From: Defense One
How Black-Market Tobacco Funds the World’s Bad Actors
It’s time to focus the world’s attention on a smuggling enterprise that helps underwrite North Korea’s nukes and Taliban terror.
Where does North Korea, whose gross domestic product is less than that of some American cities, get the money to fund its nuclear efforts? Kim Jong-un and his regime obtain much of their money from a vast series of criminal enterprises that trade in everything from goods made by forced labor to counterfeit currency to narcotics. And like many insurgent groups and criminal organizations worldwide, Kim and his circle also traffic in illegal tobacco.
That may sound like something of an anticlimax. But smuggling tobacco products so they may be sold without the high taxes and tariffs that prevail in many countries is big business: globally, tens of billions of dollars a year. Compared to narcotics trafficking, it is a high reward, low-risk enterprise. A shipping container loaded with smuggled tobacco can be obtained for $100,000 and resold for $2 million, with criminal penalties paling in comparison to the lengthy prison terms handed down to drug traffickers.
