PDF version of this article]

Jan. 30—"This is Doomsday Time," Lyndon LaRouche warned in a Jan. 28 statement issued by the LaRouche Political Action Committee. "The world's available money supply is tied largely to the attempted bailout of financial institutions, and you've got a shortage of money, of any kind of credit, building up rapidly into catastrophic levels in every other area."

With no money available for useful production, and most world leaders still not willing to address the necessary bankruptcy reorganization of the entire international financial system, unemployment is skyrocketing, factories are closing, state and national governments around the world are teetering at the edge of insolvency, and world trade is grinding to a halt. In late January, the usually staid United Nations' International Labor Organization (ILO) issued a report forecasting that 50 million jobs would be lost worldwide by the end of 2009, and that there will shortly be 1.4 billion "working poor"—about half the planet's working-age population.

The ILO's forecast is actually "optimistic," LaRouche responded, given the accelerating disintegration of the global economy. "People are going to start dying as a result of these economic conditions."

Furthermore, the London-centered international drug cartel known as Dope, Inc. is moving in "to take over the whole world economy," LaRouche warned.

The danger is that the people who are pushing drugs will thrive; and those who get drug money will feel that they are going to thrive, too. And those who are not getting the drug money are going to find out that they don't get anything.

Now, the argument is that you have to be good to the drug pushers, because they are the only ones who are supplying the loose cash with this situation presently, in which the world money supply is collapsing and the drug supply of money is increasing.

LaRouche said that this drug takeover of the world economy by the British Empire, operating through front men like the Nazi-trained George Soros, has to be stopped cold. "Destroy the bastards! Shut them down. There's no reason to put up with this crap. Civilization is at stake," LaRouche insisted.
'The Whole System Is Infected'

The director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonio Maria Costa, has also exposed the escalating role of drug money in bailing out the drowning banking system. In a Jan. 27 interview in the Austrian magazine Profil and in comments to Associated Press, Costa said drug money laundering in unprecedented amounts is "certainly happening across the board.... The money is available, and the need for that money is there. I think the whole system is infected," Costa asserted (see below).

Costa estimated that the total street value of all illicit drugs was about $320 billion a year. This, however, significantly understates the magnitude of the problem, according to a new systematic study of Dope, Inc.'s global activities that EIR is currently preparing. Preliminary findings indicate that the total dollar value of drug production may well be two to three times UNODC's figure, and that other components of the global "black" economy— illegal weapons, commmodities contraband, gambling, prostitution, etc.—are probably as much again as the drug money, bringing the total into the ballpark of $1.5-2 trillion a year.

In these days of trillion-dollar TARP bailouts and quadrillion-dollar vaporization of derivatives and other financial assets, $2 trillion may not sound like a lot of money. But this is loose, highly-liquid, free-floating cash, which can go a long way to purchase politicians and narcoterrorist armies, and salvage friendly financial institutions—albeit briefly.

The campaign for drug legalization, which Soros is spearheading internationally, will only make the problem far, far worse by vastly increasing drug consumption and revenues. The constantly repeated refrain that, "You just can't win the war on drugs, so we may as well strike a deal," is a pack of lies.

"The only reasons we have a drug problem," LaRouche stated on Jan. 19, "is because governments don't want to take it away. People say, 'Well, you can't solve the problem.' What do you mean you can't solve the problem?! We have the technological means to detect everything in fine detail, to find all of this stuff; we know how to develop methods for solving the problem. They choose not to do it! That's the reason—it's the only reason. Because you have a system which is doing it. You have to shut down the system."
Operation Afghanistan

LaRouche this week urged the Obama Administration to launch a serious war against drugs, as the best way—in fact, the only way—to solve the crisis in Afghanistan and Southwest Asia in general (see below).

"There is no hope for Afghanistan or Pakistan, so long as the drug trade is allowed to flourish," LaRouche stated. "The most direct way to shut down that trade, and establish the necessary conditions for a viable policy for South and Central Asia, is to first eliminate George Soros. Shut down his offshore operations, remove him from any access to the American political process. Cart him off to jail. Then, come and talk to me about an appropriate strategy for bringing stability and prosperity to Afghanistan and Pakistan." LaRouche added: "George Soros is so pivotal to the British opium war operations, whether in Afghanistan/Pakistan, or in Mexico and other parts of the Western Hemisphere, that no victory is possible in either of these areas, so long as Soros is allowed to operate."

LaRouche has also emphasized that the new war on drugs must be fought with a minimum of deadly violence, using advanced technologies—especially space-based technologies—to defeat the enemy by detecting, eradicating, interdicting, and seizing drug flows at every stage of the process. LaRouche has dubbed the needed approach "Operation Afghanistan."

Dope, Inc. has in fact converted Afghanistan into a giant opium and heroin producing machine for the global drug market that London has created. Afghan opium production soared by 140% over the last five years since the NATO invasion—from 3,400 metric tons in 2002 to some 8,200 metric tons in 2007—and its share of world production leapt from 75% to 92% in the same period (see Figure 1).

Dope, Inc. has a lot going for it in Afghanistan. Opium yields there averaged about 40 kilograms per hectare over the past three years, which is substantially higher than the 15 kg/ha average in most other opium producing countries. It is widely known that half of Afghan opium is grown in the British-occupied Helmand province, which is only 9% of the country's land area. As Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Baheen put it on Jan. 18: "Afghanistan's opium production was only high in places where international foreign forces were stationed, like the British troops in Helmand."

The vast majority of Afghan opium is converted into heroin, mostly inside Afghanistan itself, or in laboratories located just across the border in Pakistan. Furthermore, since about 2002, Afghanistan has improved the efficiency of its conversion of opium into heroin, by about 15%. Instead of requiring 10 kilograms of opium to produce 1 kilo of heroin (which has been the standard historic average around the world for decades), Afghanistan now requires only 8.5 kg of opium to produce 1 kg of heroin.

This means that, out of an estimated world production of about 795 tons of heroin in 2007, Afghanistan produced some 753 tons (95% of the total), and the rest of the world produced only 42 tons. The "Afghan bonus" due to the increased conversion efficiency since 2002, has added about 110 tons to what it otherwise would have produced—which, alone, is nearly three times what the rest of the world produced!

If we compare world production of opium and cocaine over the period 1995-2007, a crucial point comes into focus. Opium production increased by 90% during this period (from 4,475 tons in 1995, to 8,484 tons in 2007), with phenomenal increases, especially in the last two to three years in Afghanistan. Cocaine production, on the other hand, was almost flat during that same period, inching up from 929 tons in 1995, to 940 tons in 2007.

The reason? Eradication of over half of all coca plantations, principally in Colombia. If there had been no coca eradication, cocaine production in 2007 would have been 1,903 tons, almost double the 940 tons that actually were produced. And the curve of rising cocaine production from 1995 to 2007 would have looked like an exact copy of the curve for opium production (see Figure 2).

Stated otherwise: Over the past four years, Afghanistan eradicated less than 7% of its poppy crop. Why so little? Because the British wouldn't allow it, because they are promoting drugs in Afghanistan, and internationally. According to a July 2008 article in the New York Times Magazine, by former ambassador Thomas Schweich, a high-level anti-narcotics official from the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs: When an aerial interdiction effort was briefly undertaken a few years ago in Afghanistan, the British command in the Helmand opium province "actually issued leaflets and bought radio advertisements telling the local criminals that the British military was not part of the anti-poppy effort."

During the same period that almost no poppy plants were eradicated in Afghanistan, the coca-growing nations of Colombia, Peru, and Boliva—but especially Colombia—eradicated 50% of the total coca crop.

But even these levels of eradication are modest, compared to what can be achieved with full deployment of shared modern technology, based on cooperation among sovereign nation-states. EIR has estimated that fully 90% of all drug crops—coca, poppy/opium, and marijuana—could be eradicated with a serious deployment of high-tech detection and eradication technologies. All that is lacking is the political will to do it.