Drugs for weapons

[VincentVan]

It has long been an acclared fact that the biggest chunck of non strategic weapons on the international market gets payed for in illegal drugs in order to allow such top notch clients of arm dealers such as guerrilla and terrorists groups or criminal gangs to afford those products that are often developed and produced for their specific needs.
Having travelled on several occasions to Russia and to some new "indipendent" ex-soviet republics for work , I often heard rumors (mostly unproved and unprovable fancy theories) about the traffics of drugs for arms and arms for drugs fluorishing on the southern borders of these new nations, and how they made billionaires out of some old ex apparatchniks of the old nomenklatura.
I also often wandered were was the money coming from that I could see was being spent so liberally by so many gold-rolexed russians flying their private jets to the major alpine ski resorts or sailing their yachts between Sardinia and the Cote d´Azur.
During those trips to the east of the Urals I have also never managed to really grasp what all those seemingly fluorishing westerners with american accents were doing in godforsaken and flyblown fronteer villages of Tadjikistan, Turkmenistan and specially Tadjikistan, in the streets of whose capital, Dushambé everyone around seemed to hold a U.S. diplomatic passport.
Now, I´m not the kind of fella who belives everything he reads, specially if I happen to have read it in doubious internet pages, but this article made me think because it gave some possible (if sometime farfetched) answers to some of the questions I have long been puzzling over and specially because he seemed to ask all the right questions (even if the plausibility of the answers it gives could and should be called into question)
Some of the things he says are thing I have heard myself from local collegues , sources and political and economical insiders. So much so that at first I thought it had been written by a frustrated(maybe sidelined) ex-soviet apparatchnik. Then I realized that it was obvious that this could´nt be the
case (it´s long to explain you why but trust me on this) and that this guy had access to the kind of inside info and professional means that only a collegue (or a press agent, or an employee of an information related agency or structure) coud have.
Now I´ve got one more bug torturing me: Who is this guy?

Anyway, try to take a look , it´s not necessary to belive every word he says to get an idea of what probably it´s going on in this fat business and why our first world cities are, and will keep on being, very well stocked with illegal drugs. Oh yes , and why some shady russians and their western counterparts are likely to keep on spending very large amounts of cash in luxury goods for the forseeable future, in the process doing their bit to help the world economy to hum along.

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/ar...lobal-drug.htm

By the way: who is this guy?

VV.











Anyway

Reputation Comments on this post:

interesting stuff

[VincentVan]

Yes I know he is Peter Dale Scott, ex diplomat, university prof. at Berkeley , Poet and well respected writer and journalist, what I meant is: where did he get his info from? And specially is he really the author and researcher of this piece or (as I have started to think) he is just the well respected front for someone else? Maybe one of his students? He teaches English and journalism and the style of this piece is somewhat different from his other stuff. Besides I find it somewhat hard to belive that the professor has being doing the kind of gumshoes work that seems to be behind this work.
I might be wrong though.
Sometimes I am.

VV.

P.S.
Who really is this guy?

[Alfa]

Vincent, this is a fucking long read, but it is good stuff!