In his book A Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx put forward a series of arguments in favour of treating the criminal as a productive member of society. ‘Crime takes off the labour market a portion of the excess population, diminishes competition among workers … while the war against crime absorbs another part of the same population.’ In a similar fashion, the drug dealer and the drug user help suck up excess wealth, keep our massive legal, medical and penal systems in work and maintain increasingly rigid social divisions. To put it another way, if cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you’ve got too much money, then crack is just His little way of letting you know you’re in the wrong neighbourhood.

In the meantime, the drug cartels of Central America keep the world markets flooded with cocaine, while organized gangs from Afghanistan and the Far East step up the traffic in heroin. The scale of the black economy involved in these transactions is literally astronomical. You can buy whole countries for the money this trade generates.

The traffic in drugs is used to finance terrorism and regime change. It helps to uphold corrupt governments, destroy people’s lives and allows criminal organizations to hold entire populations to ransom.

Meanwhile, those farmers in the developing world foolish enough to dedicate their meagre resources to the growing of food protest outside the latest G8 summit meeting. They object to the way in which the international market is weighted against them by subsidies and tariffs. The G8 countries can’t effectively regulate an illegal trade, thus making the cultivation of coca and opium an extremely attractive option that beats slowly starving to death on a subsistence income. Yes, there is a price to pay for all that cheap food you consume everyday – you are starving some and sending others begging to the drug cartels for ready cash.

Read on …