Domestic Terrorism Summary

Summary
The global traffic in illicit drugs contributes to terrorist risk through at least five mechanisms: supplying cash, creating chaos and instability, supporting corruption, providing “cover” and sustaining common infrastructures for illicit activity, and competing for law enforcement and intelligence attention. Of these, cash and chaos are likely to be the two most important.
Different drugs, different trafficking routes, and different organizations have different relationships to terrorist threats. Therefore it might be possible to improve domestic security by targeting drug law enforcement on those drugs, routes, and organizations with the strongest known or potential links to terror. However, doing so would require new analytic
It is not clear that increased drug law enforcement alone can succeed in that respect; the cocaine and heroin markets have proven stubbornly resistant to vigorous enforcement efforts.
Reducing demand for illicit drugs can also shrink the markets. The total number of users is much less important in determining drug volumes and revenues than the behavior of a relatively small number of chronic, high-dose drug-takers. Most of that “hard core” group consists of people who are repeatedly arrested, not only for drug offenses but for a wide range of property, violent, and public-order offenses. Acting to reduce the population of hard-core user-offenders, through treatment, drug courts, or testing-and-sanctions programs, may offer a better prospect for reducing the size of the drug markets, and thus potentially the contribution of drug trafficking to the terrorist threat.
The corruption problem can be exacerbated by low public-sector wages. Both corruption and anti-corruption measures can be profoundly demoralizing, and can reduce the respect the public has for the agencies of government. Even when corruption does not actually exist, the perception of corruption can be corrosive. The resulting diminished public support for government agencies makes the anti-drug effort that much more difficult.
Once corruption becomes embedded in the practice of an agency, it may not remain restricted to its original domain; an army commander accustomed to taking bribes from drug traffickers may be less resistant to bribes from terrorist groups. The opposite effect is also, of course, logically possible; the flow of corrupt money from drug trafficking may make the bribes terrorist groups are capable of paying seem too small to bother with from the viewpoint of officials used to larger bribes in the drug business.
The complement to corruption is intimidation. The Medellin Cartel in Colombia famously offered officials a choice of “plata o plomo” (literally, “silver or lead”): those who refused corrupt cash risked violence against themselves