There are many sorts of crimes that are plagues on societies around the world. However, some are more prominent than others. Indeed, there is rape, murder and drugs. The latter, along with two crime types that often accompany drug use or dealing on more than one level, shall be the focus of this brief report. Specifically, there will be a review of peer-reviewed journal articles that pertain to illegal drug use, prostitution and money laundering. The first two often feed to the other in that the money garnered from the illegal activities has to be “cleaned” so as to disguise the source of the proceeds. The crime types in question will be covered in a way that shows how they relate to each other and how they often stand on their own. While many law enforcement agencies have tried very hard to stomp out drug use, prostitution and money laundering, all of those crimes still persist and remain omnipresent in the harsher areas of societies around the world.
Analysis
It is indicated in the introduction that both drugs and prostitution intersect heavily with money laundering. This is true but there is one other major reason why people siphon money overseas or in concealed ways. This, of course, would be taxes. Indeed, the United States has a rather aggressive tax policy for corporations in particular but individuals seek ways to avoid taxes as well. This is often done by storing (or hiding) money in overseas accounts. The banks and other groups that hold these funds are often lauded and chosen over their “discretion” and their propensity to not chat with authorities of other governments over who has accounts there. Regardless of the motive for hiding funds, either within the United States or outside of it, it is clear that money laundering has been and continues to be a major issue for the United States as well as other countries. One of the more recent manifestations of this money hiding still clearly being prevalent is the Panama Papers document trove that came out in 2016. Indeed, it was shown that many people and organizations around the world, including in the United States, were making heavy use of foreign banks and institutions to hid money, criminal behavior (above and beyond the money laundering itself) or both (Hardy, Michel & Murray, 2016).
The stakes of money laundering do not just rest on the shoulders of the people that are engaging in the criminal enterprise. Indeed, many recent law enforcement activities have targeted financial center executives and the companies that they lead. Not unlike what happened with Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) and the rest of the aftermath following Enron in 2001, financial companies and the people that lead them are now having the heat of law enforcement and potential fines and jail time placed on them as a means to help curtail money laundering. It is to the point that financial organizations are having to revamp and retool their financial risk management strategies entirely so that they comply with the law and aid law enforcement to the required degree when it comes to spotting and stopping illegal money laundering activities that involved their institutions to any degree. In short, law enforcement, fairly or not, is trending towards not allowing financial institutions to feign ignorance (accurately or not) when their facilities are used to house or filter money that is obtained via illegal behaviors and methods (Boles, 2015).
Commonly referred to as the world’s oldest profession, prostitution is something else that is present and obvious if one pays attention to the right corners and parts of societies around the world. Some people are wont to refer to prostitution as a “victimless crime” and these same people gripe about the enforcement methods used to curtail the behavior. However, even when the behavior is simply money in exchange for sex and nothing else, there are all sorts of issues that arise from the transaction including money being spent that perhaps should go to taking care of kids or other issues, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and so forth. Quite often, there is a very strong association between drug use, prostitution and all other sorts of activity. Organized crime and the aforementioned money laundering are often not that far behind. Even further, prostitutes are often regulated and controlled by pimps that abuse them, sell them to any willing bidders and so forth. While full-blown sex trafficking and slavery is not the common result, it can and does happen and getting out of the life of prostitution can mean threats, abuse or even death to those women (or, in some cases, men and children) that want to leave. Indeed, there has been an approach with prostitution that addresses the pimps and other higher-level players within the prostitution game. This is not unlike going after dealers and importers of drugs rather than slapping simple users with felonies for possessing the slightest amount of heroin or cocaine (Elrod, 2015).
Just one reason, as noted above, that prostitution becomes a little less than victimless is when a prostitute is knowingly infected with HIV and yet engages in prostitution, even unprotected, despite knowing this fact. It is to the point that many laws are designed to escalate and enhance charges if it can be established that a person is knowingly spreading HIV as part of wider prostitution behavior. Rather than just sex, these laws pertain to things like biting, spitting and so on. Even if the disease is not spread, there are people that are being charged with crimes just relating to the spread (or potential spread) of HIV and/or AIDS. Even if that makes sense to a lot of people, there are those that suggest that sexual orientation and similar factors are far too entwined with who is prosecuted and why. There is also the idea of the impacts on public health in the United States and other countries where HIV/AIDS and other diseases being spread by prostitutes is or could be an issue (Buchanan, 2015).
One opinion and assertion that has started to emerge, however, is that even with the targeting of proprietors and creators of prostitution enterprises is that even addressing the higher-ups is not effective. The main reason this is asserted, at least according to many, is that targeting of higher forces in the prostitution trade do not address the fact that the demand is still there. So long as the demand is there, there will surely be someone that will be willing to fill the demand. Just like with conventional economics, supply and demand is what it is and cutting down on supply will just drive the price up in the long run. This assertion is made even for more advanced and civilized countries like South Korea and the United States. Indeed, agencies as massive and sprawling as the United States Department of Defense (DoD) are among those that are trying to curtail prostitution through high-level policies and levels of law enforcement. Indeed, unless society is (or could be) molded and shaped to get rid of such demand, all of the enforcement in the world, regardless of type, is not going to stop the behavior. This is true even if the countries involved truly become oppressive and omnipresent. Not even the Nazis could stop such behavior entirely unless they sequestered and arrested everyone and that is not feasible or possible. (Brown, 2010).
Just as sex is a staple and part of society that will be very hard to get rid of and curtail, the same is true when it comes to drug use. Indeed, even reality television programs are filled with references to and even the glorification of drug use. Just as with the trade and interactions relating to sex, the same is true of drug use. However, it is certainly a cultural thing as men and white people are much more likely to use drugs while Asians and women, just to name two groups, are much less likely to do so. In other words, it has to be admitted that breaking the cultural patterns and ties that link certain groups to drug use (or prostitution, for that matter) might be hard (if not very hard) to do. However, to suggest that there is not a link and method to the proverbial madness would be less than accurate. The stakes are very high, however, when it comes to drug use (and prostitution) and this is because there are public health and behavioral implications to allowing the behavior to happen unabated, whether implicitly or explicitly. Even with that, the addressing of these problems needs to be targeted and focused. For example, African-Americans in the United States are disproportionately likely to be on crack cocaine. However, that same group is less likely to be abusers of prescription drugs. In other words, it would fit in with statistics and trends if a black person was arrested for crack cocaine but the same would not be true if a black person had possession of non-prescribed Xanax. The inverse would be true for white people. Both of those drugs being used and abuse is a problem and both of those issues need to be addressed. However, using the same approach to both or a template-based approach in general is not going to be fruitful and for more than one reason. It should take calculated policy from law enforcement, physicians, psychologists and other healthcare practitioners to fully and completely address the problem as it truly exists. Sure, there will be outliers and exceptions in every group. However, it has to be recognized what the most common issues are so that they can be addressed. This means trending towards alcohol and crack cocaine abuse with black people and alcohol and meth or heroin use with white people. Indeed, the general strategies that bring the greatest good to the most people should be the natural order of things. At the same time, a full and complete mental health and drug use assessment should be done for every person regardless of race and culture. Upon that assessment being completed, a full and proper intervention of all of the maladies that exist have to be completed. Further, the same would be true of someone who is using prostitution to “make it” or support a drug habit. That is not now nor should it ever be considered normal behavior, even if some people disagree. Both sex and drug use are glorified and honored in very unseemly ways within the entertainment and societal sphere and all of that needs to stop. However, it has to be done in organic and voluntary ways rather than through law enforcement alone and coercion (Fogel & Shlivko, 2016).
If there is one more parallel and corollary that should be drawn, it would be that drugs and prostitution are all about fixating and exploiting people that have a psychological or physical need for something that is commonly dangerous and usually unhealthy on one or more level. Further, there is not a lot of separation between those two industries and the sale of alcohol. While the sale of alcohol to clearly drunk individuals is generally prohibited, the sale happens all of the time to people that are abusing alcohol or that are alcoholics but those sales are not stopped. The only real difference between alcohol and prostitution or drug use is that one is legal and the other is not. People engage in sex in reckless ways all of the time, for example, and many could argue that marijuana is much safer and more docile than alcohol but yet marijuana remains a schedule one drug by the DEA to this very day. Just as illegal drug use and prostitution can have very “menacing” consequences, the same is true when it comes to alcohol use, cigarettes and reckless sexual behavior in any sort of combination. It is vexing at times to try and figure out what the differences might be. This is especially true when removing religious morality from the equation and just looking at things from the perspective of consequences and public health (Bhunu & Mushayabasa, 2012).
As noted before, these legal and illegal enterprises are a cash cow to the people that engage in them. The clear demarcation is that some people have to “clean” their proceeds (i.e. money laundering) while others do not. Some people think there is a difference between the drug traffickers in Colombia that make heroin and cocaine and the people that own the company that sells Oxycontin. However, others see no difference due to the pervasive abuse and misuse of the latter and how the latter is in many ways creating the same (or worse) problems than the former. Combine all of this with a culture that glorifies and condones the same in many instances and in many ways, it is not surprising at all that the use and misuse of these substances and the selling of sex is so pervasive and the entertainment and other societal and cultural cues are all often aligned with the same. The United States is perhaps the best example of all of this manifesting. However, one could certainly look at other cultures, both past and present, that have been much the same way. Indeed, Holland had a “Golden Age” where much the same thing was going onand that was five centuries ago. The sequence of events and the verbiage used by authors and scholars of the day are still assessed during present-day discussions (Roberts & Gorenendijk, 2004).
There are perhaps a good number of people that use drugs and engage in the purchase of prostitutes’ services that do not really hurt anyone else. However, there are many more that actively and obviously abuse the process and end up hurting others in the process. Drug dealers and pimps may reason that they are not forcing anyone to do what they are doing and that they are simply fulfilling a demand. Even so, there are grim and nasty milestones that are commonly met when it comes to drug use and practice of prostitution. Even if the effects on some are nominal and non-invasive, the way they manifest for many others is destructive and life-destroying. People that engage in prostitution and the drug trade (or drug use) are often on a particular pathway of problems, abuse and self-destruction. Indeed, drug use often aligns with mental illness even before the drug use starts and women that engage in prostitution are often not terribly happy or healthy when it comes to their history or their family life growing up (Potterat et al, 1998).
Conclusion
It is those factors and issues that have to be addressed if the illegal behaviors (and the money laundering relating to the same) are ever going to be addressed. Indeed, if the underlying catalysts and contributing factors are not minimized and addressed, the things that are causing the demand will still be present and the people engaging in the abuse and misuse of themselves and others shall continue. It needs to truly resonate with law enforcement agencies and other government institutions that dealing with the cultural cues and the catalysts or precursors should be the main goal.
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