“I was rich, gold ruined me. » What if this quote from the novel L’Or (1925), by Blaise Cendrars, could modestly spur the fight against drug trafficking, which is one of the main social and criminal scourges that we have to face? In the spring, the Senate, which proposed a new global plan to combat drug trafficking, estimated the turnover of this sector between 3.5 billion and 6 billion euros in 2023. The settling of scores of autumn in Rennes, Marseille, Grenoble or even in towns known to be quieter, such as Poitiers, have highlighted the criminal and deadly issues of this activity.
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For a long time, traffickers have succeeded in resolving the three main difficulties of economic and commercial systems: securing production, ensuring a distribution network and guaranteeing customers. Even if the law and public authorities have made significant efforts to combat trafficking, drug traffickers, intermediaries and consumers have put in place, each at their own level, powerful counter-fires intended to leave as few traces as possible. this traffic – local cannabis cultivation, multimodality of transport modes, use of Internet platforms and secure communication systems.
Although cutting-edge technologies are used at each stage, the fact remains that the final transaction is almost always carried out through an exchange of cash to limit traces, and therefore proof. Traffickers have very large sums of cash which, at least initially, constitute a real management difficulty: during investigations, it is not uncommon to discover cash of several tens, or even several hundred thousand euros at people suspected of trafficking.
Long and random investigations
There are numerous and diverse channels for laundering this money – the purchase of cryptocurrencies or the use of shell companies and tax havens, for example. The legislator, investigators and magistrates therefore attack all or part of the ill-gotten assets of traffickers. As the legislation stands, holding a large sum of cash is not, however, a criminal offence: it is up to the courts to demonstrate that this sum comes from or is linked to drug trafficking. Traffickers do not hesitate to maintain that these are family savings, resources drawn from undeclared work or successful results from gambling, all propositions which are largely unverifiable.
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