We read from the RAND corporation report that “Spending on cannabis, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine by Americans reached nearly $150 billion in 2016,” which surely means that this number has increased even more to account for illicit opiates as well as fentanyl. The sheer size of this number should be deeply disturbing to all Americans, but even more so, it signifies that for all this illicit drug business to be occurring within America, this necessitates a robust infrastructure for these illicit businesses, which isn’t discussed or thought about nearly enough.
When we look at an orthodox American business, we recognize that for that business to reach sales of just 1 billion dollars, it will require real estate, security, computers, personnel, transportation, logistics, data storage, accountants, lawyers, salespeople, management, inventory, and banking. All of these very things are also necessary for the illicit drug trade and even more so, because illicit drugs operate outside the law, but nevertheless still require things that all companies of a certain size need in order to operate, be efficient, and grow. This thus signifies the rather obvious point, that whether transactions are done with cash, or cash like instruments that banking is going to be required to be involved with all the money that is coming in and going out, wittingly or unwittingly, but still involved in the drug trade, which means that whatever controls that are currently in place to monitor such are doing an incredibly poor job of catching much of anything. So too, while the United States has plenty of law enforcement personnel, it just seems rather obvious that certain of those law officers have been compromised in one way or another, or else there would be a much more serious interdiction of drugs coming to America and being distributed throughout America. The bottom line is that whatever is being done at present sure isn’t that effective, because just about any illicit drug is easily obtainable within just about any city in America, without exception.
The one thing that we know for a certainty is that sums of $150 billion just can’t be hidden and what this nation really needs to do a far better job of accomplishing, is to follow the money, because all those transactions are going somewhere to something, again and again, of which, there doesn’t seem to be the type of serious interdiction that should be accomplished, actually occurring. Additionally, America has some very high-budgeted secret agencies, such as the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, which one would think would have their finger on the pulse of the drug trade, but rather, it seems like these agencies, regrettably, either aren’t doing their job well and competently, are quite possibly, are compromised and even aiders and abettors of the illicit drug trade, for their own ulterior motives, typically justified under the mistaken belief that if it is only the underclass of America, suffering from this drug scourge, it’s no big deal.
All of the above would indicate one important belief: America hasn’t done nearly enough to eliminate or to rein in substantially this drug flow in America, which begs the question as to why, because the volume and monies are so large, it seems as if the powers that be aren’t even really trying, which is rather suspicious.