On the other hand, if you are an important person, and you work for a big international bank, you won't be prosecuted even if you launder nine billion dollars. Even if you actively collude with the people at the very top of the international narcotics trade, your punishment will be far smaller than that of the person at the very bottom of the world drug pyramid.
Back here in NZ, I can't think of a single bank or financial institution that has ever been prosecuted for laundering black market money. Yet according to the Law Commission's Controlling & Regulating Drugs Report, the domestic cannabis market alone is worth an estimated $116.2 million a year (2001 figures. Yep, the latest stat is 11 years old).
Yet the police seems more concerned with entrapping garden centres and trying to take the home off disabled political activists. That is, when they're not shaking spare change out of home growers and dope fiends under the new Proceeds of Crime Act (written by Labour, stamped by the Nats).
Taibbi states articulately what I was groping for back here, comparing the persecution of harmless dope fiends to the religious inquisitions of yore. The War on Drugs is a class war, and unless lawmakers change the rules of this bent game, they make themselves complicit in this corruption of justice.
Vive la 2013.
