Under apartheid, Zulus were confined to KwaZulu-Natal and denied South African citizenship from 1981 to 1994. Today, about 10-12 million Zulus live in KwaZulu, preserving their language, customs, and identity amid South Africa’s multicultural landscape.
…..legal framework of apartheid. Human Rights Watch found that the Israeli government has demonstrated an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the OPT. Yesh Din reached this conclusion in the West Bank, specifically. B’Tselem found that Israel is maintaining a system of apartheid over Palestinians in the OPT as well as Palestinians living within its own borders.
USAID was frozen recently. The result for Zulus was:
Majola is one of millions of patients in South Africa affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s global foreign aid freeze, raising worries about HIV patients defaulting on treatment, infection rates going up and eventually a rise in deaths.
The relief fund is currently active in seven districts in KwaZulu-Natal, five in the Eastern Cape, four in Gauteng, and several districts in other provinces across the country…….
…….HIV/Aids programmes would be most affected, as these programmes were the focal point of funding through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfa)
Today, geographical patterns of poverty on the map of South Africa still correspond to the apartheid “homelands”, barren rural regions far from cities, packed with people but with little infrastructure, no development and few jobs. Municipalities with high percentages of people living in poverty are today often found in regions that were once homelands.
Meanwhile Trump wants to own the Palestinian homeland and has been angry that South Africa has supported the Palestinians. He is freezing aid because he wants South Africans to stop seizing land of white farmers who stole it during colonial occupation.
We watched the report of your conversation with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, with fear and distaste. We find it insulting that you expect Ukraine to show respect and gratitude for the material assistance provided by the United States in its fight against Russia.
Gratitude is owed to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world. They have been dying on the front lines for more than 11 years in the name of these values and the independence of their homeland, which was attacked by Putin’s Russia.
We do not understand how the leader of a country that symbolizes the free world cannot recognize this.
Our alarm was also heightened by the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation, which reminded us of the interrogations we endured at the hands of the Security Services and the debates in Communist courts. Prosecutors and judges, acting on behalf of the all-powerful communist political police, would explain to us that they held all the power while we held none. They demanded that we cease our activities, arguing that thousands of innocent people suffered because of us. They stripped us of our freedoms and civil rights because we refused to cooperate with the government or express gratitude for our oppression. We are shocked that President Volodymyr Zelensky was treated in the same manner.
The history of the 20th century shows that whenever the United States sought to distance itself from democratic values and its European allies, it ultimately became a threat to itself. President Woodrow Wilson understood this when he decided in 1917 that the United States must join World War I. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this when, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he resolved that the war to defend America must be fought not only in the Pacific but also in Europe, in alliance with the nations under attack by the Third Reich.
We remember that without President Ronald Reagan and America’s financial commitment, the collapse of the Soviet empire would not have been possible. President Reagan recognized that millions of enslaved people suffered in Soviet Russia and the countries it had subjugated, including thousands of political prisoners who paid for their defense of democratic values with their freedom. His greatness lay, among other things, in his unwavering decision to call the USSR an “Empire of Evil” and to fight it decisively. We won, and today, the statue of President Ronald Reagan stands in Warsaw, facing the U.S. Embassy.
Mr. President, material aid—military and financial—can never be equated with the blood shed in the name of Ukraine’s independence and the freedom of Europe and the entire free world. Human life is priceless; its value cannot be measured in money. Gratitude is due to those who sacrifice their blood and their freedom. This is self-evident to us, the people of Solidarity, former political prisoners of the communist regime under Soviet Russia.
We call on the United States to uphold the guarantees made alongside Great Britain in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which established a direct obligation to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for its relinquishment of nuclear weapons. These guarantees are unconditional—there is no mention of treating such assistance as an economic transaction.
Signed,
Lech Wałęsa, former political prisoner, President of Poland
And, in reading the piece below, I have learned those extremist Catholic beliefs have never been extinguished. The Opus Dei cult has evolved out of that Spanish history.
It is not one supported or practiced by most Rank and File Catholics. It is a kind of Catholicism which has done irreparable harm. It is a kind of Catholicism unfit for existence in the modern world.
Inquisitor Bernard Gui said, the layman must not argue with the unbeliever, but “thrust his sword into the man’s belly as far as it will go.” In a time of burgeoning ideas about spirituality, the Church insisted that it was the only avenue through which one was permitted to learn of God. Pope Innocent III declared “that anyone who attempted to construe a personal view of God which conflicted with Church dogma must be burned without pity.”
Then I open Craig Unger’s 2017 book where he surprised me with this:
In effect, as attorney general, Barr, a leading figure in the newly emergent Catholic right—with its ties to Opus Dei, a mysterious fringe sect with roots in fascist Spain—was bringing in a new strain of religious authoritarianism and theocratic nationalism to join forces with Trumpism on their way to collision after collision with the US Constitution. All this in a world of decadence and depravity tied to figures like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, whose pedophile operation trafficked in underage girls as young as eleven, and also had links to Russian intelligence. This was a war for the soul of America. And at the heart of it all were seemingly simple questions that had never been answered. Indeed, almost absent from the presidential campaign was any discussion of what put Trump in the White House in the first place: Russia.
My mind is being exposed to an intriguing avenue of thought which seems to have historical facts behind it. I must find out more.
I am trying to understand how daily news now reveals the US and Russian foreign policies are aligning.
The US vote against a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia for starting the war against Ukraine placed it in previously unthinkable company – on the side of Russia, Belarus and North Korea. Even China abstained from the vote
I have a range of relevant books I am reading just now which are opening my mind to historical events which have led us to this tumultuous point in time.
None of us can afford to remain bystanders. Educating ourselves is more important than ever, but retaining an open mind is important.
So the latest guru to influence the techies is Curtis Yarvin:
Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington.
For over a decade, Yarvin, an ex-computer programmer-turned-blogger, has argued that American democracy is irrevocably broken and ought to be replaced with a monarchy styled after a Silicon Valley tech start-up. According to Yarvin, the time has come to jettison existing democratic institutions and concentrate political power in a single “chief executive” or “dictator.” These ideas — which Yarvin calls “neo-reaction” or “the Dark Enlightenment” — were once confined to the fringes of the internet, but now, with Trump’s reelection, they are finding a newly powerful audience in Washington.
Craziness is as craziness does. It is hard to believe that these cults are breaking American ambitions to be the shining house on the hill.
Weapons of war have been designed and manufactured by the US since Eisenhower, after WW2. But he warned, in his final address, of a potential over intense concentration on an arms race. The consequence would be funds directed at a massive military-industrial complex, rather than meeting the greater needs of the people of America.
I’m reproducing the newsletter of Ralph Nader, 22nd Feb 2025:
From: Ralph Nader <info@nader.org> Date: 22 February 2025 Subject:Stop Repeating the Vast Undercount of Gazan Deaths. It Is Ten Times Greater. Reply-To: Ralph Nader <info@nader.org>
Stop Repeating the Vast Undercount of Gazan Deaths. It Is Ten Times Greater.
By Ralph Nader
February 21, 2025
Enough already of the media’s lazy indifference to the vast undercount of the Palestinian death toll from Netanyahu’s genocidal daily bombing and shelling of Gaza’s defenseless civilian population. I’m referring to all the media – the corporate media, the public media, and the independent media. They all stick with the Hamas Ministry of Health’s (MOH) count of named victims whose corpses have been identified by hospitals and mortuaries. For months there have been no operating hospitals and mortuaries to send their grisly data to the Health Ministry.
The official Hamas count that all sides like to cite is now over 48,000 deaths. As American doctors back from Gaza before the Rafah closing last year said—just about everybody surviving in Gaza is sick, injured, or dying. They put the death estimate almost a year ago at a minimum of 95,000, not counting tens of thousands of families buried under the rubble when Israeli F-16s blew up entire apartment buildings.
Why would all sides to this one-sided Israeli war of extermination rely on Hamas’ figures? Well, Hamas has an interest in low-balling the number of deaths to limit the rage of its inhabitants and allies abroad for not protecting the people of Gaza and not providing them with shelters. The Israeli super-hawks want to keep the undercount low to dampen down the international rage, boycotts, and demand for more sanctions and ICC prosecutions. The Biden administration and now the Trump regime also benefit from a low number.
Here is the Washington Post’s esteemed foreign affairs editor Karen DeYoung’s reply on September 6, 2024 to my inquiry:
“We use the Gaza MOH [Ministry of Health] figures – as does the United Nations, World Health Organization and virtually every other humanitarian organization – while noting that independent media are not allowed to enter Gaza and the casualty counts are most certainly underreported… The Lancet [British Medical Journal] report notes that based on other ‘recent conflicts…it is not implausible to estimate’ that four times as many have died than those listed by the MOH…The time will come, I believe, when an independent accounting can be done.”
But six months later the time still hasn’t come. The Biden State Department had a much higher estimate of deaths but refused to release their analysis, obstructing our Freedom of Information request filed last May 24, 2024. All kinds of estimates and projections by reputable universities, specialists, global health groups and UN agencies point to a much higher death and overall casualty toll. But the State Department won’t come forward with a reasonably estimated number that can replace Hamas’ statistical immolation.
For example, in late 2023, the chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh—Professor Devi Sridhar—said that if the destruction continues, half a million Palestinians would die in 2024. The devastation has gotten worse—the bombings, the genocidal denial of “food, water, medicine, electricity, fuel” in the omnicidal words of the high Israeli military officials, the spread of diseases, untreated injuries, babies born into the rubble, infants starved, lack of potable water, sick elderly without critical medicines, and more. This is the result of 110 thousand tons of bombs (Israeli admission) daily tank shelling and precise destructions. Yet neither she nor most other experts who have projected continuing mayhem have offered a number.
Interestingly, the media has no trouble estimating the Syrian deaths at the hands of dictator Assad (500,000) nor the deaths in the wars in Sudan or Ukraine. Only the Palestinians, who are not allowed to live, don’t get the respect of having their deaths accurately estimated. One team of Gazan undertakers said they buried 17,000 bodies in mass graves by February 2024, including 800 in one day.
Were the shoe on the other foot, Congress would not only have had intense public hearings: it would have declared war against Hamas. With total U.S. co-belligerency – from huge weapons supplies to the veto at the UN, Netanyahu gets away with blocking Israeli and all other reporters from going freely into Gaza, and shuts up those conscience-stricken Israeli soldiers who are sickened by what they were ordered to destroy. One of them said, “I felt like, like, like a Nazi … it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.”
Some columnists in the U.S. like Charles Lane and Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post and Netanyahu’s mouthpiece, Bret Stephens of the New York Times, do not believe the Israeli military consciously targets civilians and civilian infrastructure. Israelis scoff at such naivete; many want more annihilation of all Palestinians whom they regard as “subhuman,” “vermin,” “snakes,” or “animals” (racist words from high Israeli politicians over the decades).
Some 45 years ago, former UN Ambassador and Foreign Minister Abba Eban —under then Prime Minister Menachem Begin—wrote that Israel “is wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name.”
In August 2024, based on available historical, empirical, and clinical records, we estimated about 300,000 Palestinians had been killed. (See the August/September 2024 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). By now it is over 400,000. Yet the media still uses the figure by Hamas and ignores the lives blown apart under the killing fields in Gaza.
At 400,000 and growing, far more Palestinians have been killed in Gaza than the combined total of deaths from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden in World War II. This week, Netanyahu dropped leaflets in Arabic signaling a forthcoming violent exclusion of Gaza’s trapped, unsheltered Palestinians from their homeland. More accurately estimated civilian casualties matters morally and for the intensity of the political, diplomatic, and civic resistance when the world learns the truer toll of death and injuries in this tiny enclave the geographical size of Philadelphia.
To remind the world of the daily Israeli violations of settled international law inflicted on Gazans (also in the West Bank and Lebanon), international law practitioner Bruce Fein compiled this concise list:
ISRAEL’S TEN VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL HUMANITARIAN LAW IN GAZA
Genocide Count I. Killing Palestinians in Gaza.
Genocide Count II. Deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
Genocide Count III. Destroying hospitals and maternal care necessities intended to prevent births by Palestinian women in Gaza.
Crimes against humanity. Extermination and persecution of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza as part of a systematic attack directed at Palestinian civilians.
Deliberately targeting civilians and civilian property for destruction.
Failing to provide for the security and welfare of the inhabitants occupied by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.
Impeding delivery of humanitarian assistance.
Forcible relocation of civilian population.
Use of military force causing civilian casualties vastly disproportionate to the importance of any legitimate military objective.
This diagram below has been helpfully put together because digitisation enables such quick overviews.
Thanks to digitisation we have given away our personal information believing it was held securely, TRUSTING the systems which held the data.
It has now been stolen and tampered with by those who had contempt for us believing in such a myth.
Anne Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic, February 29th 2025:
For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered too. Thanks to its allies, the U.S. obtained unprecedented political and economic influence in Europe and Asia, and unprecedented power everywhere else.
The Trump administration is now bringing the post–World War II era to an end.
Each of us has either lost our homeland, knows of family who has, or doesn’t know their ancestors did so in recent centuries. But all of us have origins from thousands of years ago back in pre- Christian times, when early civilisations rose and fell, and land was grabbed and those who once occupied it were forced out, enslaved or assimilated.
Somewhere within us we have race memory that knows that pain of loss of homeland. We recognise it and should be able to relate to it. Yet some of us lack the humanity to recognise it. We may only have the motivation to take from a perceived vulnerable group, take what we have decided is rightfully ours, though it is not.
And in Ronen Bergman’s book, ‘Rise and Kill First’, he relates the 1980s painful situation Palestinians find themselves in, being classed as terrorists because it is their belief the land the Jews assert is theirs, is not.
APPROXIMATELY 2.5 MILLION PALESTINIANS (no general census was conducted during that period) lived in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, having been under Israeli rule since 1967. Their frustration and bitterness had been growing steadily year after year. Israel had opened its gates to Palestinian workers, and some 40 percent of the workforce crossed the border every day to work in Israel, but only menial jobs were available, at exploitation wages and in difficult conditions. Palestinian construction laborers and dishwashers watched resentfully as Israelis thrived and reached an almost Western European level of economic prosperity. Inside the occupied territories themselves, unemployment grew, and there were few jobs available for those with higher education. The cities were intolerably overcrowded, and Israeli authorities did nothing to improve municipal services, nor did they provide land for building and agriculture to meet the needs of a burgeoning Palestinian population. Israel did, however, confiscate Palestinian lands and settle increasing numbers of its own citizens there, a blatant violation of international law. Many of these settlers were ideologically driven, believing in the idea that “Greater Israel” belonged to the Jews. Others were simply seeking a better standard of living and taking advantage of the heavily subsidized housing. After enduring these aggravations, wretched conditions, and visible injustices for years, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were on the verge of exploding. But this was something that Israeli intelligence either could not see or did not want to see. A longtime focus on pinpoint warfare against the PLO and its leaders had concealed the swelling rage of the Palestinian people from Israel’s intelligence community and its politicians. The Israelis’ tactical achievements and ability to locate and eliminate PLO leaders and militants nearly anywhere in the world had given them the sense that Israel could forever impose its rule over the millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories without consequence.
And now, in 2025, President Trump desires to make Gaza an American Riviera.
So now I’m reading ‘Burn Book’, by Kara Fisher. As I was passionate about computers in education back in 1981, this book has great resonance for me. Kara Fisher began as a journalist, intrigued by the young start-ups in Silicon Valley during the flourishing of the Internet. Here is an extract from the first pages of her book:
All these companies began with a gauzy credo to change the world. And they had indeed done that, but in ways they hadn’t imagined at the start, increasingly with troubling consequences from a flood of misinformation to a society becoming isolated and addicted to its gadgets. So had I, so much so that I had taken to joking at the end when I made speeches: “I leave you to your own devices. . . . I mean that; your phone is the best relationship you all have now, the first thing you pick up in the morning and the last thing you touch at night.” It always got a laugh, but by the time Trump was halfway through his term, it was much less funny and it was dead clear that I had underestimated how compromised the tech companies would become. “Facebook, as well as Twitter and Google’s YouTube and the rest, have become the digital arms dealers of the modern age,” I wrote in one of my first columns after I joined the New York Times as a columnist in 2018. “They have mutated human communication, so that connecting people has too often become about pitting them against one another and turbocharged that discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civic discourse. And they have weaponized, most of all, politics.”
From those days in the 1980s when I worked as National Information Officer for the UK’s Microelectronics Education Programme, to now, when all my hopes for the future of our children have been smashed into fragments, I find myself greatly saddened in my final years of life at the present era of tech influence on us today.
We know there are huge positives from developments in technology, but we, the global population, are paying much too high a price.
I have a 1978 copy of The Times Atlas of World History. I’ve taken these photos of some of its pages:
I treasure this book. Its then editor was Geoffrey Barraclough, formerly Stevenson Research Professor of International History, University of London and Chichele Professor of Modern History, University of London.
An interesting debate about genetics, ethnicity, faith and assigning names, which may cause confusion, can be read here:
After Assad fled, one news item stayed in my head. A warehouse filled to the ceiling with the drug, Captagon. The comment was that this was the favourite drug of Jihadists.
No doubt the “Captagon” used by ISIS or ISI, and other extremist groups, to enhance their soldiers abilities today is far removed from the Captagon of the eighties. Instead of just two main ingredients, illegal manufacturing likely combines several highly addictive stimulants with compounding actions into one destructive little pill. This “new age” Captagon, as with any highly addictive substance, is likely to cause irreversible changes in brain circuitry that govern impulse control and judgement, taking away a person’s ability to reason or think rationally.
Russia has been active in the Middle East for a while and only exited Syria when Assad’s government fell. RSF atrocities in Sudan have been done with the help of Russian Wagner mercenaries and UAE. Extremely barbaric slaughter has occurred in Sudan, and we all remember the butchery by Wagner troops in Ukraine.
ISIS attacks are so extreme and cruel and there is a deep psychopathic behaviour which was also active when Hamas extremists descended on the unsuspecting Israelis on October 7th, 2023.
If the brain circuitry is irreversibly damaged, this could be a drug administered to recruits (whether willing or forced) to turn them into psychopathic killing machines.
So who is manufacturing the drug, where are ingredients obtained and did Assad become wealthy from those purchasing it to spread terror and fear throughout the world?
I know my question has already been answered but do military motives outweigh motives to destroy all drugs which result in transforming a thinking, rational, responsible human being into a killing machine to work for some power hungry force?
Ronen Bergman, in his book, ‘Rise and Kill First’, tells us the history of extremist Israeli strategy against Palestinians. For example, in Lebanon, where fleeing Palestinians were living in flimsy refugee camps, that led to resentment from Christian extremists and some Israelis realized they could capitalize on that:
David Agmon was head of the Northern Command staff, one of the few who were in on Dagan’s secret ops. “The aim,” he said, “was to cause chaos amongst the Palestinians and Syrians in Lebanon, without leaving an Israeli fingerprint, to give them the feeling that they were constantly under attack and to instill them with a sense of insecurity.” In order to leave no Israeli fingerprints, Dagan and his crew recruited Lebanese locals, Christians, and Shiite Muslims, who detested Arafat and were infuriated by the way the Palestinians treated Lebanon and its people, as if it were their own land. Using those “operational squads,” as they were called, Dagan’s SLR began a series of targeted killings and sabotage operations in southern Lebanon.
In 1976 a massacre of Palestinian refugees occurred:
Sharon’s response was typical. Testifying behind closed doors before a 1982 Knesset oversight panel on the secret services, he read from a sheaf of classified documents about the massacre of Palestinians perpetrated by the Maronites at the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in 1976, when Rabin and Peres were running the country. Sharon dwelled at length on the horrendous slaughter of children, the blades that slashed open pregnant women’s bellies. Peres responded angrily, “Who knew [what was going on]?” Sharon replied, “The Red Cross reported that during those days of the massacre, our ships prevented the entry of vessels carrying medical aid. … You built the relationship and we continued it. … You also helped them after the massacre. We didn’t complain to you then. And I would not have raised the matter if you did not behave the way you behaved. … You, Mr. Peres, after Tel al-Zaatar, have no monopoly on morality.”
And a few years later, the link between militia taking drugs before committing atrocities was recorded:
Robert Hatem, Hobeika’s executioner, recalled that when the 350 Phalangists set out on their mission, “Hobeika told us, ‘Fuck everybody there. Erase the camp.’ We even took a D9 [bulldozer] to demolish everything.” The camp, Hatem said, “was made up of shacks, tin shanties. When we fired, everything came tumbling down. We shot in all directions. We didn’t check to see who was behind those walls.” The lion’s share of the damage was inflicted by a group commanded by Marom Mashalani. “Its members – including one of the commanders –” Hatem said, “took a lot of drugs, as much as it is possible to take. They didn’t distinguish between fighters and noncombatants or between men and women. They shot them all.” The result was a horrific massacre. The number of the dead is disputed—the Israelis say 700, and the Palestinians say 2,750. Sharon would later claim that “Lebanese forces [i.e., the Phalangists] would conform to the conventions of war when the IDF was controlling them, overseeing or coordinating their actions. … The terrible outcome is in the nature of an unanticipated and unexplained breakdown.” In other words, Sharon argued that he could not have foreseen what had happened. Classified IDF and Mossad documents, however, prove that the barbaric behavior pattern of the Phalange had long been known by the heads of the Israeli defense establishment. The prevalent assumption was that, straight after the evacuation of the PLO from Beirut, “the Phalange would find a way to move in, to settle scores—that murder would begin in Beirut from the first day.” Sharon himself had spoken with contempt about any possible military contribution the Phalange could make, asserting, “Forget about them. They won’t do a thing. Maybe later, when … it’ll be possible to loot, to kill, to rape. Yes, then they will rape and loot and kill.” The IDF and the Mossad didn’t contribute directly to the massacre, but the patronage they extended to the Christian forces and their failure to protect the occupied Palestinians tarred Israel’s name. As soon as the Israelis discovered what the Phalangists had done, they ordered them to cease and expressed their outrage. At the same time, however, they also began counseling the Maronite militia on what to tell the legions of journalists now covering the atrocity.
Religious differences within the Palestinian population have been exploited by their enemies.
And wherever there are differences of beliefs around the world, these are exploited by militia between factions causing continual suffering and strife. Drug use fuels the blind rampages of violence.
See also spread of drugs such as cannabis, opioids
The billionaires who profit in their illegal trade launder the proceeds at every stage of the supply chain:
The global illicit drugs trade is estimated to be worth at least half a trillion US dollars each year. Drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin generate large revenues all along their supply chains, from where the products (and precursor materials) are grown or made – principally Colombia and Bolivia, China, Afghanistan, and the “golden triangle” of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand – to wherever the finished drugs are consumed.
Earnings in the illicit drug trade are variable. Few people will make the kind of money that once put the Mexican former cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán on the Forbes list of global billionaires. But while drug “kingpins” are the industry’s biggest individual earners, they do not hold the majority of the drug money that is generated throughout the global supply chain.
Despite their frequent glamorisation in film and TV portrayals, drug cartels are basically international logistics companies. They work with distributors in different countries who deliver the drugs to regional wholesalers, who in turn supply the local retailers (dealers) who sell drugs to individuals.
Everyone along the supply chain takes their cut, with most people making much more modest incomes than the millionaire drug traffickers of narcocorrido lore. In our interviews with illicit drug entrepreneurs in the US and UK, we routinely spoke to sellers whose incomes ranged from pocket money to providing a moderately comfortable life.
Illicit drug use is damaging large parts of the world socially, politically and environmentally. Patterns of supply and demand are changing rapidly. In our longform series Addicted, leading experts bring you the latest insights on drug use and production as we ask: is it time to declare a planetary emergency?
Around 70% to 80% of the overall revenue generated by illicit drugs is shared among the many wholesale and street-level dealers in destination countries such as the UK and US, where the price per gram is at its highest. How this money moves and is used to sustain the illicit drug trade should be an important part of any worthwhile counter-narcotics strategy. But it rarely is.
Disinformation is dangerous. We fight it with facts and expertise
Professional money launderers
The people and organisations responsible for laundering drug revenues – that is, transforming them into untraceable money that can easily be spent, or into assets that can be held or sold – often exist under the radar of law enforcement and the media.
Yet the ways illicit drug money is laundered are hardly a mystery. Techniques include wire transfers to offshore bank accounts, investments in shell companies or deposits in cash businesses, and buying foreign currencies or (to a small extent) cryptocurrencies. In addition, the straightforward physical transportation of cash across national borders is an often-used method known as a “bulk cash transfer”.
The largest players in the illicit drugs industry, such as international cartels, national distributors and large-scale wholesalers, often use professional money launderers – some of whom have seemingly reputable jobs in the financial sector. In one recent case, US financial regulators fined TD Bank US$3 billion (£2.4 billion) – a record penalty for a bank – for facilitating the laundering of millions of dollars of drug cartel money.
Drug finance experts Mark Berry and R.V. Gundur have written extensively on the subject, and you can find an article about their findings in The Conversation.
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