Drug Millionaires

Crime is Money

The primary motivation of nearly all narcotics traffickers operating above retail levels are the substantial financial gains. (The term retail levels generally means the daily quantities of drugs that a dealer would sell to a narcotics user.) The kicks, the frenzied lifestyle, and peer pressure all provide their own stimuli, but the promise of financial wealth is what seduces most people into becoming involved in smuggling or selling drugs on any scale. For some, drug trafficking is the logical continuation of a criminal career that started in property crime. More alarming is the number of people who enter the drug trade as a career change from a legitimate business. In societies or subcultures generally permissive of certain kinds of drug use, the step to becoming personally involved in the drug trade is apparently not blocked by feelings of guilt or fear of stigmatization, although users of heroine or cocaine who become involved in dealing drugs to finance their own consumption seldom store and distribute more than a few ounces at a time. Their habit makes them a business risk for potential partners, as they are often known to law enforcement agents and are vulnerable to blackmail.

Ascendance of the Drug Millionaires

Entrepreneurs making huge profits on narcotics deals have been around since at least the 1920s, when American mafiosi such as Charles Luciano and Vito Genovese became involved in importing and peddling heroin into the United States from the Middle East. By the mid-1930s they were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Profits soared by the mid-1950s, when the New York godfather Carmine Galante, together with Luciano and the Montreal crime boss Frank Petrula, organized the “French Connection,” which refined Turkish opium into heroin in Marseilles to be shipped to Canada and the United States (Nash 1992: 171). Then, in the late 1970s, Colombian traffickers such as Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez, Pablo Escobar Gaviria, Carlos Lehder Rivas, and others began making many millions of dollars by organizing large imports of cocaine into the United States. Their profit rate has been estimated at 80 percent. Operating from a country where corruption was endemic, they became drug billionaires in the 1980s, with an economic and political influence that has, in all likelihood, never been matched by other traffickers. Until the mid-1980s, they remained virtually untouchable by law enforcement.

Profitability of Illegal Drugs

Estimates of the revenue generated by the illicit drug industry vary considerably, from about $100 billion to more than $1,000 billion a year, but the most reasonable estimate is probably somewhere between $300 and $500 billion a year. (United Nations International Drug Control Programme 1998: 3). In 1999, the United Nations Office for Drug Control estimated the value of the unprocessed coca base and opium produced around the world at $1.1 billion (United Nations International Drug Control Programme 2000: 48). Such relatively low basic production costs leave very substantial profit margins for the middlemen who refine, smuggle, and distribute the narcotics on their way to the end users.

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