ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters, we described the various drug markets and their motley crowd of participating adventurer crime-entrepreneurs. Unpacking the constituents of fear of crime is a complex task, since it is not always possible to strip out the demonology of social stereotypes from other aspects of the harm done by the acts themselves. Imposing an abstract rationality necessarily does violence to the emotional ‘logic’ that reinforces opinions and real experiences. Nevertheless, it is important to try to disentangle whether the fear and concern that drug dealing inspires comes from the commodities themselves or from how dealers are believed to organize themselves and what other activities they may engage in. One of the aspects of crime that has been presented in the last decade as a real threat is the financial potential that profits from illegal drugs may have brought about. This concerns not only the negative role models to society at large offered by the more or less spectacular unjust enrichment from crime. More menacing still are the alleged hundreds of billions of narco-dollars, narco-euros and narco-pounds which are considered to provide a harmful leverage over the economic and political ‘control chambers’ of free democratic societies. Though the argument neglects that clandestine political finance and bribes can be given in unlaundered cash, it is assumed that to exert that influence, some or all of those moneys may have to be laundered to give them a façade of illdeserved respectability. This makes money-laundering a connected evil.
